Charles Portis
I've been compulsively reading books by Charles Portis in the last week. I'd never even heard of one of the great comic novelists of his era, but Dogs of the South and The Masters of Atlantis are both hilarious and incredibly well written.I also suspect Portis influenced John Kennedy Toole because when I read Portis the dialogue reminds me of Confederacy of Dunces. And Portis was a southerner, born in Arkansas, so was probably familiar to Toole.
If you've never heard of him, it's a good time to start. Oh, and these novels are, to some degree, a product of their time, so some things are going to seem dated. But they're brilliantly written and laugh-out-loud funny.
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