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What
Authors Influenced You?
Bookreporter.com,
another website from The Book Report Network, has been
talking to authors since 1996. Here is a look at what
75 authors told us about the writers who have influenced
their lives. Whether you are an author or a reader, these
inspirations may lengthen your personal reading list.
Warren
Adler: I have been influenced by many writers from
Shakespeare, through all of the classic British, Russian
and French novelists. If there is any one novelist that
I truly admire most for his concise and brilliant psychological
portrayals it is Georges Simenon, not in much favor these
days, but a prolific and accessible literary genius.
Julia
Alvarez: It's been different people because I started
out wanting to be a poet. So I was reading mostly poetry.
I was totally taken with Walt Whitman. He was the most
Latino-American (laughs) voice I ever heard, wonderfully
florid and musical, and [he was] a man of expressive gestures
to me. I was taken in by his voice. The opposite voice
was enthralling --- Emily Dickinson, with her probing
and sassiness, linguistically anyhow --- and discovering
Neruda, someone in my native language who was really a
wonderful model for me. In terms of prose, I went to college
during the early 60s before the multicultural literature
and women's studies [were popular] --- I read the canon
and got a very limited education but I learned the tradition.
Out of college, I had to educate myself in terms of what
books had been missing ---discovering African-American
literature --- Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Zora Neale
Hurston --- the fact that these other voices and other
experiences could be part of American literature and not
just sociology. Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior
was such an eye-opener to me. Oh, my God! The realization
that you could make American literature out of [experiences
that were] not mainstream literature like I had been led
to believe was the subject of sociology. It gave me a
great sense of permission. So many Latina writers will
tell you that that was the book that did it.
Gail Anderson-Dargatz: There are so many writers
who I consider influences. Margaret Lawrence and Alice
Munro are big ones. My mentor was and continues to be
West Coast writer Jack Hodgins. I love Toni Morrison's
work. But I think my inspiration comes from the people
and landscapes around me more than from other books. Reviewers
have often seen South American influences in my work ---
the ghosts and magic, I guess. But the ghosts, premonitions
and magic came from family stories. For example, in A
Recipe for Bees, Augusta has a premonition of her
father's death by drowning just after she has given birth
to Joy. This premonition was one that my mother had, although
it was her brother who drowned, a week after the premonition.
I have recorded this story much as my mother told it to
me. My father passed on the rich stories and legends about
the region I grew up in, that he heard from the interior
Salish natives he worked with, and I used these in The
Cure for Death by Lightning.
Laurie Halse Anderson: Chris Crutcher, Francesca
Lia Block, Karen Hesse, Karen Cushman, Robert Cormier,
and Judy Blume.
Noreen
Ayers: As different as they are, I would say that
without a doubt I owe a debt to Elmore Leonard, James
Lee Burke, and the poets Anne Sexton and William Matthews.
Cat
Bauer: I can tell you my favorite writer, who is Elizabeth
Berg. I can tell you my favorite books: Catcher In
The Rye by J.D. Salinger, Alice in Wonderland
by Lewis Carroll, The Little Prince by Antoine
de Saint-Exupery, The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton
Juster, A Separate Peace by John Knowles.
Martyn
Bedford: The author who inspired me to be a writer
was Jack Kerouac. On The Road was a pivotal book
in my life. I also read a lot of Hemingway, Steinbeck
and Salinger when I was younger. More recently, I've become
a fan of Paul Auster, Annie Proulx, Don DeLillo, Margaret
Atwood, Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut, Raymond Carver,
Franz Kafka and Flann O'Brien. My favorite British writers
are James Kelman, Alan Warner, A.L. Kennedy and Rupert
Thomson.
Elizabeth
Berg: I read a lot of contemporary fiction --- too
much, really. I like Alice Munro, Jane Hamilton, Anne
Tyler, Ellen Gilchrist, Amy Bloom, JoAnn Beard, Lorrie
Moore. My favorite author of all time is E.B. White. I
also like Sherman Alexie and Michael Byers. I can't say
that any author really influenced my own writing --- I
play in my own corner of the sandbox.
