Writers who have helped shape my World View

When I was young--very early 20's--I was drawn to "counter-culture" icons like Tom Robbins and Richard Brautigan and a new book by either was, to me, an event to look forward to. After I started opening up as a young psychic-to-be, I was drawn to books, I guess fairly naturally, that were about young men "trying to figure it out"--Maugham's "The Razor's Edge" and Hesse's "Demian" and "Steppenwolf" being some of the most important and memorable to me.

Two writers now I read alot--but almost always their non-fiction rather than their novels--are Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, although I REALLY am looking forward to reading Mailer's latest novel about Hitler "The Castle in the Forrest".

As a playwright, I was drawn to the German Expressionists and Absurdists and was, for a time, really in to Samuel Beckett. Nikki Giovanni is very important in my life but as a creative writing teacher she was more of a second mother to me than anything else. The poet Mark Strand was once my "idol"--the stud poet and that is what he was--and he and I used to talk quite a bit and he is also then an important part of my past literary landscape.

I have an admiration for many of the 19th century German writers like Nietzche, Holderlin, and Goethe as well as many of the Middle European writers of the early 20th century, such as Thomas Mann, Hesse, Rilke, Doblin, Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig, et al.

I know, for myself, that these writers have been huge influences on me both sytlistically and in terms of the thematic elements of their work. I wrote about the occult novelist Gustav Meyrink and the whole pre-Nazi era as well as some of the late 18th Century sturm und drang vibe too is, I think, absolutely intoxicating.

Thomas Mann ("The Magic Mountain" and "Death in Venice") and Hermann Hesse ("Steppenwolf" and "Siddhartha") were both German writers who opposed the Nazis and both were Nobel Prize winners. Rainier Maria Rilke was a great German-Czech poet (and the name of my myspace page "The Lyre Among Shadows" is taken from a line in his "Sonnets to Orpheus" which goes something like this:

"Only one who has lifted the lyre among shadows may divining render the infinite praise").

Alfred Doblin, Stefan Zweig. and Joseph Roth were German writers of the early '20's and '30's. Doblin's most famous work was "Berlin Alexanderlatz" which was made into a movie/mini-series by the great German film maker Ranier Werner Fassbinder.

Zweig was a pacifist who fled the Nazis and who committed suicide with his wife in South America in the early 40's. He was famous then but almost forgotten now, same with Joesph Roth (another Jewish writer) who wrote "The Radetzky March" among others, and died in 1939 after fleeing Germany for France in 1933.

Even though I am a psychic (aren''t we all supposedly stupid) and a college drop-out, too, I have spent a LOT of time wandering through book stores and libraries and well eventually you see these books and you just somehow remember them and get to know them.

As Thomas Jefferson once said "I cannot live without books". And, sadly, I really can't.