For anyone who is a prolific reader, especially of long-gone writers, finding a "new" author to read is better than finding money.  I've hit on John Williams, an excellent writer, who crafted three distinctly different novels Stoner, Butcher's Crossing, and Augustus.  All pitch perfect.  Another good book I just finished is Hadji Murad by Tolstoy.  Magnificently written as you would expect, but he's taken the preachy stick out of his ass to just tell a story.

Read any Elizabeth Marshall Thomas book.  They are all fascinating.  This is taken from Salon.com people:

"The Hidden Life of Dogs" was one of those stealth bestsellers that send surprised publishers bounding around the room doing kung fu moves, shouting, "Who's the bomb? I'm the bomb!" The first printing, in August 1993, was 13,000 copies. Within a week Houghton Mifflin had orders for 10,000 more. It spent nearly 10 months on the New York Times bestseller list. There are more than a million copies in print, and literary agents and publishers are still being flooded with manuscripts advertised as "the next 'Hidden Life of Dogs.'"

"Hidden Life" was such a surprise success that you might have thought its author had dropped from the sky, but writing brilliantly about dogs was only Thomas' most recent accomplishment, and not her first 15 minutes of fame.

Much of Thomas' work is connected to a transformative experience, a series of unusual African sojourns her family undertook in the early 1950s.

Ambrose Bierce is an excellent writer whose life is as interesting as his stories.  The Hunter S. Thompson of his day.  His Civil War stuff makes Stephen Crane's stories seem like a child with an active imagination.  Bierce brings to mind a few other authors in my library a lot of people haven't read.

Richard Bissell- Excellent story teller and writer.  He was born on the banks of the Mississippi River and many of his books are themed around his time sailing it.  Definitely worth a look.  Might have to go on line and buy them used.  Not expensive.

John Fante-  Did the Bandini series that was autobiographical.  A+ writer.  Fante got a blurb of recognition about a year ago when a good movie was made from one of his books.  Some of his books are still in print and available in bookstores.  He and Bissell are good writers to learn bits of the craft from. 

Bierce is a monster.  His writing was a bit spotty, but his sarcastic wit is probably as strong or stronger than Twain's.  His life story is as fascinating as his writing.

"Dean had a sweater wrapped around his ears to keep warm.  He said we were a band of Arabs coming in to blow up New York."

"Drowsy, peninsular Algiers (New Orleans, Louisiana) with all her bees and shanties was like to be washed away some day."

Those two quotes are from On The Road, by Jack Kerouac, which was published in 1957 after being edited for six years.  Weird.

I think I've met a few guys who have cloacas.                 

cloaca noun-1. the cavity (in birds, reptiles, amphibians, most fish, and monotremes but not mammals) at the end of the digestive tract into which the intestinal, genital, and urinary tracts open