belletrist means A person who writes or is concerned with belles-lettres. Lexicurio rates it Sui generis — a strength score of 88 out of 100.
Why this word is great
BELLETRIST — [Noun] A writer or critic devoted to belles-lettres, literature valued for its aesthetic refinement and stylistic artistry. From German Belletrist, itself a coinage by Goethe from French belles-lettres (literally "fine letters") + the agent suffix -ist. Unlike an academic, who excavates meaning through systematic rigor, or a journalist, who chronicles the factual ledger of the present, the belletrist is an aesthete of the sentence and a guardian of literature's sensuous charm. It is the essayist polishing a prose cadence until it rings like struck glass; the critic appraising a novel as one might a sonata; the novelist for whom a perfect cadence carries more weight than plot—a quiet, necessary protest against the tyranny of the purely useful, sustained by the faith that how one writes is the truest part of what it means.
noun
- A person who writes or is concerned with belles-lettres