A brief non political post and I will mostly do those in the future. In my 68 years I have been a spy, a scientist and an engineer. But I have always loved and appreciated literature. There are authors and writers and then there are wordsmiths – craftsmen of the English language. They are rare but I have three special favorites. Alduos Huxley is the first, in addition to great content and subject matter he was a craftsman. If you haven’t read any Huxley before I would suggest After Many A Summer Dies The Swan and Antic Hay for starters even though he is probably best known for Brave New World. Some of his best wordsmithing is in Antic Hay. The main character goes up to see a dying relative in the hospital almost daily and tells her how much better she looks and describes this farce as “floundering in a quagmire of hypocritical platitudes” – wordsmithing at it’s best. My second favorite is Joseph Conrad of Heart Of Darkness fame. He is an unusual English Wordsmith since he didn’t even learn the language until he was in his late teens. The third is an unlikely candidate the pulp ficiton writer that I have discussed before, Edgar Rice Burroughs, here is a snip from that post:
When I was in the 7th grade I discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs. My fascination with his stories continued through high school. There was of course Tarzan but there was also Barsoom and Pelucider not to mention Venus. Silly fantasy but it could have been worse – I might have become interested in Ayn Rand. Burroughs was a master of “graphic prose.” It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words: well Burroughs could do it with 20 words or less.