Maeve
Binchy: Nobody influenced me in the way that I write
because I speak entirely with my own voice, but I greatly
admire Kurt Vonnegut, William Trevor and Alice Munro
Michael
Blaine: My influences are very eclectic. For some
reason, I read a lot of Russian writers when I was quite
young. I think Notes From The Underground by Dostoyevsky
was a bit of an adolescent anthem. My reading is so undisciplined
it's hard to say. I love so many writers who are so different
--- Marquez and Dreiser, for instance --- that it seems
to me to be impossible to sort out influences. Certainly,
Faulkner continues to hold some sort of sway. I am a great
fan of Eudora Welty, and I think I learned something about
the unreliable narrator from her work. Flannery O'Connor's
grotesques appeal to me. I also have a completely unrealistic
idea that one day I'll write a novel in the vein of Machado
De Assis. Short chapters, very, very dry.
Christopher
Bohjalian: Joyce Carol Oates and John Irving have
been among my favorite writers for two decades now. I
will never forget the first time I read Oates' novel,
Expensive People, with that cryptic first line:
"I was a child murderer." The narrator asks
you to ponder what that means: A child who happened to
murder, or an adult who murdered a child. I imagine Oates
is comfortable with all manner of ambiguity in her fiction.
I
believe I cherish Irving's work because he consistently
offers us such wondrously vibrant and idiosyncratic characters.
Mark
Bowden: John Hersey. His book Hiroshima is one of
the early examples of powerful nonfiction writing; I probably
read it when I was in high school. I first became acquainted
with George Orwell's writing through his essays, and only
later read his journalism, like Homage to Catalonia, which
was his account of the Spanish Civil War, which was an
amazing book. I was very much influenced, though not stylistically
in the case of Black Hawk Down, but in terms of
the kind of nonfiction storytelling that I like to do,
by Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Guy Talese, John McPhee,
I'm probably leaving out four or five important writers.
Peter Mathieson is someone whose nonfiction writing I've
greatly admired. Those are some of the most important.
T. Coraghessan Boyle: But you must realize that
I have at least a thousand literary heroes, and depending
on what I had (or didn't have) for breakfast on any given
day I'm bound to forget some of them. I like your adducing
Camus. Existentialism hit me hard (the body blow to complement
the left jab of Darwin and Earth Science) at a tender,
post-Catholic age. I quote The Stranger for one
of the two epigraphs of Without a Hero (".
. .all that remained to hope was that on the day of my
execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and
that they should greet me with howls of execration").
Kafka, of course. Probably too obvious an influence to
even list--he got to me long before Borges. Gogol's Dead
Souls is a killer, but I haven't read anything else
by him
Terry
Brooks: I think that most writers write because of
what they've read. I'm no exception. A lot of other writers
inspire me. I was inspired to write Shannara in
the tradition of the great European adventure stories,
that and Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. I also listen
to classical music and pop rock. I get a lot of ideas
while listening to music. I don't like rap. My son listens
to techno. I listened to it once and thought I was going
to go insane.
Larry
Brown: Yes, Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver and
Charles Bukowski
Sandra
Brown: The authors who influenced me are: Tennessee
Williams, Taylor Caldwell, and Evelyn Anthony.
Susan
Brownmiller: Oh, of course Virginia Woolf --- she
was very brave, very very brave. Because of the work I've
done, such as for Rape, I used Durkheim's Suicide
as a model. This guy chose a subject that had a history
and brought it to popular attention. For this book I kept
thinking narrative, narrative, narrative. I have to tell
stories. So I got to thinking of John Reed and Ten
Days That Shook the World and James Michener. I loved
the idea that James Michener might be perched on my shoulder
while I was writing because the guy had great narrative
skills. It's an eclectic assortment of people I've turned
to in the course of my work. Nobody would expect that.
