Prejudices: A Selection by H.L. Mencken (Johns Hopkins, $25). I found this volume of essays by the now nearly forgotten master American journalist when I was a college freshman back in the Age of Aquarius. It just blew ... my … mind. Mencken’s skill at skewering the idiots of his day and age was my introduction to the kinetic power of artfully crafted language.
The Bushwhacked Piano by Thomas McGuane (Vintage, $14). McGuane was only a few years older than me in 1971 when this, his second novel, was published. The sniper-like precision of his style, and his gift for broad comedy, did for me in fiction what Mencken had shown me in the art of the essay.
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (Grove, $13). I performed onstage in Godot as a college sophomore. Beckett’s economy of language and lyricism affected me deeply. Having memorized the lines, they became woven into the fabric of my brain. Even today, when I write dialogue in my own novels, the rhythms and syntaxes of Beckett stay with me in the deep background.
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The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Scribner, $14). Having returned to re-read this chestnut roughly once every decade, I am no longer so impressed with Fitzgerald’s craft, or the clunky plot. But it certainly had a formative effect on my notions about American tragic decadence.
A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander et al. (Oxford, $65). This one was not about style, but rather informed me about a whole realm of subject matter that I would treat in several of my own books—the way we build things and why some things work better (and please us better) than other things. Alexander is one of the godfathers of the New Urbanist movement, which I have been a part of since the early 1990s.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (Bantam, $17). Wolfe was the master of journalistic polemical comedy in my time, coming of age professionally in the 1960s. His abilities with language and attitude toward his subject matter were different than Mencken’s, or McGuane’s, but his sheer virtuosity was astounding. This book made him, deservedly, a major figure in American literature.
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