For The Love of Books
Ronald B. Shwartz, sent a message to 115 authors with the prompt: "Identify those 3-6 books that have in some way influenced or affected you most deeply, spoken to you the loudest, and explain why—in personal terms. All books are fair game." Many greats responded, among them: Kurt Vonnegut, John Hawkes, John Irving, Susanna Kaysen, Caroline Knapp, Elmore Leonard, Norman Mailer, Frank McCourt, Arthur Miller, Joyce Carol Oates, Mario Puzo, Neil Simon, Oliver Stone, John Updike.
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Ulysses
James Joyce · 1920 · 39 lists
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In Search of Lost Time
Marcel Proust · 1913 · 29 lists
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The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1880 · 22 lists
- 5
Moby-Dick
Herman Melville · 1851 · 34 lists
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War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy · 1869 · 29 lists
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The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger · 1951 · 32 lists
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First Folio
William Shakespeare · 1953 · 0 lists
- 9
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy · 1876 · 24 lists
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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain · 1885 · 25 lists
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Look Homeward, Angel
Thomas Wolfe · 1929 · 8 lists
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Great Expectations
Charles Dickens · 1861 · 19 lists
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Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert · 1856 · 26 lists
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Paradise Lost
John Milton · 1667 · 8 lists
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Collected Poems
Wallace Stevens · 1954 · 0 lists
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Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats
William Butler Yeats · 1994 · 0 lists
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Absalom, Absalom!
William Faulkner · 1936 · 16 lists
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The Good Soldier
Ford Madox Ford · 1915 · 12 lists
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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce · 1916 · 15 lists
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Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov · 1955 · 38 lists
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To The Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf · 1927 · 25 lists
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Journey to the End of the Night
Louis-Ferdinand Céline · 1932 · 12 lists
- 24
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra · 1615 · 27 lists
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David Copperfield
Charles Dickens · 1850 · 19 lists
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A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens · 1859 · 7 lists
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Poems of Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson · 1890 · 0 lists
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Collected Poems of T.S. Eliot
T.S. Eliot · 1936 · 0 lists
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Stories of Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway · 1930 · 0 lists
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The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis · 2020 · 3 lists
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Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman · 1855 · 13 lists
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Carry On, Jeeves
P. G. Wodehouse · 1925 · 0 lists
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Encyclopedia Britannica
Encyclopedia Britannica · 1910 · 0 lists
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One Thousand and One Nights
Unknown · 2018 · 0 lists
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Desert Solitaire
Edward Abbey · 1968 · 0 lists
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Poems of W. H. Auden
W. H. Auden · 1979 · 0 lists
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The Sot-Weed Factor
John Barth · 1960 · 0 lists
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The Works of Max Beerbohm
Max Beerbohm · 1896 · 0 lists
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The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow · 1953 · 11 lists
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Henderson the Rain King
Saul Bellow · 1958 · 4 lists
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Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford University Press · 2015 · 0 lists
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Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë · 1847 · 26 lists
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Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë · 1847 · 29 lists
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Tarzan of the Apes
Edgar Rice Burroughs · 1912 · 5 lists
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The Stranger
Albert Camus · 1942 · 23 lists
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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll · 1865 · 26 lists
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Death on Credit
Louis-Ferdinand Céline · 1936 · 0 lists
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The Worst Journey in the World
Apsley Cherry-Garrard · 1922 · 0 lists
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Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad · 1899 · 29 lists
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Lord Jim
Joseph Conrad · 1900 · 9 lists
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The Divine Comedy
Dante Alighieri · 1321 · 25 lists
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The Deptford Trilogy
Robertson Davies · 1600 · 0 lists
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The Hardy Boys
Franklin W. Dixon · 1988 · 0 lists
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Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1866 · 22 lists
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The Complete Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle · 1900 · 0 lists
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The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas · 1844 · 14 lists
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Middlemarch
George Eliot · 1871 · 26 lists
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Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison · 1952 · 29 lists
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The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1925 · 0 lists
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Howards End
E. M. Forster · 1910 · 11 lists
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A Passage to India
E. M. Forster · 1924 · 18 lists
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The Poems of Robert Frost
Robert Frost · 1991 · 0 lists
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The Forsyte Saga
John Galsworthy · 1898 · 5 lists
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez · 1967 · 33 lists
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The Tin Drum
Günter Grass · 1959 · 9 lists
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Catch-22
Joseph Heller · 1961 · 0 lists
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In Our Time
Ernest Hemingway · 1925 · 0 lists
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The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway · 1926 · 22 lists
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The Odyssey
Homer · -800 · 21 lists
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The Ambassadors
Henry James · 1903 · 8 lists
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The Portrait of a Lady
Henry James · 1881 · 13 lists
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The Principles of Psychology
William James · 1890 · 0 lists
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Andersonville
MacKinlay Kantor · 1879 · 3 lists
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Darkness at Noon
Arthur Koestler · 1948 · 0 lists
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The Progress of Love
Alice Munro · 1985 · 0 lists
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A Good Man Is Hard to Find
Flannery O'Connor · 1955 · 0 lists
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Tell Me a Riddle
Tillie Olsen · 1961 · 0 lists
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Little Disturbances
Grace Paley · 1959 · 0 lists
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The Moviegoer
Walker Percy · 1961 · 0 lists
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Three Lives
Gertrude Stein · 1909 · 3 lists
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Gulliver’s Travels
Jonathan Swift · 1726 · 17 lists
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Lad
Albert Payson Terhune · 1947 · 0 lists
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Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas · 2016 · 0 lists
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Walden
Henry David Thoreau · 1854 · 7 lists
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Omeros
Derek Walcott · 2004 · 0 lists
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A Handful of Dust
Evelyn Waugh · 1934 · 5 lists
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The Bonfire of the Vanities
Tom Wolfe · 1987 · 7 lists
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Duke of Deception
Geoffrey Wolff · 1979 · 0 lists
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Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf · 1925 · 20 lists
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Orlando
Virginia Woolf · 1928 · 11 lists