A Note to the Young

 There are many fine writers out there right now (such as Mark Helprin) but don't let them distract you from oldies such as these:

• Leo Tolstoy
• Charles Dickens
• Jane Austen
• Isaac Bashevis Singer
• Herman Melville
• Anthony Trollope
• Patrick O'Brian
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Olivia Manning
• Saul Bellow
• Jiri Weil
• Mark Twain
• Robinson Davies
• Jim Harrison
• J.D. Salinger
• James Clavell
• George Orwell
• James Baldwin
• Raymond Chandler
• Aldous Huxley
• Erich Maria Remarque
• Robert Graves
• Agatha Christie
• Cormac McCarthy
• William Styron
• Joseph Heller
• Edwin O'Connor
• Ernest Hemingway
• Katherine Anne Porter
• Ralph Ellison
• William Faulkner
• Flannery O'Connor
• John Steinbeck [I recently met a young Steinbeck fan.]
• Alexander Solzhenitsyn
• Philip Roth

Just to name a few.