Books/Authors Which Have Influenced My Writing

A Prayer for Owen Meany

By John Irving

A story of friendship through adversity, faith and destiny, and the search for God.

The Sun Also Rises

By Ernest Hemingway

A group of expatriates travel from Paris to the Pamplona bullfights.

The Great Gatsby

By Francis Scott Fitzgerald

Tells the tragic love story of Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

By Ernest Hemingway

A book about love and courage and decency and glory. It is written with a wisdom that washes the mind and cools it. With an understanding that rips the heart with compassion.

The Cider House Rules

By John Irving

Wilbur Larch, a physician, philosopher, obstetrician, and abortionist at St. Cloud's orphanage struggles through his relationship with his apprentice and surrogate son, Homer Wells.

The unforgettable novel of a childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of conscience that rocked it, To Kill A Mockingbird became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was later made into an Academy Award-winning film, also a classic. Compassionate, dramatic, and deeply moving, To Kill A Mockingbird takes readers to the roots of human behavior - to innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, humor and pathos. Now with over 18 million copies in print and translated into forty languages, this regional story by a young Alabama woman claims universal appeal. Harper Lee always considered her book to be a simple love story. Today it is regarded as a masterpiece of American literature.

Great Expectations

By Charles Dickens

Guilt and desire, money and the nature of capitalism are pervasive themes in Dickens's magnificent novel, Great Expectations.'Pip's expectation, before his expectations, is that he will be shown to have already committed a crime', writes David Trotter in his Introduction to this new edition. The orphan Pip's terrifying encounter with an escaped convict on the Kent marshes, and his mysterious summons to the house of Miss Havisham and her cold, beautiful ward Estella, form the prelude to his 'great expectations'. How Pip comes into a fortune, what he does with it, and what he discovers through his secret benefactor are the ingredients of his struggle for moral redemption.

Jane Eyre

By Charlotte Brontë

An orphan girl who accepts employment as a governess finds herself involved in a family secret and in love with her employer.

The Catcher in the Rye

By J.D. Salinger

The "brilliant, funny, meaningful novel" (The New Yorker) that established J. D. Salinger as a leading voice in American literature--and that has instilled in millions of readers around the world a lifelong love of books. "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth." The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caufield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days.

Books/Authors Which Have Influenced My Writing

A Prayer for Owen Meany

None

The Sun Also Rises

The Great Gatsby

None

None

None

None

For Whom the Bell Tolls

The Cider House Rules

To Kill a Mockingbird

Great Expectations

Jane Eyre

The Catcher in the Rye