Edna
Buchanan: As I child, I loved to read Sherlock Holmes
and Albert Payson Terhune who wrote books about animals.
I am an animal lover anyway. I love short stories too.
James
Lee Burke: William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora
Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Hemingway, James T. Farrell,
Tennessee Williams, and the Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley
Hopkins.
Julia
Cameron: As far as mysteries go, I remain a Raymond
Chandler lover.
Ana
Castillo: When I started to write, there were no US
Latina writers publishing yet. It was a terrible void
for a young writer who wanted --- needed --- to see someone
similar to herself reflected in literature. It was mostly
men who were coming out in this country available in English
translations. I was deeply impacted by a book entitle
The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters. Many
years later, I was "inspired" by the Brazilian
writer, Clarice Lispector, as I worked on the short story
collection, Loverboys. These two examples "inspired,"
"taught," and "influenced" my writing.
I learned to write from reading a lot, writing a lot,
and taking what I admire from writers I admire, consciously
and unconsciously. They are usually writers who have come
before me.
Bebe
MCamp: Toni Morrison was a big influence as a young
adult. As a child, I read a lot of classics: the Bronte
sisters, Twain, Dickens. I continue to read the classics
even now. I read a lot of fairy tales as well.
Michael
Connelly: Thomas Harris, James Lee Burke, Lawrence
Block --- to name just a few.
Pat
Conroy: No question. Thomas Wolfe. Look Homeward
Angel. An English teacher gave me that when I was
l5, and it changed my life.
Catherine
Coulter: If you are interested in writing girls' books,
join the Romance Writers of America. They should have
a local chapter and you'll meet published and unpublished
authors. They will tell you everything. They have a website.
Clive
Cussler: I would say the one who influenced me the
most, because I leaned on his writing style with my first
two books, was Alistair McLean. Hemingway once said that
he leaned heavily on Dostoevsky and Tolstoy at first,
then, after a book or two he came into his own style.
Alice
Elliot Dark: I wanted to be a writer when I was little,
so I started with Paddington. That was probably
my first huge influence. I read that book and immediately
wrote my own bear book. After that there were so many
things. The books that really influenced me were not the
great works of fiction. I read A Stone for Danny Fisher
by Harold Robbins when I was about 13 and all of a sudden
I understood point of view and how it changes something
--- just from reading that book. That really excited me.
Fitzgerald was a huge influence on me, but much later
in my life. When I was a teenager and I was writing a
lot, I was reading poetry, and it was mainly romantic
poetry --- Shelley, Byron, Keats, Rimbaud, and Mallarme...
the really sensitive, nutty guys. It was my version of
teeny-bopperness. The Beatles and Percy Shelley...the
same thing a century earlier.
Chitra
Banerjee Divakaruni: I have been influenced by many
ethnic women writers who are concerned about many of the
same issues as I am --- culture, community, the place
women carve out for themselves in a patriarchal environment.
Some of them are: Sandra Cisneros, Louise Erdrich, Maxine
Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Bharati Mukherjee, Cristina Garcia
and Anita Desai.
Rita
Dove: I wonder why people always want to know that.
My favorite poets may not be your bread and butter. Also,
I have more favorite poems than favorite poets...Langston
Hughes: A Theme for English B... Cavafy's Marc
Anthony Leaving Alexandra... I don't know why, but
those poems change my life every time I read them. My
early influences were Shakespeare, Edna St. Vincent Millay,
Heine... and Mother Goose. For each stage of life, there
are groups of poets --- the list is too long!
