I began to mull over the nature of literary influence (mull is not a word indicating any kind of progress) when I was considering opening A Temple of Texts (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006) with a pamphlet that the International Writers’ Center and the Washington University Library published to celebrate the center’s birth in 1990. We arranged an exhibit of books and manuscript materials to accompany a list of 50 works that I was prepared to say had influenced my own work. Our aim was modest: merely to get our endeavor noticed on a busy campus. I dashed my mini-catalogue off in a few days as books called out their authors’ names to me, and I could have gone on I don’t know how much further. To my dismay, this list was immediately taken to be a roll call of “best books,” an activity I have no sympathy for, and certainly did not apply in this case, because not all great achievements are influential, or at least not on everybody. So Proust was not there, or Dante or Goethe or Sophocles, either. Awe often effaces every other effect. I more fully examine the concept of influence in my essay titled “Influence” in A Temple of Texts.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria

I am not the only reader who considers the Biographia the greatest work of literary criticism ever—even if Coleridge plagiarizes from the German idealists. I was lucky enough to study it under the gentle and wise guidance of Professor M. H. Abrams. The seminar was built on one directive: we would not only read the Biographia but would (by sharing and parceling out the labor) read every book it quotes from, mentions, or alludes to. The result was, in miniature, a university education. In researching my papers for the course, I also learned never to rely on secondary sources, but to trust only primary ones—a teaching that leads directly to this ideal: write so as to become primary.

Virginia Woolf’s Diaries

Pepys, everybody knows about. The lover of diaries, however, is familiar with them all, from André Gide’s famous work to Emanuel Carnevali’s more obscure entries. Actually, Gide kept a journal, while Cesare Pavese kept a diary, and the difference between a notebook of the sort Henry James tended, which was his workshop, the record of activities that makes up the diary, and the kind of “thought-clock” the journal resembles is an interesting one. Loneliness is the diary keeper’s lover. It is not narcissism that takes them to their desk every day. And who “keeps” whom, after all? The diary is demanding; it imposes its routine; it must be “chored” the way one must milk a cow; and it alters your attitude toward life, which is lived, finally, only in order that it may make its way to the private page. It is a pity Virginia’s could not have held her head above water a while longer.

Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (the Tietjens tetralogy)

Ford is, for me, a much-maligned, misunderstood, and heroic figure, the author of at least three great works: the Fifth Queen trilogy, the masterful epistemological novel The Good Soldier, and his Tietjens books. He was a wonderful memoirist, too, a great editor, and a true friend of literature, “a man mad,” as he said, “about writing.” About 15 years ago [now nearer 30], talking to a group of literature students at the University of Leeds, I asked them their opinion of Ford, and fewer than a handful had ever heard of him. No wonder the empire fell into decay. Largely through the efforts of Sondra Stang, Ford’s reputation has grown since then, but he is still not accorded the position he deserves. Some Do Not . . . , the first volume of the four, was written in 1924, the year of my birth. I still think it is the most beautiful love story in our language. It is a modern love story, with this astonishing difference: everything is treated with profound irony except the love itself.

James Joyce’s Ulysses

When I was in high school, I tried to smuggle a copy of this once-banned and still “dirty” book past the resolutely puritanical eyes of my hometown librarian. No luck. I’d have placed a curse upon her ovaries had I known where ovaries were. But everything works out for the best, as Dr. Pangloss says. I was then too young for Ulysses. When I did read it, I was not struck dumb, as I should have been. Rather, I was flung into a fit of imitation. Like Dante, like Milton, like Proust, like Faulkner, like García Márquez, Joyce is too towering to imitate. It would be years before I could escape his grasp, and I still avoid Ulysses when I am working. The only words that dare follow “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan . . .” are Joyce’s.

Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain