Three exciting writers from the drab Forties & Fifties

"He was an erudite and an elegant writer and none of the artifices of rhetoric was unfamiliar to him. His style was rich in simile and metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and catachresis. He never let a noun go by without an escort of two stalwart adjectives. Images sprang to his mind as profuse and fat as mushrooms after rain, and being well read in the Scriptures, the works of the Fathers and the Latin moralists, he was never at a loss for recondite allusion. He was learned in sentence structure, simple, compound and compound-complex, and could not only compose a period, with clauses and subclauses, of the most choice elaboration, but bring it to a conclusion with a triumphant clang that had all the effect of a door slammed in your face. This manner of writing, to which an ingenious critic had given the name of Mandarin, is much admired by those who affect it, but it has the the trifling disadvantage of taking a long time to say what can be said in brief; and in any case it would be discordant with the plain, blunt style in which this narrative is written; and so, instead of making a vain attempt to reproduce the good father's grandiloquence, the author of these pages has thought it better to give the gist of the matter [Inquisition 'auto de fe'] in his own simple way."
W. Somerset Maugham: 'Catalina', Doubleday, 1948, pp.89-90

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Somerset_Maugham

Maugham and Michener and Han Suyin are the writer of the postWW2 period that I most enjoy reading. Suyin's autobiographical works are quite excellent history.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_of_the_South_Pacific

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Suyin