Andre
Dubus III: Well, as I said, I didn't want to be a
writer while I was growing up. But when I was 17, the
first book that completely floored me was The Grapes
of Wrath. When I finished that I couldn't speak afterwards,
I was so blown away. It had everything --- psychology,
religion, art, economics. And I've also always listened
to great music. I like some of your more literary songwriters
--- Bob Dylan in my teens; Kris Kristofferson, Bruce Springsteen
in my twenties. He wrote about neighborhoods I've lived
in. I've done quite a bit of acting, too, so I've also
been inspired by good plays. Not movies so much. I think
writers today are too influenced by the visual. They should
read more widely, discover the range and depth that prose
has. Prose is superiorly suited to telling the human story.
Though I think there is a resurgence of great fiction
these days. There are some truly gifted American writers.
Elizabeth
Evans: If I were to name all of the terrific contemporary
writers I read and admire this list would be ridiculously
long, and I'd still be certain to forget somebody wonderful.
I do continue to read and reread George Eliot, Dickens,
Flaubert and Tolstoy. They are my old standbys. And Nabokov,
of course.
Anne
Fadiman: The same short list answers both questions:
Charles Lamb, Virginia Woolf (particularly the essays),
John McPhee, Susan Sheehan, John Updike, and E. B. White.
Ellen
Gilchrist: Oddly enough my work has been influenced
by poets. I was thinking the other day, when I went off
to college every book that I took with me was a book of
poetry. My favorites are T.S. Elliot and Edna St. Vincent
Millay who was influenced so strongly by Shakespeare.
My favorite poet and writer is William Shakespeare.
John
Grisham: I still read Steinbeck, Dickens and Twain.
I'm not sure anyone has influenced my style, but if I
could emulate anyone it would be Steinbeck.
David
Guterson: The most influential books in my life were
basic reference books like atlases, encyclopedias, and
dictionaries. When I was a child, I spent a lot of time
with those books. I literally read the encyclopedia. I
didn't read it from A to Z, but I read the articles in
it and I read a lot of them and over a long period of
time. In the same way that kids today turn on the television
and wander around, when I was young I wandered around
in encyclopedias and atlases. That meant that I knew a
little about a lot of things, but it also broadened my
interests and gave me some intimation of just how expansive
the world is and how many things there are to know more
about. That perspective has stayed with me. I'm glad my
parents had on hand a set of reference books that gave
me that opportunity. I'm confident about going into just
about any subject. There's nothing out there that you
can't tackle and learn about if you want to.
Barbara
Hambly: There's an infinite list. Georgette Heyer,
Mary Renault, Manning Coles, John Le Carre, A. Conan Doyle,
Rudyard Kipling, Dorothy Sayers, Josephine Tey, JRR Tolkien,
L. Frank Baum, Anne Rice, Tony Hillerman, Sarah Caudwell,
Marge Piercy.
Jonathan
Harr: There are many. In nonfiction, all of John McPhee,
Norman Mailer (for The Executioner's Song) Truman
Capote (for In Cold Blood); Edmund Wilson (for
To The Finland Station and American Earthquake);
John Hersey (for Hiroshima); my friend Tracy Kidder.
The one thing all of them combine is elegant writing and
good reporting.
E.
Lynn Harris: I wouldn't say that they were characters.
When I was little, I used to read a lot of books. Lois
Lensky, I used to love her books. I remember reading James
Baldwin, Maya Angelou. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
just changed my life --- not because of what she'd written
or gone through but because she was from Arkansas and
she had managed to get out. Just the fact that this woman
had written this wonderful book and was from Arkansas
--- it just totally changed my life. Like a lot of people,
I didn't act immediately on what I'd gotten from the book.
Colin
Harrison: All the usual people you read in school
and college, plus John O'Hara's early novels, the Paris
Review interview series, William Styron's Sophie's
Choice the theory books by John Gardner, Updike's
Rabbit series, Batman comic books, my wife's books, a
few movies, the songs of Tom Waits, the "Pulp Fiction"
soundtrack --- many things have inspired me.
