Over on Facebook, my favorite socialist revolutionary and friend Jason Chappell has started a little project, name your 15 favorite and most influential authors.
So, I'm sharing the challenge with you my vast readership (all 5 of you). Who are the 15 authors who shaped your outlook the most?
The Rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen authors (poets included) who've influenced you and that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.
Mine in no particular order:
Hannah Arendt
WH Auden
Thomas Mann
Rheinhold Niebuhr
Mark Twain
Paul Tillich
Martin Buber
Thucydides
TS Eliot
Walt Whitman
William Blake
Blaise Pascal
George Orwell
Albert Camus
Martin Luther King Jr.
Quite a spread. A lot of these folks I couldn't imagine in the same room together.
John Steinbeck
ReplyDeleteVirgil
Tom Robbins
Mohandas K. Gandhi
Joan Bondurant (Gandhian scholar---explains Gandhi better than MKG does!)
Homer
William Shakespeare
Thomas Merton
Dante Aligheri
WEB DuBois
CS Lewis
Robert Tapert & Co: the creators of Xena Warrior Princess (you know I'm TOTALLY serious)
Joss Whedon (creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Toni Morrison
John of the Cross
I think there's a fair amount of diversity there... ;-/
[I could have listed "Authors of the Bible", but felt that, as a Christian, that's sort of understood. Disclaimer: I bumped George Orwell, and Martin Luther King Jr, to add Virgil and Homer. I'm tempted to bump more contemporary authors for some of the Ancient Greek playwrights (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides)]
Someone else who I'd add to my list if I could, a very great political pragmatist, a great Italian patriot, and even a great political moralist (his morality was Classical, not Christian), Machiavelli.
ReplyDeleteI'd add that other great Renaissance neo-pagan, Leonardo da Vinci whose writings on painting are still very much worth reading.
Excellent respectable list, JCF, especially the Buffy and Xena entries.
ReplyDelete(Having now read your list, Doug)
ReplyDeleteShit! I left out Whitman! }-X
Thanks, Doug.
ReplyDeleteI'll also admit: I left in Toni Morrison, mainly because I wanted more women on my list (I liked Beloved . . . and INTEND to read her earlier works---God knows I own a few! My LibraryThing is here.) But I was still kind of posturing. Y'know, like a "gay liberal socialist" will do. ;-p
Hannah Arendt is the best man on my list.
ReplyDeleteLord knows we need more gay liberal socialists. Let's start the recruitment drive.
ReplyDeleteMy fifteen, in no order at all
ReplyDeleteCharles Williams
Dorothy L Sayers
DT Suzuki (the writer on Zen)
Chaung Tzu
"Dionysius the Areopagite" (whoever actually wrote the writings we know under that name)
Edmund Spenser
Aleister Crowley
whoever actually wrote the Zohar
the editors of the Talmud
Ayn Rand (sometimes positive, sometimes in a negative "this is what happens when you make a bad choice" sort of way)
Cao Xueqin (author of "Dream of the Red Chamber")
Henry Fielding
Chaim Grade
T. H. White
Tolkien
oops, sorry for the double post.
ReplyDeleteundoubled
ReplyDeletehi
ReplyDeletei follow yr blog via rss
my 15 are
antoine st exupery
albert camus
michel foucault
allen ginsberg
james baldwin
derek jarman
samuel beckett
walt whitman
federico garcia lorca
judith butler
dennis cooper
douglas coupland
raymond carver
james robert baker
patti smith
i'd probably include david wojnarowicz as one of the writers who has made the biggest impression on me, particularly because i got to look at his hand written diaries when i was in nyc last year... i just wish he'd written more...
Geoff
I'm a fan of Wojnarowicz myself. I might put him on my list.
ReplyDelete"Favorite authors" and "most influential authors" for me make up two different groups. But here is a list, put in chronologigal order of my encountering them, of those most-influential writers who made me think differently,and who gave me a jolt, even if ultimately I may not have gone with all of them.
ReplyDelete(I will go with JCF in keeping the bible out of it, as it has a rather different standing if one is raised with it.)
1. Charles Schultz
2. Mark Twain
3. Alexander Solzhenitsyn
4. Plato
5. Martin Heidegger
6. Raymond Chandler
7. Alexander Pope
8. John Henry Newman
9. Karl Marx
10. Homer
11. Thomas Aquinas
12. G.K. Chesteron
13. Confucius
14. Eric Hobsbawm
15. Miquel de Cervantes Saavedra
Though like most people I enjoy list-making, I think this sort of archeology of one's own thinking is rather important. Many of our differences can, I think, be traced to the history of how we encountered certain ideas. It doesn't resolve the differences, but it helps nevertheless.
(And I will add an apologia for leaving out Gandhi--I was absolutely smitten with him between Twain and Solzhenitsyn above, when in middle school. But it wasn't through his writing, or as a writer, but through a number of different accounts of his life).
Of course, this is also great pleasure for those of us who enjoy that very naughty pleasure of seeing what's on other people's bookshelves.
ReplyDeleteSimone Weil
ReplyDeleteHans Christian Andersen
CS Lewis
Mary Oliver
RS Thomas
JRR Tolkien
Baum
MacDonald
Kazantzakis
Annie Proulx
Willa Cather
Elizabeth Alexander
Upton Sinclair
that's all I can think of on a lazy Monday afternoon....
Oh yeah --Wittgenstein
ReplyDeleteKazantzakis and Wittgenstein, Margaret you little heretic. I'm impressed.
ReplyDeleteohhhh --I think it was Willa Cather that made me a heretic --and Kazantzakis that brought me back in to the fold... (heheheheh!)
ReplyDelete--And, my little dog, Mr. Witty --is named for Wittgenstein --a man of few words...
Who else {cringed} either at the authors you haven't read . . . or hadn't even heard of? :-0 (Eric Hobsbawm? Chaim Grade?)
ReplyDeleteI'm cringing at everyone's list. Y'all are much better read than I am.
ReplyDeleteNo need to cringe. I like to say, "Everybody is stupid about something." Re Joan Bondurant, Robert Tapert, and Joss Whedon, I would have been totally clueless without your explanations. (and as to "pop" figures, one I scould have put in for an "earliest" influence was Bob Kane--I was against the death penalty as a kid because of Batman. It stuck.)
ReplyDeleteHobsbawm is an elderly English Communist historian. He wrote a very good series of books on the modern world--The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire, The Age of Extremes. One needn't be a Communist (I'm obviously not) to appreciate an account of the last two hundred and fifty years that actually treats as important the lives of ordinary working people.