OK, top of my head here's my list...

1). James Crumley (esp. Dancing Bear)
2). James Lee Burke (esp. In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead)
3). Michael Malone (esp. Handling Sin)
4). Denis Lehane (Any Kenzie & Gennaro)
5). Robert B. Parker (Spenser - esp. God Save the Child)

No order:
Stephen King
Orson Scott Card
Dean Koontz
Arthur Clakre
David Brin
Larry Niven
Melanie Rawn

Ok, I saw no screenplay writers, but I've got to put in playwrights (which, I feel, are a little different).

1. E.M. Forster (esp. The Longest Journey)
2. Samuel Beckett (esp. Endgame)
3. Chaucer (esp. Troilus and Criseyde)
4. W.H. Auden (esp. The Dog Beneath the Skin)
5. Fyodor Dostoyevsky (esp. Notes From Underground)

Tom Clancy
Stephen King
John Keegan

I read so many books but these are the only authors that I regularly read.

George Orwell
Stephen King
Douglas Coupland
Edgar Allan Poe
Stephen Jay Gould

J.D. Salinger
J.K. Rowling
Chuck Palahniuk
J.R.R. Tolkien
Bill Waterson (Calvin & Hobbes)

Joe Haldeman
Robert A. Heinlein
Bentley Little
David Gerrold
Stephen King

HM: Robert McCammon, Philip Dick, John Farris, Richard Laymon, TED Klein (who'd be in my top five if he'd written more), Dan Simmons (who'd be in my top five if his last five novels hadn't been so terrible), Alex Garland, Alfred Bester, & Michael Crichton

OK...Favorites....These are authors I truly enjoy reading, some aren't exactly Steinbeck but what the heck.

Hunter Thompson
Arthur Conan Doyle
P.J. O'Rourke
Robert Ludlum
Isaac Asimov

Okay here goes my 2 cents:

Alice Hoffman: Her writing is infused w/ what a critic (can't remember which one) termed "magical realism". I could not agree more with that phrase. It fits Alice's writing beautifully. My favorites of hers are Practical Magic (ignore that crap movie they made from it), Here on Earth (a sort of modern day take on Wuthering Heights) and The River King.

Ann Patchett: She never writes the same way twice. I love that about her. Bel Canto is her latest and was up for the National Book Award earlier this year. She lost out, but it in no way diminishes my love for this fictionalized book loosely based on the embassy takeover in Peru a few years ago. Of course, her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars will always hold a special place in my heart as I read it first.

Larry Brown: Fay is as rough and heartbreaking a book as you are ever likely to read.

Marian Keyes: lovely Irish author...her books are in the same vein as Bridget Jones's Diary, but w/ heaps more depth, but just as much funny. She walks that balance perfectly.

Jeffery Deaver: I rarely read mysteries of any sort, but I started The Bone Collector at the urging of a friend and now, I adore Deaver. His writing is taut and gripping. He never loosens up and he always wraps up any loose ends (which is why I usually don't read mysteries...I hate loose ends).

Honorable mentions: Truman Capote, JD Salinger, Elizabeth Berg, Lee Smith (who writes the finest Southern novels I've ever read), Dan Chaon, Alice Walker, Carrie Brown, Joe Lansdale (for The Bottoms alone...excellent). There are undoubtedly countless more, but I think that's way more than enough for today.

Tough to narrow so many favorites down to five but I think I've finally done it...

Michael Chabon
Georg Buchner
Don DeLillo
Edgar Allen Poe
Natanael West


...with a special mention for Joseph Wambaugh, J.D. Salinger, Geoffrey Chaucer, Richard Matheson, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and F. Scott Fitzgerald.


jay

Actually, I'm not a "reader"
But there are a few that I occasionally read.

1. Arthur C. Clarke
2. Hunter S. Thompson
3. Piers Anthony (From my younger days)

1. David Zindell - _Neverness_ and _The Broken God_ are two of my very favorite novels
2. Philip K Dick - always entertaining . Can't say I've ever been disappointed in reading one of his novels
3. Stephen R. Donaldson -- I've read just about everything he's written except for the mysteries written under a pseudonym and one of his short story collections. The Gap series is one of my all time favorites. It can be brutal and cruel but it more than makes up for it in the later novels with the political intrigue.
4. Ian Fleming -- I always enjoy picking up a Bond novel for good old fashioned entertainment
5. John Steinbeck/Mark Twain - tie for last place. My favorites are lesser known works by these authors: Steinbeck's _The Winter of Our Discontent" , Twain's _The Recollections of Joan of Arc_

Other runnersup: David Gerrold, Harlan Ellison, Dan Simmons, Roger Zelazny, Isaac Asimov, HP Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, MR James

In no particular order (and the first five to come to mind) . . .

