• You are currently viewing our forum as a guest, which gives you limited access to view most discussions and access our other features. By joining our free community, you will have access to additional post topics, communicate privately with other members (PM), view blogs, respond to polls, upload content, and access many other special features. Registration is fast, simple and absolutely free, so please join our community today! Just click here to register. You should turn your Ad Blocker off for this site or certain features may not work properly. If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us by clicking here.

Author Types: 4's and 5's

Lotr246

New member
Joined
Aug 2, 2008
Messages
350
Based on what I've seen from sites:

4:
Viriginia Woolf (4w5)
Fyodor Dostoevsky (4w5 or 5w4?)
Tennessee Williams (4w3)
William Blake (4w5)
John Keats
Albert Camus (4w3)
Soren Kierkegaard (4w5)
Marcel Proust (4w3)
Oscar Wilde (4w3)
J.D. Salinger (4w5)
Hermann Hesse (4w5)
William Shakespeare

5:
James Joyce (5w4 or 4w5?)
Rainer Maria Rilke (5w4 or 4w5?)
Franz Kafka (5w4)
Stephen King (5w4)
Emily Dickinson (5w4)
T.S. Eliot (5w4)
Vladimir Nabokov (5w4)
Isaac Asimov (5w6?)

Add any others! And what do you think distinguishes one as a 4 or 5 writer? I have a hard time distinguishing 4w5 and 5w4 writers from one another...like Dostoevsky, Joyce, Rilke..Any ideas?
 
Last edited:

Lotr246

New member
Joined
Aug 2, 2008
Messages
350
I'm starting to think Joyce was a 4w5 with a high w5 instead, or at least his fictional character, Stephen Dedalus (who is a fictional rendering of Joyce), is. For one, Joyce's novel about Stephen, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is highly autobiographical. Here's what one site mentions: "Their artistic work tends to be autobiographical, based on their families, on relationships, past or unrequited, and on the content of their subjective experience." And needless to say, its about him wanting to become an artist--seeing himself as unique and elite, searching for beauty, inspiration..

Ulysses, too, shows Stephen (or Joyce), but at a much more unhealthy level. He's deeply depressed from the death of his mother, and Joyce compares Stephen to Hamlet, another fictional 4. He's also extremely envious of others because his work or talents are not being appreciated by the high literary society of Dublin.

And Ulysses, if anyone has read it, is in some sense an answer to the 4's plight--to appreciate every experience, however mundane. I think that Joyce wrote about daily life as a way for making the ordinary, especially w/ his language and the correlations to Homer's epic, extraordinary.

Based on those two works, again highly autobiographical, Joyce seems more 4w5. He could be a 5w4, but Joyce's writing never comes across as detached (except Finnegans Wake), His earlier works, like Dubliners, are filled with powerful emotions, longing, loss. These just seem like themes a 4 would be more concerned with.
 
Top