

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 . back to top