So who would win in a fistfight? Ernest Hemingway or Norman Mailer? James Fenimore Cooper or William S. Burroughs? This week we present the most burly, manly men of letters. In their world, or at least in their fiction, the liquor is always strong, the women willing, and wildlife had best take cover. If there is anyone you feel should be included or bumped from the list in favor of your own choice, let us know. Until then, in chronological, if not muscular order, the top 10 are:

1. James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851). Man vs. Wild? Get over it, Discovery Channel. Natty Bumppo has it all. Toughness, smarts, an ability to survive in the grimmest of circumstances. Hawkeye, aka Natty, is the protagonist of five “Leatherstocking Tales,” including The Last of the Mohicans and The Deerslayer. Cooper’s tales have inspired generations of young boys and men to fight to the finish and defend their homeland. (And for the lady-folk out there, Daniel Day-Lewis’ portrayal of Hawkeye in the 1992 film is quite swoon inducing.)

2. Jules Verne (1828-1905). “Up periscope!” Any room on the couch, Doctor Freud? Even if everything is on the up-and-up, as it were, many a young boy’s pretending to be aboard submarines and spaceships is based on the descriptive adventures in Jules Verne’s novels, among them Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Center of the Earth. Verne is widely considered to be the father of science fiction. No girls allowed, by the way…or at least precious few have trespassed into this private male realm.

3. Jack London (1876-1916). To Build a Fire. Call of the Wild. ’Nuff said. While other writers of his era where wringing their hands about the plight of the modern world and wearing smoking jackets, Jack was actually on fire. Well, not literally, of course. But he was a man’s man, for sure…working on ships, hopping freight trains, and living a life on the edge. He was self-educated and self-assured. And he died of alcoholism (allegedly). As a result, you can now be the owner of several moderately priced wines that bear his name as you read his work.

4. Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). Where to begin on the manly men scale? Hemingway became almost as well-known for his macho antics as for his writing, and not all of it was fictionalized (though he was not above a good “enhancement.”) A volunteer ambulance driver for the Italian army driver during World War I, Hemingway was even wounded in the groin no less. His exploits of hunting, fishing, delivering babies, and attending the bullfights in Spain are revisited and sensationalized in novels like A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises.

5. Richard Wright (1908-1960). Richard Wright created one of the most frightening characters in twentieth-century literature, Bigger Thomas in Native Son. Alone in a world of racial oppression, do-gooders, and poverty, Bigger’s “will or kill” attitude was a startling look into the festering anger experienced by many African-Americans. Long before Malcolm X, Wright was committed to active resolution of injustice. Wright once said, “I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.”

6. Ralph Ellison (1914-1968). The Invisible Man is one of literature’s most manly of men, and his creator wasn’t too shabby either. Although Ellison’s protagonist lives in the “shadows,” his potential for menace is fully illuminated. “A hibernation is covert preparation for a more overt action,” the Invisible Man explains. Ellison himself lived as large as possible: he was in the merchant marines, played jazz trumpet, and tried his hand at painting too.

7. William S. Burroughs (1914-1997). Okay, so some of you may contend with Burroughs’ inclusion on a “most manly of men” list because of his overt homosexuality. But unlike Truman Capote, who might be felled with a feather duster, I doubt anyone would have wanted to meet Burroughs in a dark alley. Naked Lunch contains some of the most graphic descriptions of drug addiction in literature and was the cause of a major obscenity trial in the United States in 1959.

8. Jack Kerouac (1922-1969). Who hasn’t wanted to be Dean Moriarty? Or at least his buddy, Sal Paradise? On the Road was based on Kerouac’s own road trip to enlightenment with his pal Neal Cassady. Like his protagonists, Kerouac was a voracious connoisseur of life who didn’t easily take “no” for an answer. A high school football star, Kerouac physically fought with the football coach who refused to let him play at Colombia. When the armed forces declined his membership, Kerouac joined the merchant marines. He gave himself and his fellow writers the moniker the “Beat Generation,” a label that still identifies many writers of the post-WWII and Vietnam eras.

9. Norman Mailer (1923-2007). Ah…the most soft-spoken, timid, and reticent of men? Maybe in bizarro world. Author of Armies of the Night and Advertisements for Myself, Mailer never shied away from the spotlight or a good punch. Typical of Mailer’s rhetoric is this statement: “Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.”

10. Cormac McCarthy (1933-present). Last on our list, by virtue of still being above ground, is Cormac McCarthy, recent winner (2007) of the Pulitzer Prize in Literature for his novel The Road. McCarthy has lived all over the world, including what has to be one of the least desirable locales on the planet—a pig farm in Tennessee. His novels are brutal and unflinching. Almost everyone dies, all the time. But isn’t that the fate of all of us in the end? (You are free to cry in a manly fashion into your pillows now.)

Posted Tue, 04 Dec 2007 15:56:58 and filed under Top 10, Literature. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.