Kathryn
Harrison: I just read Disgrace by Coetzee,
and admired it greatly. I like Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood,
Flannery O'Connor. Faulkner. Madame Bovary is my
favorite novel. Not exactly contemporary, but I can't
think of a book that comes close to its achievement. I
don't know what influences me --- everything and nothing.
Mo
Hayder: Literary? The Japanese authors, who have such
elegance in their writing, like a small flower arrangement
on every page. Otherwise? My father, the scientist, who
can't even make himself a piece of toast without wanting
to take the toaster apart to see how it works.
Carl
Hiassen: I was influenced -- overwhelmed is a better
word -- by writers like Joseph Heller and J.D. Salinger.
Craig
Holden: Many, many, many. I don't read many thrillers
or mysteries at all anymore. They mostly bore me. But
some of the great character driven thrillers or crime
novels that I admire are: Gorky Park by Martin
Cruz Smith; Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow; The
Black Dahlia by James Ellroy; Deliverance by
James Dickey; The Little Drummer Girl by John Le
Carre; The Last Good Kiss by Jim Crumley; Red
Dragon and Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris;
Clockers by Richard Price; Billy Bathgate
by E.L. Doctorow. Some of the more recent thrillers I
admire are The Simple Plan by Scott Smith; The
Secret History by Donna Tartt; Smilla's Sense of
Snow by Peter Hoeg.
Ha
Jin: Lu Xun was the author most Chinese in mainland
China read and I couldn't avoid being influenced by him.
Gradually I figured out that he had been influenced by
the Russian authors, especially Gogol. So I went to the
Russians directly. As for inspiration, there are many,
besides the great Russians, V.S. Naipaul, Alice Munro,
Saul Bellow, Adrienne Rich, Susako Endo.
Diane
Johnson: I was always influenced by the 19th Century
English novel --- Austen and Trollope etc. --- because
those were the ones we mainly had at home and at school.
Where people read Catcher in the Rye, etc. now,
we read Silas Marner and Tom Jones. The
first living novelist I met, Alison Lurie, still a close
friend, influenced me in many ways too. Then too, I revered
certain writers like Kafka and Fitzgerald without being
able to explain why.
Kaylie
Jones: There are too many to name. Style-wise, I've
tried to avoid imitating or echoing my favorite writers.
I love individual works by writers rather than the whole
body of work of a writer. I adore Fitzgerald's The
Great Gatsby, and Faulkner's The Sound and The
Fury. Content-wise, I believe I was first influenced
by the 19th Century Russian writers I first read in college
--- Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenyev --- and Dostoievsky, too,
of course, but less so. Tolstoy offered me an understanding
of death not long after my father's death that helped
me cope and grow and develop a life philosophy that truly
kept me going through some very dark times. I later read
Katherine Ann Porter's short novel, Pale Horse,Pale
Rider, and that had a huge effect on me as a writer.
Faye
Kellerman: Some of my favorite writers are Jonathan
Kellerman, Joseph Wambaugh, Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald,
John D. MacDonald, Sue Grafton, Stephen King, Dean Koontz
. . . those are the twentieth century people. Let's not
forget Dumas, and Hugo and the Bronte sisters. I'm a sucker
for Goth novels. There's nothing so appealing as a girl
all alone in a scary house with a brooding storm over
the horizon.
Jonathan
Kellerman: The other hard-boiled California writers
--- Chandler, Hammet, Jonathan Latimer, Horace McCoy,
etc., --- as well as Joseph Wambaugh, E.A. Poe, A.C. Doyle,
Dumas, Verne, HG Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, James
T. Farrell. And many others. Anyone with style, grace,
and a strong sense of story.
Matthew
Kneale: I particularly value writers who can say something
serious using humor. Among my favorites are Dickens, Ian
McEwan, Evelyn Waugh, Timothy Mo, John Updike, VS Naipaul.
