Who was the most influential writer of the 20th century?
I'd say it would be either Hemingway, Kafka or Joyce.
Hemingway because he arguably created the first "modern" style that moved away from the Victorian style of writing.
Joyce because he created one of, if not the best novel of the century and demonstrated to other writers the power of stream of consciousness and other literary techniques considered to be too "working class" for literature.
Kafka because his ideas and themes have influenced a multitude of mediums of art and continue to do so.
Hemingway, not that I’m particularly happy about it. I like his books alright but the fact that he’s easier to read and understand than Joyce and Kafka means he is more widely read and exerts more influence on modern day writing.
Caleb Young
One, or all, of these guys:
Nabokov Joyce Proust
Jackson Young
I like Nabokov but makes you consider him to be so influential?
Colton Walker
Most influential? Kafka. Influenced: Borges, Camus, Kubrick, Bolaño, DFW, García Márquez, etc.
Henry Gray
Kafka, no question. His influence hasn't dwindled at all over the last 80 years, whereas Hemingway's "muh short, simple sentences" style isn't as widespread as it used to be. Also, Kafka was more creative than Hemingway.
Dylan Wright
His widespread use of the unreliable narrator and nearly all of his works are about identity etc.
John Cox
Yeah, when I read Harry Potter and Twilight and the Hunger Games, the first thing I think of is Kafka. Such an influencer he was.
Carter Smith
Bunch of dead fuckers nobody outside of autistic niches cares about lol
Benjamin Howard
Yeah, and Kubrick hasn't influenced cinema because there isn't any trace of his work in the latest Marvel movie. Stop pretending to be retarded.
Kubrick and García Márquez are pretty popular. I suppose it depends on where you live. If you live in Burgerland it's no surprise. All they read is Harry Potter and all they watch are Marvel movies.
Tyler Wright
Joyce. Kafka wasen’t widey read until around the 60s or so. That’s nearly half a decade of irrelevance. Hemingway didn’t really do anything that was initially perceived as stylistically new; he just synthesized the European tradition of the short story form (Balzac, Maupassant, Chekhov, et. al.) with the strictly magazine/journal based practice of storytelling in the U.S. I don’t think his influence was really felt until about the 50s and 60s as well when you had a distinct American style to choose from thanks to other diverging talens like Faulkner, Fitzgerald, the rediscovery of Melville, and so on. Whereas Joyce was immediately heralded as a genius, read and emulated by his contemporaries, and explicated the 20th goal of the novel to be firmly experimental. Without the boldness and explicit experimentation of Joyce, there would’ve been no Beckett, no Passos, no Pynchon, no Gaddis, no Gass, no Barth, etc. It can be argued that other stylists were moving in this direction (Woolf, Stein, the Modernist poets) but no one was so bold as Joyce. Literally samples every canonical prose style in the English language up until that point in the same breadth that he was transgender vulva-stimulating mutations and revelries. An absolute madman if there ever was one. I’d argue that Kafka and Hem. have had the last say in terms of tangible influence though, the former on every serious European master since Mann and the latter on EVERY American prose writer, especially those produced by the academy/workshop model.
Jaxon Ross
Literaturelet here, how has Kafka influenced subsequent culture? I always hear him mentioned as someone who has, but never the specifics of how.
Kubrick, for example - would it be seen in the Shining? I read an article on Kafka and Kubrick once, I can't remember the details of it though.
William Rivera
I have never read any of them but I know that they are all hacks, like all modern authors.
David Martinez
Borges read Kafka when it came out, basically. "Widely read" is irrelevant if we're talking about influence. Harry Potter is more "widely read" than Don Quixote.
Charles Clark
hack is a meaningless buzzword to describe anyone you don't like, though.
Angel Sanders
As did Nabokov, but those are a select few. Aside from those two, who really didn’t have traction until the 50s when they were being translated/working in English anyways, I can only think of a few other names who were explicitly influenced by K (Donald Barthelme comes to mind, and he was also influenced by Joyce). But the underlying assumption here is that someone that read K like Borges also had a wide breadth of influence, which is a little trickier. It’s gonna be a hard sell to say the disciples of K won out over the disciples of Joyce. Both impacted their medium, but I’m not sure if short stories changed as dramatically as the novel did after Joyce. I’m trying to think in pairs, maybe you have a few in mind? Like for Joyce we could compare a before novel like Jude the Obscure to the after-Joyce model of Passos U.S.A. trilogy or Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury.
Evan Cruz
And yeah you’re right about the widely read thing but I probably just provided a shitty shorthand for a way more precise scope. By widely read I guess I really mean widely read by the right people i.e., people who would disseminate the style of that author to contribute to the chain of influence.
Hudson Lopez
someone like Céline. The obscene nihilistic content and loose style of writing. His stuff still feels completly contemporary and whenever I read the latest novel by some faggot from Nyc I am reminded of him
Chase Green
I would say that Joyce has become a 'giant' of the literary canon alongside writers like Tolstoy, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Homer, Dickens, etc.
Joycean academic scholarship is immense. There is literally a national day of commemoration for Joyce (Bloomsday) in Ireland that is also celebrated around the world. He turned the novel from a serial story to an experimental artform. His level of erudition is second to none and Joycean scholars are still attempting to make sense of it to this day. So many great writers after him would have been nothing without his work. He brought the extremely experimental and avant garde stream of consciousness concept (developed by psychologists) into modern thought.
Without Joyce literature as we know it today would be vastly different. He is a man of staggering genius and creativity.
Brandon Ross
Explains why culture is such ugly, pointless, fart-smelling dogshit today.
Just did, your mom is going to need someone to clean her up.
Ryan Edwards
influential? undoubtedly hemingway
Carter Gray
When I read Joyce I feeling like I'm doing him a favour, by which I mean I feel as if I get very little in return. With Tolstoy, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Homer, Dickens, etc., I am more after than I was before. I can't say what influence he would have on me had I been a writer...I sort of feel as if I'd be adopting a style rather than being influenced by him.
Kerouac. Beat poetry really gave literature to the bourgeoisie, it gave music to bullies, it gave philosophy to drug addicts. Kerouac is why we have rap and postmodernism.
Owen Nguyen
Who did he influence, desu? Literaturelet here.
Nathaniel Scott
Well for example Faulkner wrote The Sound and The Fury, which uses stream of consciousness, after he had read Ulysses and was inspired by its techniques.
