Authors

As I've told some of my friends I consistently share my work with, I've been reading a lot of John Updike lately. One of his essays in Due Considerations speaks of his literary influences, many of whom are obscure, but, regardless, have had their influence of one of the greatest writers of our time. Thus, I decided to write my own. This, I think, is still a work in progress.

I have, first and foremost, been influenced by non-fiction writing and writers. This fact is probably understood primarily through the idea that non-fiction is, while not always factual and concrete, real. As readers, we choose our non-fiction reading based on our interests, sports, politics, popular culture, etc. Subsequently, we’re given the unique passage into a place we were never in -the 1983 NBA Eastern Conference finals, the 2000 Republican National Convention – through someone else’s lens.

I was fortunate enough to grow up in an area where the sports took major precedence and the coverage of these teams was held to an incredibly high standard. The Boston Globe sports section still ranks as one of the best sports pages in the country. From the moment I could read, I would spread the agate page in front of me to see who won, who scored the most points, or what's going on tonight. Eventually, the fervor for opening the sports page turned away from statistics and toward the game story, where instead of just reading numbers, I could read and visualize what happened. Bob Ryan was always one of my favorite writers because he brought an element of history to his writing. He had been around the great Celtics teams and was able to put the current teams in the Boston area in a historical context that other writers could not.

In high school, I would publicly express my distain for reading, while reading every word of the classics we were asked to read like Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (which paled, in my own estimation, in comparison to Tom Sawyer, but would never express this aloud because the latter wasn't required reading) and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (..."So we beat on, boats against the current...").

The first non-fiction writer I came to admire - and attempt a miserably failing stylistic mirroring - was the late Hunter S. Thompson, who did not survive the shotgun blast to his own head in the early spring of 2005. Aside from some of the humor and craziness evoked in his writing, Thompson possessed the remarkable ability to chronicle his subjects individually as well as capture the larger picture with grand accuracy. He was the first writer I began to read consistently in high school solely for his aptitude for comedic storytelling, and eventually began to understand his prose and writing ability through studying his work as an undergraduate in Springfield.

Thompson, though not extensively studied in any academic realm, was a catalyst for the reading and eventual enjoyment of other writer's in the same generation. He led the way for discovering writers like Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and John Updike, the latter two became favorites upon classroom readings - and re-readings - of Didion's Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream and Updike's homage to Boston Red Sox slugger Ted Williams, Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu. These writers represent for me a generation of academics who redefined the term journalism, but kept most of the romantic and classic elements of prose alive. This is what drew me toward their work, and consciously veered me in the direction that I went.

These four writers possess the ability to show the tendencies and nuances of others based on what they saw. Even though their subjective opinions were not entirely transparent, they allowed the reader to make their own judgments. Paradoxically, their writing about someone else is autobiographical inasmuch as how they choose their stories, which angles they take, and the language used to report their stories. Enviably, each of these four writers that could very well be classified as non-fiction writers have dipped their toes in the waters of fiction, which is a natural avenue for superb storytellers.

In college, I was introduced to Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer and have read the book at least four different times since, once in its entirety on a six-hour cross country flight after finding my college copy in an old box. Krakauer's writing, reporting, and storytelling, in addition to his inclusion of autobiographical material lured me into reading his other books, and has catapulted him to the forefront of American authors. I was fortunate to familiarize myself - for better or worse - with a number of authors during my college years, including William Shakespeare (taught by the passionate and brilliant Dr. Dennis Gouws), where I learned how shameful it is the sonnets and comedies are not taught in high schools instead of the tragedies and H.D. Thoreau, the only author to whom I've ever attached the "it's not what he did, it's that he did it" mantra. We read John Hollinger, Sally Jenkins, Chinua Achebe, John McPhee, Jim Murray, Frank DeFord (His Johnny Unitas piece!!), and Truman Capote.

Since my undergraduate years, my reading has been completely dominated by the influence of American poetry. I've been reading W.H. Auden ("Time will tell you nothing but I told you so..."), Charles Simic, Walt Whitman, Charles Bukowski, E.E. Cummings, Robert Frost, and especially Ted Kooser. My popular culture reading comes solely from the cynical and hysterical Chuck Klosterman and the uproarious travel writing of Bill Bryson, both of whom provide a light breeze. I'm sure there is someone I'm forgetting, as these literary influences have encouraged stylistic revision, ideas, and inspiration for what I’ve got so far to constitute my life’s work.