It's always a little hard to say who I've been inspired
by, but I guess more than any would be JG Farrell, who
wrote three outstanding novels about the British Empire
in the 1970s, all funny, unexpected and fiercely alive,
as well as being very true to the periods they were set
in. And perhaps Joseph Conrad and also CS Forrester ---
who I read as a child --- gave me an interest in the sea.
Ira Levin: I really don't know where the ideas
come from. . . a lot of them come from things I've read,
mostly nonfiction. Like The Boys from Brazil was
triggered by an article in the New York Times magazine
about cloning. I wrote very slowly and figured by the
time I have something ready to go, six other writers would
have something out on cloning. So I put the article away
and took it out 6 years later and started writing. Stepford
Wives came from reading Alvin Toffler's Future
Shock. Generally, I started writing because I grew
up in a home where a lot of books were read, especially
mysteries. My mother was a mystery fan. I started writing.
It seemed like a good idea.
Alan
Lightman: I could easily list five or ten: Dostoyevski,
James Joyce, Annie Proulx, Michael Olijink, Marquez, Badakov.
Elinor
Lipman: Carol Shields, Stephen McCauley, Amy Bloom,
Joanna Trollope, Christopher Tilghman, Alice McDermott,
J.D. Salinger, Anita Shreve, Wally Lamb, Alice Munro,
Josephine Humphreys, Scott Spencer, to name a few favorites.
I always recommend (i.e., if you like me you'll like them):
Karl Ackerman, Christina Bartolomeo, Mameve Medwed and
Caroline Preston. Favorite nonfiction: Tracy Kidder and
Stacy Schiff (biography). As for influence, I was raised
on Ring Lardner, and I worshipped Max Shulman. I'm sure,
too, that Laurie Colwin's early work gave me license to
write about love instead of war.
Jeff
Long: Besides H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, the usual
suspects: Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov,
Melville, Conrad, and that other guy, Homer.
Ed
McBain: James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald,
John O'Hara, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James
M. Cain, T.H. White.
Anne
McCaffrey: Rudyard Kipling and Austin Tappen Wright
(who wrote Islandia).
Anchee
Min: I have to give you a list of Chinese names. Most
of these authors are unknown to the western public, i.e.
Tang Xian-zu of 1200. I read him when I was 14 in a dark
storage where Red Guards placed their rooted goods.
Susan Minot: Out of those (many) writers I admire,
some might be seen as being more influential on my work:
Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Hemingway, Proust,
Emily Dickinson (this for Evening), Edith Wharton,
Henry James, Evan Connell, Jane Austen, Isak Dineson,
Evelyn Waugh (Folly), Raymond Carver, Colette,
Katherine Mansfield, (Lust) and Henry Green, Chekhov,
J.D. Salinger (plus those above for Monkeys. But
then there are all the others who go into the pot of admiration:
Nabokov, Tolstoy, Thomas Hardy, Kafka, DH Lawrence, Raymond
Chandler, Dostoevsky, Graham Green, Walker Percy, Dawn
Powell, WH Auden, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sigmund Freud,
Nancy Lemann, Milan Kundera, John O'Hara, Beckett ---
I'll stop there, though it doesn't stop there.
David
Mitchell: Too many to list! Let me think of ten. Italo
Calvino, Haruki Murakami, John Banville, Nabokov, George
Eliot, Muriel Spark, John Cheever, Isaac Asimov (I confess),
and I'm going through a strong Philip Larkin phase right
now. Not many 'genre writers' there, are there? I guess
I might be a book cover snob --- if it's gold or embossed,
I tend to move to another shelf. I forgot Ursula K. Le
Guin --- I love her mature work.
Reggie
Nadelson: Well, I was an English major so I had all
the usual tastes --- Jane Eyre, I adore Trollope, Jane
Austen, Shakespeare. Modern authors I love include John
Updike, who I think is America's great living novelist.
