Fifteen authors

[drwex]

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 15 you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Let me know if you do this, because I'm interested in seeing what authors my friends choose....

Robert Heinlein
JRR Tolkein
Isaac Asimov
Richard Feynman
William Gibson
John Crowley
RA Wilson
Daniel Goleman
Stuart Brand
Richard Bach
Edmund Husserl
Jean-Paul Sartre
Edgar Allen Poe
Christopher Alexander
Lewis H. Lapham

I had a hard time separating people who influenced me by their writing from people who influenced me in other ways; I've been privileged to meet many of the authors I admire.

I am ashamed that there are no women on this list. The one who came closest was Megan Lindholm of all people. There are a number of women writers whose work I like but I was looking for influence, not like; thus, Neil Gaiman and Italo Calvino aren't on the list either. Those women who write and who have been the most influential on me have influenced me personally much more than through their writings. I also got exposed to non-Anglo writing much later in life; I imagine if I had the chance I would have been influenced by them as well. Note to self - taunt children with interesting non-English literature.

Stopping at 15 meant I cut off some names I could easily have listed. Stuart Card, Kevin Lynch, Heidegger and Kant, and poets such as e e cummings and T.S. Elliot all were cut more or less arbitrarily. Likewise for SF/F fantasy authors such as Ted Sturgeon and Fritz Leiber, not to mention Doyle, Verne, and Mary Shelley. That, I suppose, is the joy and pain of doing this under a time limit rather than reflecting on choices longer.

Comments

[catness.livejournal.com]

Huh. I didn't want to read your list first, so I did it Over There:

sheri s. tepper
iain m. banks
robert heinlein
ray bradbury
issac asimov
madeleine l'engle
j.r.r. tolkien
c. s. friedman
neil stephenson
robert anton wilson
frank herbert
andrew m. greeley
shirley jackson
richard bach
agatha christie

All fiction. :) I'm hopeless.

Nice list

[drwex]

Tepper, Banks, Christie, and Bradbury were all on the "like but not influence" list for me.

*headdesk* Neil Stephenson. That should've been obvious.

Greeley and Jackson are the unknowns for me in that list.

Re: Nice list

[catness.livejournal.com]

I can still be influenced, even as an adult. :)

Jackson wrote some creepy shit that children shouldn't read. Unfortunately, nobody ever noticed what I read when I was a kid.

Father Andrew M. Greeley wrote two sci fi books and the rest of his stuff is Catholic romance novels. :) Through his influence (and that of his favorite protagonist, Father Blackie Ryan), I developed my love of James Joyce and all things Irish which I'd missed getting directly from my biological maternal grandmother. ;)

Re: Nice list

[catness.livejournal.com]

I should be more accurate about Father Greeley. Everything of his I own is a Catholic romance (including the sci fi), but he also writes a ton of stuff that is *not* fiction. As I am not Catholic, I don't tend to read a lot about the state of modern Catholicism in other than novel format. ;)

[inahandbasket]

did mine on my LJ before I read yours.
I forgot Robert Heinlein, appalling. argh.

without looking at the bookshelves:

[papertigers.livejournal.com]

Agatha Christie
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Dorothy Sayers
Toni Morrison
Alice Walker
Nikki Giovanni
Audre Lorde
Bebe Moore Campbell
Octavia Butler
Stephen King
Isaac Asimov
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Richard Wright
Alex Haley
John Stuart Mill

[moechus.livejournal.com]

in alphabetical order (saves the trouble of ranking them):

Harold Bloom
Robert Browning
Joseph Campbell
Albert Camus
Ralph Waldo Emerson
John Kenneth Galbraith
John Stuart Mill
Henry Miller
Morse Peckham
Richard Rorty
Arthur Schopenhauer
William Shakespeare
George Bernard Shaw
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Algernon Charles Swinburne

also no women on my list sad to say; tops would probably be Susan Sontag whom I read a lot of in my twenties but have not read in 15-20 years and whose influence has pretty much faded completely

[inkedandkinked.livejournal.com]

Allen Ginsberg
Walt Whitman
Tom Robbins
Jack Kerouac
Kathleen Dunne
Haruki Murakami
Milan Kundera
Truman Capote
Langston Hughes
Hubert Selby Jr.
JRR Tolkien
Fyodor Dostoevsky
John Irving
Kurt Vonnegut
Bill Wilson/Bob Smith

Nice

[drwex]

I could probably have guessed the first three, but Haruki Murakami? I love Murakami's stuff but I didn't think of it as influential.

Re: Nice

[inkedandkinked.livejournal.com]

Influential as in it makes me stop and think. Anything that makes me stop and think I think of as influential. I think.

[inkedandkinked.livejournal.com]

Bukowski!

[c1.livejournal.com]

Douglas Adams
Richard Feynman

That's about it. I can't really say there were 15 authors who influenced me like those two: I regularly re-read their works to a degree that I just don't with other authors.

The only two other authors I'd add would be Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut, but I haven't read and re-read their stuff nearly to the same degree.

Is rereading necessary?

[drwex]

For example, I haven't reread Emotional Intelligence since that first time but dear lord did it knock my world-view akilter.

[roozle.livejournal.com]

List over on my LJ, thanks for posting this. I see we share a few on our lists, though I tried to not read other people's lists first ...

[pryder]

Robert Heinlein
Robert H. Rimmer
Isaac Asimov
William Gibson
Bruce Sterling
Sheri Tepper
Usrula K. LeGuin
Melissa Scott
Rudy Rucker
Francesca Lia Block
Lewis Carroll
Ayn Rand (for better or worse)
B.F. Skinner
Ernest Callenbach
Theodore Sturgeon

Honorable mentions:

Philip K. Dick
L. Neil Smith
Larry Niven/David Pournelle (works in collaboration, not alone)