This is making the rounds on facebook. I was hard put to name the authors, and in some cases had to resort to Google (to find the author of Hawk, I’m Your Brother, for one). I couldn’t find one book, but in high school I read a non-fiction work that I could swear was titled “Not Every German was a Nazi,” but the book might have been a collection of essays, and that might have been the title of one of the essays, instead.

It’s an eclectic mix. I had to keep stopping myself from just listing favorite authors, and focus on those who influenced. There’s a difference, although I think we are, or can be, influenced by everything we read. The names on my list are authors who helped shape my thoughts, or who changed my thoughts, or whose words I can never get out of my head. Some are recent, and some go back to childhood

The official instructions: Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen authors (poets included) who’ve influenced you and that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.

Madeleine L’Engle
Robert Frost
Elizabeth Moon
R.A. Heinlein
Altsheler
Sally Roth
Byrd Baylor (think of his book every time I see a hawk in the sky)
Thomas Jefferson, et al (“When in the course of human events…”)
James Madison, et al (“We, the people, in order to form a more perfect union…”)
Celia Hayes (not sucking up – constantly remembering scenes from the Trilogy, and when my local PBS recently aired a show about the Germans coming to TX, I compared their data with what I remembered from Celia’s books, trusting her to be accurate, and them to have errors)
Bess Streeter Aldrich
Sara Stein
Ayn Rand
Dr Seuss
Shel Silverstein

Feel free to add yours in the comments.

Cross-posted to In My Own Little Corner, with a plug to Sgt Mom’s Amazon page