who are your favorite cranks?

I'd vote for Florence King. She's one cranky misanthrope.

Adorno!

h l mencken, mark twain in "damned human race" mode, albert goldman

Philip Lopate's essay Against Joie de Vivre is pretty cranky. And David Foster Wallace's smackdown of John Updike in his recent book Consider the Lobster. But they are both probably creampuffs at heart

i forgot a good one:

Ambition is a Dead Sea fruit, and the greatest peril to the soul is that one is likely to get precisely what he is seeking.
Edward Dahlberg

Every decision you make is a mistake.
Edward Dahlberg

Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.
Edward Dahlberg

I would rather take hellebore than spend a conversation with a good, little man.
Edward Dahlberg

It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.
Edward Dahlberg

It takes a long time to understand nothing.
Edward Dahlberg

Man hoards himself when he has nothing to give away.
Edward Dahlberg

Men are mad most of their lives; few live sane, fewer die so. The acts of people are baffling unless we realize that their wits are disordered. Man is driven to justice by his lunacy.
Edward Dahlberg

No people require maxims so much as the American. The reason is obvious: the country is so vast, the people always going somewhere, from Oregon apple valley to boreal New England, that we do not know whether to be temperate orchards or sterile climate.
Edward Dahlberg

One cat in a house is a sign of loneliness, two of barrenness, and three of sodomy.
Edward Dahlberg

Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.
Edward Dahlberg

So much of our lives is given over to the consideration of our imperfections that there is no time to improve our imaginary virtues. The truth is we only perfect our vices, and man is a worse creature when he dies than he was when he was born.
Edward Dahlberg

The ruin of the human heart is self-interest, which the American merchant calls self-service. We have become a self-service populace, and all our specious comforts - the automatic elevator, the escalator, the cafeteria - are depriving us of volition and moral and physical energy.
Edward Dahlberg

There is a strange and mighty race of people called the Americans who are rapidly becoming the coldest in the world because of this cruel, man-eating idol, lucre.
Edward Dahlberg

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.
Edward Dahlberg

We are a most solitary people, and we live, repelled by one another, in the gray, outcast cities of Cain.
Edward Dahlberg

We are always talking about being together, and yet whatever we invent destroys the family, and makes us wild, touchless beasts feeding on technicolor prairies and rivers.
Edward Dahlberg

We can only write well about our sins because it is too difficult to recall a virtuous act or even whether it was the result of good or evil motives.
Edward Dahlberg

We cannot live, suffer or die for somebody else, for suffering is too precious to be shared.
Edward Dahlberg

Edward Dahlberg seems to have the most prominent qualification for a first-class crank: he is full of admiration for his own opinions, leaving little to spare for the opinions of others. (Of course, so am I, but just a dash more quietly.)

Robert Crumb
Daniel Clowes

Jamie Oliver has become a crank. Bless him, he was always an advocate of fresh food and so on, but I was given his most recent book, Jamie's Italy, for Christmas, and there's a whole section in it on the appalling state of the meat industry in Britain. He urges readers to visit his website to find out more and to become active in stamping out rubbish meat.
I'm not saying he's not right, I just don't remember him being so, well, political.
But when are you a crank and when are you passionate about things you believe in? Is it like the difference between eccentricity and madness?

i probably should have extended the thread title to include cranks/curmudgeons/ranters. cranks are usually, in my experience, people who complain for the sake of complaining and they are usually easily dismissed. whereas, there are fine and funny writers who are merely "cranky" and who always seem to have a thorn in their paw. and curmudgeons are usually older people who shake their heads and fists at the insanity of modern life. i kinda like them all! even though i'm more of an optimist in general. bierce's devil's dictionary. is it the work of a crank? a misanthrope? and yeah, twain's later stuff. there is some seriously foul mood food for thought in a lot of it. bitter and bleak. i dunno, it's a fine line. many people would say that bierce was just a realist. i might have to agree with them. dahlberg though. he was a bit of a crank. a bit of a brilliant crank in his way.

here's how i see it:

clowes - cranky

crumb - curmudgeon

pekar - crank

Ebenezer Scrooge. Bah. Humbug.

Houellebecq is indeed a crank. And what about John Banville? I've only read Shroud, but that character was pretty cranky, and Banville himself was cranky in his acceptance of the Booker prize, with all that "about time they gave it to a real writer" talk.

Felipe Alfau