Alexandra Pell, Enjoys Hypergraphia

23 upvotes by Diana Lee, Anuradha Raja, Quora User, (more)

TL;DR David Foster Wallace, Vladimir Nabokov, Oscar Wilde, and I'll add more later.

I'm choosing to define this not necessarily as writers whose styles "changed
everything", but simply ones with voices that can't fail to be noticed (or at least
that I can't fail to notice).

David Foster Wallace [1]

In both his fiction and non-fiction, he applied a neurotic, cerebral view to the
profound and mundane alike. If anyone could have (and has) been accused of thinking
too much, it would have been him. He could write lengthy, philosophical essays
about lobsters, but also about prescriptive versus descriptive dictionary wars. I
wish I could know what he would say, if he were still here, about every new shiny
facet of pop culture I encounter. I'm sure it would be fascinating, and much less
trite than the simplistic dismissal so commonly given to all that is not
constructed for the purpose of high art. He elevated whatever he saw, even while
sometimes sort of mocking it. He, like Dave Eggers [2] (as mentioned in Yishan
Wong's answer ), was "excessively self-conscious" as Yishan put it, but in a way
that was less cutesy and more... anxious.

Titles of some of his essays:

Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think

Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough has Been Removed

Then, from How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart, about the ghost-written autobiography
of a famous tennis player:

And her epiphany after winning that final: "I immediately knew what I had done,
which was to win the US Open, and I was thrilled."

Tracy Austin on the psychic rigors of pro competition: "Every professional athlete
has to be so fine-tuned mentally."

He went on, sharing snippets of Tracy Austin's "breathlessly insipid autobiography"

(his words). However, instead of just concluding that neither Tracy Austin nor her
ghostwriter are exactly the next Tolstoy -- I think a lot of intellectual types
would simply say, "Tracy Austin is a moron," and move on -- DFW wasn't satisfied
with such a lazy (and/or sane, depending on how you define these things)
interpretation. After much fascinating thought that I can't summarize here, he
ended with:

It may well be that we spectators, who are not divinely gifted athletes, are the
only ones able to truly see, articulate, and animate the experience of the gift we
are denied. And that those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius
must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it -- and not because blindness and
dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence.

As you may have picked up already, he wasn't a snob when it came to ignoring Strunk
and White as he saw fit. He used (gasp!) sentence fragments a lot: "Random
examples. When she..." (and then, of course, lists examples). He started sentences
with "and." His essays are masterfully constructed, but sometimes give off the
sense of being jumbledy-random.

I'm not even going to start about his fiction. Just go read it.
Also. [3]

Vladimir Nabokov

This was another guy with a really large brain and an even bigger vocabulary. With
words, he painted and made music, stringing syllables together both playfully and
carefully. I think of him as both artist and fiction engineer. In addition to being
a writer, he was a lepidopterist, and he applied the fine-tuned way of thinking
that is useful in such fields to his prose; he was mind-numbingly meticulous. He
was aware of sound, of the notes and cadence of repeated, aspirated t's.

Lo-lee-ta. the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to
tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

These strands of language, it's like I could bite and taste them because they are
peculiar and beautiful morsels:

...that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually
imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other's soul and flesh...

Or:

...and take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to touch each
other...

He was good at writing the over-intellectual, navel-gazing narrator -- and not in

the popular style now, where we are forced to listen to a narrator self-
deprecating, and then self-deprecating about self-deprecating, and then being
ironic... or something. Rather, he could write madmen who were brilliant enough to
sound like an imitation of sanity when they bothered to explain themselves.

Oscar Wilde

One of his specialties was a sort of mean-spirited wit. He focused quite a bit on
cruelty, art, and immorality (or what immorality even means).

...no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to
say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind,
just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.

Or:

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to
read in the train.

There is a certain laugh-so-you-won't-cry sense about much of his work, making the
hideous into the hilarious.

