Authors on their literary idols

“My interest in McCarthy went beyond the page and into my sense of her as a person in the world -- a sense that I gleaned from biographies and from photos, which showed this extremely stylish woman with a facial expression that revealed wit, sophistication and fierceness, all of which I craved.”

Read more

“Baldwin was gay and black at a time when America wrestled with the black part and did not know what to do with the gay part. Yet he resisted being categorized as a ‘black writer’ or a ‘homosexual writer.’ He was an American writer and a quintessential one at that, unpacking uncomfortable truths and deconstructing myths, never settling for a simplistic, black-or-white point of view. Everything was gray. The personal was always political.”

Read more

“Ellison taught me that sometimes a book can disrupt the relationship you have to the world around you and force you to demand more, seek more, expect more, experience more that is essential and important to what truly matters.”

Read more

“The loners in her books appealed to me, the fragile and friendless women in worlds built to appear ordinary that always revealed a more sinister nature. ... Shirley Jackson felt like my first example of a real writer.”

Read more

“It wasn’t until one hot summer when I fell under the sway of the ribald, disreputable, restless prose of Chester Himes that I found my truest muse. I knew Hollywood made a pre-blaxploitation movie out of his ‘Cotton Comes to Harlem,’ but it wasn’t until I stumbled upon four of his series of books featuring detectives Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones in a bookstore that I found a true calling.

Read more