I am a writer living in Washington, DC. I was born way back in 1945. Ten years later, my life was significantly transformed when I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. If you have not read that book, you should do so.
My literary tastes are very old-fashioned. My favorite novelists when I was young were Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and William Faulkner, who, in my opinion, are still the big three in American letters. Henry James very often exasperates me with his fussiness, but at his best, as in “The Bostonians” and “The Jolly Corner”, it’s hard to argue that he doesn’t deserve to be called “great”.
The greatest novelists, in my opinion, are Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Proust. The greatest writer, for western civilization, at least, has to be Shakespeare.
My own fiction is heavily satirical or outright pastiche. For some reason, I am only “tragic” in my short stories, and not often there. Since I often aspire to wit, though I may not achieve it, I should list my favorite comic writers, who are, in chronological order, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, Mark Twain, P. G. Wodehouse, and James Thurber.
I don’t read any fiction these days. I have always liked old-fashioned narrative history, starting with Herodotus and Thucydides, who remain hard to beat. I think Thomas Macaulay is seriously undervalued, and I prefer him to Gibbon. There is a great deal of excellent “modern” history being produced, and I would particularly recommend Diarmaid MacCullough’s “Christianity The First Three Thousand Years”, Walter Schiedel’s “Escape from Rome”, and Fritz Bartel’s “The Triumph of Broken Promises.”
I have read quite a bit of the “classical” philosophers, and particularly admire Spinoza, Plato, Aristotle, Montaigne, Kant, Hobbes, Hume, Locke, and Santayana.
I have worked in Washington as a writer for many years, writing mostly about education. I maintain a blog, Literature R Us, which allows me to complain about a wide variety of things.
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