It's a work that engages multiple generations of readers, tends to have superb qualities in terms of some combination of theme, plot, characterization, and prose, and which has something to say about that glorious shared historia that millennia of human civilizations have shared with each other.



There are literally hundreds of authors I could name. Some not named (as well as a few that were) would include Henry Fielding (esp. for Tom Jones), Lautréamont, Huysmans, Thackeray, Anne Lennox, William Beckford, Thomas Mann, Thomas Wolfe, Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O'Connor, Ludovico Ariosto, Melville, García Márquez, Borges, Cortázar, Faulkner, Eliot, Tasso, Boiardo, Gide, Flaubert, Naguib Mahfouz, Nabokov, Flann O'Brien, Max Ernst, Saramago, Italo Calvino, Twain, James Thurber, Roberto Arlt, D.H. Lawrence, Norman Mailer, Günter Grass, Truman Capote, Fuentes, Rulfo, Rivera, Stendhal, Fitzgerald, Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, Saul Bellow, Graham Greene, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Boccaccio, Dante, Milton, Alexander Pope, Sterne, Zola, Collette, Chaucer, Marx, Hitler, Stanek...err...

If you had to suggest just one, which would it be and why? (please not, "because it's good" )

Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find, simply because it covers a fading South in language that moves those who have grown up in this fine region and it confounds those who cannot see past the apocalyptic veneer.



Nothing comes to mind.



I tend to read most works of literature.