Reading Like a Writer with Author Rick Pryll
In this episode, award-winning author Rick Pryll discusses how to read like a writer and his quest to read the 50 great American novels, including his rules for the quest and his impressions, plus his double-down quest to read the books with the best literary sex scenes. Access the episode Here
Rick Pryll is an award-winning author and poet living in Charlotte since 2002. His book, The Chimera of Prague(Foolishness Press, 2017) was selected as the winner of the 2018 New York Festival of Books in the Romance category. Part II of Chimera released in October 2020 and he reads an except on the show. Readers’ Favorite 5-star review calls Chimera, “Spicy, witty, charming and surprisingly hilarious. Unrelenting entertainment.” Author of two other books, Rick’s stories and poems have been featured on the pages of Think, Optimism, Ekleksographia, Prometheus Dreaming, and The Esthetic Apostle.
Top 50 Great American Novels listed here:
| Title | Author first | Author last |
| Little Women | Louisa May | Alcott |
| Winesburg Ohio | Sherwood | Anderson |
| The Adventures of Augie March | Saul | Bellow |
| Fahrenheit 451 | Ray | Bradbury |
| In Cold Blood | Truman | Capote |
| My Antonia | Willa | Cather |
| The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay | Michael | Chabon |
| The House on Mango Street | Sandra | Cisneros |
| Underworld | Don | DeLillo |
| The 42nd Parallel | John | Dos Passos |
| An American Tragedy | Theodore | Dreiser |
| Invisible Man | Ralph | Ellison |
| Middlesex | Jeffrey | Eugenides |
| The Sound and the Fury | William | Faulkner |
| The Great Gatsby | F. Scott | Fitzgerald |
| JR | William | Gaddis |
| The Scarlet Letter | Nathaniel | Hawthorne |
| Catch-22 | Joseph | Heller |
| The Sun Also Rises | Ernest | Hemingway |
| The Old Man and the Sea | Ernest | Hemingway |
| A Prayer for Owen Meanie | John | Irving |
| On the Road | Jack | Kerouac |
| One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest | Ken | Kesey |
| To Kill a Mockingbird | Harper | Lee |
| The Call of the Wild | Jack | London |
| Blood Meridian | Cormac | McCarthy |
| The Heart is a Lonely Hunter | Carson | McCullers |
| Lonesome Dove | Larry | McMurtry |
| Moby Dick | Herman | Melville |
| Gone with the Wind | Margaret | Mitchell |
| Beloved | Toni | Morrison |
| Lolita | Vladimir | Nabokov |
| The Bell Jar | Sylvia | Plath |
| The Shipping News | Annie | Proulx |
| Gravity’s Rainbow | Thomas | Pynchon |
| Gilead | Marilynne | Robinson |
| American Pastoral | Philip | Roth |
| The Catcher in the Rye | J.D. | Salinger |
| A Tree Grows in Brooklyn | Betty | Smith |
| The Grapes of Wrath | John | Steinbeck |
| Of Mice and Men | John | Steinbeck |
| A Confederacy of Dunces | John Kennedy | Toole |
| The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | Mark | Twain |
| Rabbit, Run | John | Updike |
| Slaughterhouse-Five | Kurt | Vonnegut Jr. |
| The Color Purple | Alice | Walker |
| Infinite Jest | David Foster | Wallace |
| All the King’s Men | Robert Penn | Warren |
| The House of Mirth | Edith | Wharton |
| Native Son | Richard | Wright |