Graham Greene was a hero; also, Evelyn Waugh. As far as
mystery and suspense authors I started with the Brits,
and I still think Josephine Tey and Dorothy Sayers are
wonderful; also, early PD James. Ross McDonald is brilliant
(and Chandler, of course). Of more contemporary writers,
I really like Walter Mosley a lot. And James Lee Burke.
I loved Gorky Park. I'm not sure I can say who
influenced me. I don't really think of it like that, but
I suppose the writers you love get under your skin. I
suppose, though, if I were going to be influenced; I would
like it to be by John Le Carre because he transcends genre.
John
J. Nance: Great question. I was very privileged to
know James Michener, and to a certain (and important)
extent, to be mentored by him at a few critical points
in my career. Jim, you see, literally changed my life
and perception of life with Hawaii and Centennial.
I attended the University of Hawaii for one year because
of his book and the sweeping, magnificent scope with which
he brought the islands' past and present to life. While
I transferred back to my more native Southern Methodist
University in Dallas after my freshman year, the University
of Hawaii --- and that pivotal coming-of-age year on Oahu
--- were major formative factors in how I view the world
(I learned to fly out there, for instance, got my first
major job as a broadcaster, founded a coffee house, learned
to surf, joined a folk group, and we won't get into the
dating thing. My mother might read this). Years later,
having always wanted to be a writer someday, Jim Michener's
Centennial (a sweeping multigenerational work set
in northeast Colorado) opened my eyes to an entirely new
reality: the hidden story behind the mundane facade. Here
was an area of real estate I had long regarded as flat
and uninteresting (in family trips to and from Estes Park,
Colorado), but suddenly it burst to life, vibrant with
human history, simply because of the way he wrote about
it. Many years later as an airline pilot for Alaska, and
having (at that time) published two best selling nonfiction
books (Splash of Colors and Blind Trust),
I was lucky enough to spend a day with him in Sitka, Alaska,
where he was working on his novel about the 49th state.
Of the many pearls of wisdom I gathered that day, the
most important concerned Centennial. "I have
always taken pride, " Jim said, "...in taking
the ordinary and making it extraordinary on paper."
And he did just that. Not all his books were as stellar,
but he was in a class by himself, and I still recommend
to wannabe writers that they study his unparalleled ability
to compress a story, as well as his economical use of
the language. There are others, of course, who I read
and enjoy and learn from. The classics include likes and
dislikes (love Fitzgerald, despise Conrad, still don't
understand Hemingway). But among current writers, my favorite
for just the sheer joy of his linguistic indulgence is
Pat Conroy. Despite the fact that Pat keeps trying to
kill his father off in each book, the lyricism of his
writing is a perennial joy, and I look forward to being
able to tell him that in person someday (our paths have
yet to cross).
Chuck
Palahniuk: Amy Hemple, Mark Richard, Dennis Johnson,
Thom Jones, Bret Ellis.
James
Patterson: Jean Genet, John Rechy, Samuel Beckett,
the regular crowd for any bestselling thriller writer.
Joe
Queenan: Moliere, Jonathan Swift, Marcel Ayme, Samuel
Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, Aristophanes, Rabelais,
Cervantes, Oscar Wilde, Flann O'Brien, Mark Twain, H.L.
Mencken, Woody Allen, Tom Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, Graham
Greene, William Shakespeare.
Ian
Rankin: Writers I love: Ellroy, Larry Block, Robert
Louis Steven
Anne
Rice: Charles Dickens, Vladimir Nabokov, Donna Tartt,
Gita Mehta, Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov,
and Tolstoy in Anna Karenina; Edgar Allan Poe;
Carson McCullers, Ernest Hemingway, and three British
horror writers: Sheridan La Fanu, a brilliant writer;
Algenon Blackwood, a marvelous teller of tales of beautiful
style; and M. R. James who in his quaint ghost stories
has scared me dreadfully with wicked results. (The wicked
results being that I wrote very scary stuff in my novels.)