He wasn't a one-trick pony though. His short story The Nightingale and the Rose,
for instance, does not really hint at the humorous affect Wilde's writing is often
remembered for, but it does show the melancholy that was pervasive in his work. It
is about a little bird who loves a man who loves a girl who wants a rose. The bird
sacrifices her life to get the boy the rose so he can give it to his beloved, but
like many gifts to those who don't understand what they're being given, it goes
unappreciated and results in nothing special at all.
I'm going to come back and add more authors as I think of them. Probably.

[1] Gone too soon.

[2] Eggers on DFW: "He was already known as a very smart and challenging and
preter-naturally gifted writer when Infinite Jest was released in 1996, and
thereafter his reputation included all the adjectives mentioned just now, and also
this one: Holy shit."

[3] He made extensive use of footnotes. Really extensive.

Written 26 Jul, 2012.

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More Answers Below. Related Questions
Why do older people on the Internet have such a distinct writing style?
How do people develop original and distinct writing styles?
What native English-speaking writer has the most clear and concise style?
Diana Crețu
Diana Crețu, Photo spammer @ http://dianacr... (more)
4 upvotes by Cristina Hartmann, Quora User, Maheep Raj Gupta, (more)
I would add Jose Saramago.

From Wikipedia:

Saramago's experimental style often features long sentences, at times more than a
page long. He used periods sparingly, choosing instead a loose flow of clauses
joined by commas. Many of his paragraphs extend for pages without pausing for
dialogue, (which Saramago chooses not to delimit by quotation marks); when the
speaker changes, Saramago capitalizes the first letter of the new speaker's
clause. His works often refer to his other works. In his novel Blindness, Saramago
completely abandons the use of proper nouns, instead referring to characters
simply by some unique characteristic, an example of his style reflecting the
recurring themes of identity and meaning found throughout his work.

Written 28 Jun, 2013.

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Yishan Wong
Yishan Wong, Quantity has a quality all its... (more)
31 upvotes by Marc Bodnick, Quora User, Ryan Lackey, (more)
Ernest Hemingway is the pioneer of the short, clipped style of prose now prevalent
in American prose (both fictional and professional). Prior to this time, American
writing styles resembled that of British English, which tended towards more flowery
sentences with multiple clauses (you can still see this in British prose if you
visit Great Britain - even signs in public are quite wordy compared to their modern
American counterparts). In the decades after Hemingway, American prose gradually
shifted from lengthier complex sentences into shorter and more direct statements.

Hemingway was a contemporary of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who is probably the last

English writer (American or British) to emphasize flowery, descriptive language and
took it to the highest expression of the art. Thereafter, American writing style
tended to be more and more influenced by the Hemingway-inspired terseness, despite
recognition of Fitzgerald's work.
Dave Eggers is the pioneer of the more recent and modern "excessively self-
conscious style" of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which was hailed at
the time of its publication as possibly the first distinctively different style
since Hemingway. Unfortunately, in the time since it has been repeatedly copied by
modern writers to the point where its usage now saturates modern fiction and thus
largely destroyed its appeal by rendering it cliched.

Written 11 Mar, 2010.

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6 upvotes by Cristina Hartmann, Aaron Colman, Jimmy MacGregor, (more)
William Faulkner - dead giveaways are the love of Southern gothic / tragedy, lack
of a traditional plot (majority of times), stylistic writing, imagery upon imagery,
lack of punctation, etc. His works, especially Sound and the Fury, are more about
enjoying the atmosphere than making sense of what's going on (though Light in the
August is pretty coherent). It's like a puzzle - unraveling what smell and mirrors
mean to the character beyond the obvious is the goal rather than reading about the
unraveling of a Southern family.

Neal Stephenson - it's hard to describe. His writing is very detail-oriented and
covers a wide array of topics, but it's not very cohesive. It rambles (think the
conspiracy theories section from Foucault's Pendulum). Also, you get introduced to
plotlines that never resolve themselves. The point of view jumps a lot.

