Who are your favorite fiction authors?

Leeder Krenon wrote:R.A. Salvatore, Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Orson Scott Card, Roger Zelazny, Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, and Michael Crichton are among some of my favourites. For the books which have been made into movies though, I love the movies based off of Stephen King's novels that are directed by Stephen King. He always seems to appear in them at some point, and his stories are at least as good on the screen as they are in my mind.

Also, I tend to read non-fiction quite a bit more than fiction, and some of my favourite non-fiction authors include:

Richard Preston (He makes books which are the non-fiction equivalent to Crichton sometimes, like "The Demon in the Freezer" and, "The Hot Zone.")

Burke Davis (Civil War biographies, I read his biography of James Earl Brown (JEB) Stuart, and some of his other works.)

Gary Larson (Okay, I suppose that Far Side cartoons hardly count as non-fiction!)

Mikhail Tal (He wrote an autobiography of a number of his chess games, and also wrote details about the 1960 World Chess Championship. He's one of my chess heroes, and I own a revised edition of his autobiography, "The Life and Chess Games of Mikhail Tal")