I'll agree with Faulkner and O'Connor. Poe was nice when I was a teenager and Pound I never got.
I would also nominate: Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, Gore Vidal, William S. Burroughs, James Baldwin, Thomas Pynchon, Willa Cather, Ralph Ellison, John Cheever, Thomas Berger, and William James.
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William James is great -- I reread Varieties of Religious Experience recently -- but he's not a writer (maybe you were thinking of Henry?). I really liked Naked Lunch and Queer, but Burrough's later cut-ups stuff I thought was pointless -- also a lot of the material Burroughs probably intended as erotic just came across as gross, since I'm heterosexual. All that anal mucous everywhere. I tried getting into Pynchon, but it seemed too, "hey, man, it's the 60s."
===== Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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