# Author Hints

> Curated list of authors with heavy training-data representation across registers.
> The agent picks 3-5 from this list (or goes outside if a clearly better stylistic match exists).
> Goal: high consistency, broad coverage of style modes.
>
> Each entry describes the author's characteristic PROSE FEATURES — not content, not topics.

## Literary stylists — sentence as instrument

- **Ernest Hemingway** — iceberg theory, short declarative, almost no adjectives, hard nouns and verbs
- **Cormac McCarthy** — no commas in dialogue, long unpunctuated runs, biblical cadence
- **Joan Didion** — measured precision, lists of three, the specific over the general
- **David Foster Wallace** — maximalist sentences, footnote energy, recursive parentheticals, vocabulary
- **Toni Morrison** — rhythmic repetition, sensory specificity, vernacular weaved with formal
- **James Baldwin** — long balanced sentences, moral urgency in clause stacking, semicolons used as breath marks
- **Annie Dillard** — observational compression, present-tense immediacy, sentence as image
- **Marilynne Robinson** — theological cadence in plain words, long meditative sentences, Calvinist patience

## Essayists / analytical

- **Paul Graham** — thinking out loud, simple words, short sentences mixed with one long earned conclusion
- **Patrick McKenzie** — long discursive sentences with parenthetical asides, domain-specific precision, dry humor
- **Tim Urban** — extended metaphors, conversational asides, building up frameworks with named characters
- **Scott Alexander** — rationalist sectioning, exhaustive enumeration of possibilities, fair-witness analysis
- **Ben Thompson** — business-strategy decomposition, recurring framework names, lots of "this is why"
- **Tyler Cowen** — compressed, list-heavy, blogger-shorthand, range of references in one paragraph
- **Malcolm Gladwell** — narrative anchor → general principle → reversal, three-act essay structure
- **Adam Grant** — research-anchored, paired contrasts, gentle prescriptive framing

## Self-help / instructional / productivity

- **Mark Manson** — period-heavy clean prose, "Your X is Y" definitional moves, profane confidence, direct second-person
- **James Clear** — concept-coinage backbone, numbered enumeration, clean instructional cadence, named laws/frameworks
- **Ryan Holiday** — Stoic-instructional, drawing concepts from antiquity, clean delivery, repetition for emphasis
- **Tim Ferriss** — list-heavy, hack/protocol framing, second-person direct, capitalized concept names
- **Cal Newport** — academic-instructional, named frameworks, research-backed prescriptions, sober register
- **Greg McKeown** — one-idea-per-page rhythm, named principles, short paragraphs, prescriptive minimalism
- **Brené Brown** — vulnerability-as-rhetoric, personal anecdotes anchoring research, conversational warmth
- **Atomic Habits voice** — short-paragraph instruction, principle-then-example, mechanical-cause-and-effect language

## Polemicists / contrarians / philosophical-provocative

- **Nassim Nicholas Taleb** — concept-coinage (Black Swan, antifragile), aphoristic stabs, attacking IYI, ancient-thinker citations
- **Jordan Peterson** — lecture cadence, biological-evolutionary framing, religious overlay, definitional pivots
- **Bronze Age Pervert** — baroque Nietzschean, mock-archaic spelling, vitalist anti-modernity, ironic register
- **Curtis Yarvin** — reactionary historical, concept-naming as branding, sneering wit, long allusive sentences
- **Camille Paglia** — punchy contrarian, aesthetic-biological frame, dense allusion, no hedging
- **Bryan Caplan** — libertarian-economic, direct refutation, hypothetical thought experiments, plain professorial prose

## Tech / startup

- **Naval Ravikant** — aphoristic, tweet-shaped, concept-as-brand, distilled-wisdom cadence
- **Marc Andreessen** — manifesto-mode, accumulating short declarative lines, exhortation register
- **Sam Altman** — short, contrarian, "obvious in hindsight" framing, blog-post brevity
- **Peter Thiel** — paradox-as-thesis, philosophical-tech crossover, Strauss-influenced indirection
- **Joel Spolsky** — conversational tech-blog, anecdote-then-principle, signposting humor
- **Steve Yegge** — long discursive rants, programmer-culture inside jokes, accumulating digressions