Julie
Salamon: Boy, that's a tough one without sounding
incredibly pretentious. I would say the writers that have
most influenced me are Charlotte Bronte, Edith Wharton,
E.B. White, Primo Levi. These are the first ones to come
to mind.
Anne
River Siddons: I grew up with Henry James and Edith
Wharton. I have always loved the sense of society in their
books, and the wonderful worlds they created.
Hal
Sirowitz: I like Sharon Olds a lot. She wrote about
her parents who gave her a tough time. I like Masters
who wrote about dead people speaking from the cemetery,
since there's a lot about death in my poetry.
Jane
Smiley: Shakespeare influenced me, but that would
be naturally true of every writer in English. I'm sure
Virginia Woolf, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens were
also big influences.
Robert
Louis Stevenson III: I read history and the classics,
not because I'm a snob, but because I've always loved
these books. War and Peace, Lord Jim, Heart
of Darkness, The Iliad: these books are my
favorite. I also like McGuane, Harrison, Styron, LeCarre,
and so many others. The list is endless.
Elizabeth
Strout: The journals of John Cheever had a great impact
on me. Also, Tolstoy, Oscar Hijuelos, F.Scott Fitzgerald,
Anita Brookner, William Trevor, Alice Munro. I love many,
many writers.
Amy
Tan: I love Jamaica Kincard, Louise Erdrich, Eudora
Welty, Kaye Gibbons, Tobias Wolf, Isabel Allende, Nabokov,
the Brontes, so many writers, too little time... alas.
I am inspired by any voice that is strong and unique.
It's rather like meeting an interesting person at a party.
They have a voice that you know contains a thousand and
one stories. And these stories can be anyone's life and
told in an ordinary way. But with a writer with a truly
remarkable voice, you see their life unfold before you.
You are experiencing that life, those emotions, the hopes
and losses.
Leon
Uris: John Steinbeck was the most important writer
in my life. Of Mice and Men and Tortilla Flat
had powerful influences. Richard Wright and Michael Gold,
who wrote Jews Without Money, were also very important.
Alan
Watt: Russell Banks for wisdom, Pynchon for language,
and Hemingway for everything. Charles Bukowski has my
favorite line about writing. This lady moves in with him
and says, "Will I disturb your writing if I vacuum?"
He says, "Nothing can disturb my writing, it's a
disease." I thought that was funny.
Donald
E. Westlake: Lord, what authors have not influenced
my work? Some have shown me errors I might have made if
they hadn't made them first, for which I'm so grateful
I won't mention their names. Others have wowed me with
specifics: Theodore Sturgeon, Peter Rabe, Anthony Powell,
many more. When I was 14 or 15 I read Hammett's The
Thin Man (the first Hammett I'd read), and it was
a defining moment. It was a sad, lonely, lost book, that
pretended to be cheerful and aware and full of good fellowship,
and I hadn't known you could do that. Seem to be telling
this, but really telling that. Three-dimensional writing,
like three-dimensional chess. Nabokov was the other master
of that. You could learn something from Nabokov on every
page he ever wrote.
Simone
Zelitch: As a teenager, I read a lot of Vonnegut. Although my
writing bears little resemblance to his these days, his novels,
particularly Slaughterhouse Five, gave me a sense that fiction
could do anything it wanted to do. Later, I discovered Ursula LeGuin.
As a stylist, she was far more transparent than Vonnegut, and she
used science and anthropology as a metaphor for interpersonal concerns,
much the way I try to use history. At some point in college, I discovered
the Russians, and Tolstoy in particular became my standard. In short,
I like a big canvas, a lot of characters, and room enough for those
characters to transform. While I was writing Louisa, a friend
pulled me through Proust, and in some subtle ways it had its impact
on the voice of the novel, a kind of all-knowing and self-deluding
voice that owes something to Marcel's. I do read contemporary fiction
as well and notice that the stuff I like best tends to be ambitious
and, not so surprisingly, conscious of history.
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