Locobot

I think you're on the right track, find an author you really love and read everything they wrote. Hemingway has impeccable prose but please do not fashion yourself as the next Hemingway, it's tired, it was tired 50 years ago. If you can read another language it will improve immensely your understanding of English and your ability to write not just properly but with panache. In fact two of the most exemplary writers of modern English language prose were non-native speakers: Conrad and Nabokov, Polish and Russian respectively.

Nabokov (Lolita, Pale Fire, Bend Sinister) makes his words sing and his grammar is perfect. "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta."

Other authors I recommend learning from in terms of prose are: Franz Kafka (the Trial, Metamorphosis)-get the newest translations available, Tom Wolfe (The Right Stuff, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test), David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest, A Supposedly Fun thing I'll never do again), Thomas Pynchon (V, Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow), J.M. Coetzee (Disgrace, Waiting for the Barbarians, Foe).

Some authors who I love but whose prose isn't quite up to snuff: Dostoevsky, Orwell, Philip K. Dick, Vonnegut, also... Robbins.

Dickens is wonderful, but idiosyncratic. Dickens is meant to be read aloud in a serial fashion (one chapter per week) so he includes a lot of repetitive markers to help people remember characters. Reading him straight through often just feels repetitious.