Tolkien. All of his work is good, of course, but to see him at his best, pick up Unfinished Tales, and read the tale of Turin Turambar. It’s one of the most depressing things I’ve ever read, and I don’t like depressing literature… But it was so well-written that I enjoyed reading it just for the quality of the writing.
I know people have already mentioned Orwell, but many may not know that some of his best writing is actually contained not in his novels, but in his shorter essays and journalism ,as well as his non-fiction books. The essays etc. can be found in a four-volume collection entitledThe collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, published (i think) by Penguin.
Larry McMurtry - you have to spit the dust out of your mouth after reading Lonesome Dove.
Diana Gabaldon - yeah, yeah, sometimes her characters are well, too good to be true. However, she can sure spin a tail. Her imagery and prose are simply awesome.
Anita Shreve - I love how she writes. Concise yet descriptive.
This is very meta, but Strunk, of Strunk and White gets me hot. I think it was someone here who described The Elelments of Style as technical writing elevated into an art form.
Melville, at times, esp. in “Benito Cereno”.
Milton. I was blown away when I realized that the invocation of Paradise Lost was written, that somebody had set down and crafted it, made choices, seen the path nneded to make such an epic tone seem natural, organic . . .wow.
Keats. The only romantic who could really control his languafge without losing the emotion, and in doing so showed that the pleasure of the mind and of hte heart are all legitimate and really the same . . . If I could pick one minor historical detail, I would have saved Keats from TB.