Philip Roth
Herman Melville
Don DeLillo
Eugene O'Neill
Nadine Gordimer

In no particular order...

Stephen King - I will always buy his stuff hardback on it's release week. Very rarely am I disappointed with his work.

Michael Connelly - I've been hooked since The Black Echo. Really looking forward to Chasing the Dime (even if it isn't a Bosch novel ).

Richard Matheson - A new favorite. This guy is out of control. Great short stories.

F. Paul Wilson - Really enjoyed The Keep and his Repairman Jack novels are terrific.

Jeffrey Deaver - Rarely disappoints.

Some noticable mentions...

James Patterson - I like the Alex Cross character and the (fairly) new Women's Murder Club characters.

Elmore Leonard - His books have a beat. Jazzy.

Carl Hiaasen - Just read Lucky You and really enjoyed it. My dad turned me on to this author and is going to feed my his books as he (my dad) reads them. Really looking forward to reading the next one.

Caleb Carr - The Alienist and The Angel of Darkness are fantastic. Too bad this guy doesn't write more crime novels.

Patricia Cornwell - The older stuff is really good, but she has gone down hill fast. I've given up on her. That doesn't mean that I don't like her older books though.

In order:

Robert Jordan - The Wheel of Time (assuming he ever finishes the stupid thing!)

David Eddings - The Belgariad/Malloreon; The Elenium/Tamuli; The Redemption of Athlus

Margaret Weis/Tracey Hickman - Dragonlance; Darksword

Dennis McKeirnan - Mithgar series

Anne McCaffery - Pern series

Kafka
Garcia-Marquez
Jules Verne
Burgess
Hemingway
Reverte-Perez
Poe
Stanyslav Lem

Currently

Orson Scott Card
Clive Barker (even though I don't like all of his books, the ones I like I really like)
Connie Willis
David Brin
Elmore Leonard

Recent writers I've just started reading, but like everything so far:

Neil Gaiman
Nick Hornby

Raymond Feist
L. E. Modesitt
Terry Pratchett
Douglas Adams
Timothy Zahn

Stephen King
Orson Scott Card
Terry Brooks
David Webber
Tom Clancy
Jules Verne-The first master of Sci-Fi

With many, many honorable mentions. Reading is one of the greatest abilities that man has and live would be much duller without it.

Dean Koontz
Stephen King
Clive Barker
Richard Matheson
James Hilton - only for Lost Horizon

Vladimir Nabokov (Pale Fire, The Gift, Despair)
Gunter Grass (The Tin Drum)
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn!! (Gulag Archipelago)
Ian Kershaw (Hitler: Hubris & Hitler: Nemesis)
Edvard Radzinsky (the immensly entertaining Rasputin File, The Last Tsar)
John Dower (Embracing Defeat)
Dmitri Volkogonov (Stalin, Lenin)
Leo Tolstoy (The Death of Ivan Ilyich)
Chretien de Troyes (Cliges)
DH Lawrence (Sons & Lovers, The Rainbow)

Nabokov
Hawthorne
Kundera
Poe (but it's been a loooong time since I read him, but I still remember the hairs on the back of my neck standing up when I read "Ligeia")
and Joyce

Stephen King
Richard Laymon
Robert McCammon
John Sandford
Anne Tyler

Robert Penn Warren
Ernest Hemingway
Norman Mailer
T.C. Boyle
Yukio Mishima

Fyodor Dostoevsky(Brothers Karamazov, C&P, The Idiot)
Herman Hesse(Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, The Glass Bead Game)
C.S. Lewis(Till We Have Faces, Screwtape Letters, various)
J.D. Salinger(Franny and Zooey, Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters, Catcher in the Rye)
Neil Postman (Technopoly, Amusing Ourselves to Death, The End of Education)