Thanks Bleachededen....that is a keen insight. The advantage with the bard is that there have been so many interpretations of him and so many of them are so good that it can be encyclopedic in itself - in teaching how a text can be read again and again.

And the language yes. He introduced i-dont-remember-exactly-how many words. Some have since been warped and some still retain that usage. To a writer that is a wonderful class to start - I know.

Something like 8,000 words, supposedly. He was a precocious little scamp.

Wow...I wonder who's second. Joyce. Finnegan's wake! I know of a word in there that is a sentence long...stretches from one end to the other of the page. Now I wonder...what was the structural need to write like that?

James Salter. Same generation as Bellow and Roth and Malamud et al. Probably the greatest writer of the short elegant sentence. Few writers' style has had such an effect on me. When I read Light Years, which I do often, I have to take a breath between paragraphs. The second paragraph of the second chapter might be my favourite in all writing, and it's just a woman at a sink!

Thanks Neil. I will try and get my hands around that... a recommendation like that is worth checking out!

Am reading Dickens again.... Tale of Two Cities - A master story teller. My personal favourite is Great Expectations - Havisham, Estella!

John Steinbeck.

Non-Fiction:

John Locke (His collection of papers as a whole)

Thomas Paine (Common Sense, and I'm reading now "The Rights of Man")

Thomas Jefferson (his collection of papers, as well as, the Decleration of Independence)

James Madison (The federalist Papers)

John Adams (overall collection of his papers, and speeches)




Fiction

Miguel de Cervantes (Don Quixote)

Edgar Allen Poe (Absolutely EVERYTHING!)

Shakespeare (Henry V, his best play in my opinion)

I’m going to bypass the obvious masters and mention some more modern writers, since I am no longer stimulated to write by reading the classics or even the early 20th century literary innovators. That said, here is a short list of authors whose work not only gooses my muse, but often makes me angry, because I know I can never come close to their literary talents:

John Irving
Philip Roth
Tom Robbins
Paul Theroux
Nick Hornby
Christopher Moore
Douglas Adams
Christopher Buckley

Joseph Heller
Robert Pirsig
William Styron
Michael Gruber
Michael Connelly