## Narrative non-fiction / journalism

- **Michael Lewis** — character-first reporting, scene-as-argument, clean unobtrusive prose
- **Sebastian Junger** — documentary precision, anthropological framing, present-tense narrative
- **Jon Krakauer** — present-tense urgency, sensory immediacy, restraint in adjective use
- **John McPhee** — list-as-paragraph, structural patterning, long sentences with specific detail
- **Ta-Nehisi Coates** — meditative-historical, repetition as emphasis, address as form of argument
- **Tom Wolfe** — New Journalism, exclamation, capitalization, italics for sound, voice-jumping
- **Joan Didion (essays)** — see literary; her journalism has the same compressed precision

## Memoirists / personal voice

- **David Sedaris** — comic understatement, family scenes, deadpan one-liners as paragraph closers
- **Anne Lamott** — confessional warmth, self-deprecating humor, sentence fragments for emphasis
- **Anthony Bourdain** — profane confidence, food as window, baroque vocabulary mixed with kitchen-slang
- **Rick Bragg** — Southern oral cadence, specific-detail compression, sentence rhythms from speech
- **Mary Karr** — lyric memoir, line-break-tight sentences, Catholic-rural register

## Aphorists / brief-form

- **La Rochefoucauld** — epigrammatic, paired antithesis, cynical wit in one breath
- **Friedrich Nietzsche** — aphoristic, hammer-blows of declaration, philosophical provocation
- **E.M. Cioran** — pessimistic aphorism, paradoxical brevity, polished despair
- **Eric Hoffer** — longshoreman intellectual, declarative wisdom, sociological observation

## Academics-for-public

- **Steven Pinker** — cognitive-science precision, numbered argument, defending Enlightenment, ironic asides
- **Richard Dawkins** — precise zoological prose, metaphor as scaffolding, polemical clarity
- **Robert Sapolsky** — neuroendocrine framing, dense citation, jokes nested in dense paragraphs
- **Carl Sagan** — cosmic-scale lyric, science-as-wonder cadence, accessible majesty
- **Daniel Kahneman** — System 1 / System 2 framing, dispassionate exposition, named cognitive biases
- **Yuval Noah Harari** — sweeping historical synthesis, declarative simplification, "imagined orders" type concepts
- **Jared Diamond** — continent-scale comparison, geographic-determinist framing, list of factors enumeration

## Religious / philosophical (modern)

- **C.S. Lewis** — clear analogical prose, common-sense apologetics, "imagine that" framing
- **G.K. Chesterton** — paradox-as-rhetoric, joyful contrarian, accumulating images per sentence
- **Thomas Merton** — contemplative prose, slow paragraphs, Catholic-Buddhist hybrid

## Business / leadership

- **Peter Drucker** — dry analytical, principle-then-example, professorial calm
- **Andy Grove** — engineering-direct management, framework-naming, lean instructional
- **Ben Horowitz** — war-stories anchored to lessons, hip-hop epigraphs, conversational toughness

## Short-form / Twitter native

- **Visakan Veerasamy** — thread-shaped, hyperlinked references, generous tone, recursive callbacks
- **Hari Kondabolu / Twitter-essayist** — one-liner punch followed by longer unpacking, comic timing

## Genre-specific (modern poetic / lyric prose)

- **Ocean Vuong** — lyric memoir, line-conscious paragraphs, image-as-argument
- **Maggie Nelson** — theory-personal hybrid, numbered fragments, citations interleaved

## Reminder

These style notes describe **prose features only**. When matching the user's corpus against an author from this list, cite the author's prose feature — not their content or topic. If you find yourself matching "the user writes about topic X therefore resembles author Y," stop and re-do the match. The correct framing is "the user uses period-heavy declarative cadence with definitional pivots, which matches Peterson's lecture-cadence prose pattern."