Kazuo Ishiguro - his books are always well-written but sometimes it feels as if
something's missing. It might be emotional resonance. It might be the fact that
stylistic imagery's always prized over plot.

Isaac Asimov - very straightforward writing (sort of journalistic), not over-

wrought,very balanced in terms of the work as a whole; his writing's never going to
be the most complex, but it's very enjoyable. His works don't feel like science
fiction. Many of his short stories leave a punch at the end. They're usually short,
with the exception of Foundation.

David Mitchell - his earlier works are similar to Haruki Murakami with the magical
realism. His more recent books are more mainstream. They're very well-developed.
There's always going to be some strange character. His writing's on the more
evocative side, but it's still tight.

James Joyce - extremely stylistic, with religious overtones but not overdone like
the Russian authors. His writing meanders. It's very pretty, but you're not left
feeling anything sometimes.

Written 29 Oct, 2012.

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Kayla Reid
Kayla Reid, Interested in personal identit... (more)
2 upvotes by Laura Michet and Ananya Ghemawat.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He litters hisprose with sweet tragedies (often death). The
way he does it is dramatic and abrupt.

Written 27 Jul, 2012.

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Sara Zasowski
Sara Zasowski, Wannabe Writer
1 upvote by Cristina Hartmann.
Junot Diaz.

He breaks many conventions, focuses voice and dialogue mainly on the immigration
and origins of Dominicans.

His emphasis of linguistic registers and slang truly make him stand out.

Written 3 Nov, 2012.

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Jimmy MacGregor
Jimmy MacGregor, SEO Executive at Digirank
3 upvotes by Cristina Hartmann, Abhinav Varma, and Ankit Sethi.
Apologies for the brevity of these answers, but these are the authors who spring to
my mind:

Kafka - emotionally intense, deep, reflexive, paradoxical, bizarre.

Dostoevsky - claustrophobic, somehow 'tight' prose, an incredibly perceptive grasp

of character and psychology, a master of telling stories while remaining utterly
mired in the everyday experience.

Bukowski - painfully honest, funny, repulsive. Not a nice man, and he knew it.

China Miéville - often appears to have no editor ("squiddity" - really?) which

results in a personal touch that few other authors can touch, creates worlds like
fever dreams, viscerally political.

Mark Z. Danielewski - wrote "House of Leaves", one of the most startlingly

original/pretentious (depending on taste) horror(?probably) novels of recent years.
Has also written "The Familiar", which I have yet to read.

Note that I have only read most of Kafka and Dostoevsky in translation, so these
should be taken with a hefty pinch of salt. When I talk of Kafka and Dostoevsky I
am likely talking of their translator, who probably deliberately emphasised certain
aspects of their work giving them an artificially exaggerated style.

I just noticed we haven't mentioned any female authors yet:

Angela Carter was a strikingly original author with an immediately recognisable

style and wit.

Jane Austen (or according to some her editor) had a way of writing sentences and
character descriptions with wonderfully subtle twists in their tails.

Interesting question, cheers!

Written 24 Oct, 2012.

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Max Muller
Max Muller
1 upvote by Jimmy MacGregor.
In addition to the excellent answers put forth so far, I would like to add yet
another name: Michel Houellebecq.

Whether you love or hate his works, I think it's clear he has a very distinct
style. He offers a harsh, depressive, though original perspective on human
existence.

Written 29 Jul, 2012.

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J.R.R. Tolkien. His ability to make one feel as if the world in the Lord of the
Rings has been going along unnoticed by you, the reader, until you just happened to
pick it up and start reading, is unparalleled.

Written 27 Jul, 2012.

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Iffat Siddiqui
Iffat Siddiqui, Same difference
7 upvotes by Cristina Hartmann, Laura Michet, Abhinav Varma, (more)
P.G. Wodehouse. His style is the simple, fluid humorous sort that doesn't depend on
the plot to make the piece funny. The style is medieval British drawing room
English. One outstanding characteristic is the slangs he uses. They sound so absurd
and elegant at the same time.

