Best writer of all time? Even if you limit that to novelists, the competition is pretty stiff: Tolstoy, Proust, Dostoyevsky, Thomas Mann, Flaubert, Dickens, Cervantes, Joyce, etc., etc., etc. (Not to speak of the great national cultural heroes: the Shakespeares and the Goethes and the Dantes and so forth.)
But all of those guys were excellent "technicians" (that is, stylists), as you say Asimov was. (Never read him myself, I must confess. I don't care for SciFi.)
Still waiting to hear from coug what great writers were NOT. :-) |