Written 13 Nov, 2012.

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Quora User
Quora User
3 upvotes by Cristina Hartmann, Kaushik Chakraborty, and Quora User.
Hunter S Thompson gave birth to a whole new type of writing, more specifically,
journalism.
Called Gonzo, first coined by journalist Bill Cardoso, it describes a style that is
written without claims of objectivity, often including the reporter in the story
via first person.

Written 28 Jul, 2012.

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Quora User
Quora User, UAE Expatriate
3 upvotes by Cristina Hartmann, Prithvi Bhat, and Aaron Colman.
Milan Kundera. A strange, very readable cross between rational and poetic,
structured but elegant.

Written 3 Nov, 2012.

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Quora User
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3 upvotes by Abhinav Varma, Aruna Chakravarthy Dhall, and Quora User.
I'd like to add two more to the list here.
Virginina Woolf:
Her writing is characteristic of long sentences in interior monologue and stream of
consciousness. She built her characters inside out, with their thoughts first and
then the thoughts of others about them. So you decipher them little by little-
around other things like paintings, parasols, dinner tables, salt cellars- in long,
intelligent and visceral sentences.

Sylvia Plath:
There can't be anything so personal. 'The Bell Jar' is, in fact, semi-
autobiographical. But you can't expect even an autobiography to be so frank and
transparent. And in parts, there are obvious meta-references that leave an eerie
impression. My favorite bit from the book is copied here.

From another, distanced mind, I saw myself sitting on the breezeway, surrounded by
two white clapboard walls, a mock orange bush and a clump of birches and a box
hedge, small as a doll in a doll's house. A feeling of tenderness filled my heart.
My heroine would be myself, only in disguise. She would be called Elaine. Elaine. I
counted the letters on my fingers. There were six letters in Esther, too. It seemed
a lucky thing.

Elaine sat on the breezeway in an old yellow nightgown of her mother's waiting for
something to happen. It was a sweltering morning in July, and drops of sweat
crawled down her back one by one, like slow insects.

I leaned back and read what I had written. It seemed lively enough, and I was quite
proud of the bit about the drops of sweat like insects, only I had the dim
impression I'd probably read it somewhere else a long time ago. I sat like that for
about an hour, trying to think what would come next, and in my mind, the barefoot
doll in her mother's old yellow nightgown sat and stared into space as well...

... Inertia oozed like molasses through Elaine's limbs. That's what it must feel
like to have malaria, she thought.

At any rate, I'd be lucky if I wrote a page a day. Then I knew what the trouble
was. I needed experience. How could I write about life when I'd never had a love
affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a
short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete
with that sort of thing?

Written 1 Jul, 2013.

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Abhay Vohra
Abhay Vohra
4 upvotes by Diana Lee, Cristina Hartmann, Aman Anand, (more)
William Faulkner had a distinct style characterised by long flowing sentences,
southern dialect and use of conjunctions. Cormac McCarthy among the contemporary
writers comes close to matching this style.

Written 26 Jul, 2012.

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Susan Kelly
Susan Kelly, writer, teacher, raconteur
1 upvote by Aishwary Raj.
Shakespeare, David Mamet, Yeats, James Joyce, Faulkner, Hemingway, Aaron Sorkin,
Saul Bellow.

Written 17 Aug, 2013.

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Elliott Hanks
Elliott Hanks
John Kennedy Toole, It is on the tip of my tounge why, but you should read "A
Confederacy of Dunces." Probably the funniest thing I've read. But must be read to
be understood. Or maybe I'm just lazy in this anwer

Written 26 Jul, 2012.

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Pancham Singh
Pancham Singh, catcher in the rye
Dan Brown.

From what I've read of him so far, he's placed so much emphasis on having his own
recognizable style that even his plots seem to be kind of patterned.

The first time I read him, I was deeply impressed. After that, all of his works
seemed to have the same backbone. More so, his endings and specifically the
revelation of the antagonist seem like deja vu.