David Wallechinsky - The Book of Lists

For the time of high tide at Dover on the 28th of August, the behaviour of tidal streams in the Kyle of Lochalsh, or the best way through the Portland Race.

Born in 1938, Joyce Carol Oates had her first book, the short story collection By the North Gate (1963), published when she was only 25 years old. At the age of 31, she won the American Book Award for her novel them (1969), becoming one of the youngest writers ever to receive the award. A prolific writer, her other novels include Black Water (1992), Zombie (1995) and Blonde (2000), as well as a series of suspense thrillers under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith, along with many works of short fiction, poetry and literary criticism. Oates teaches at Princeton University, and she and her husband Raymond Smith edit the acclaimed literary journal The Ontario Review . Her most recent works include a children’s book, Where Is Little Reynard ? (2003), and a short story collection, I Am No One You Know (2004).

• Emily Dickinson

• Walt Whitman

• Herman Melville

• Nathaniel Hawthorne

• Edgar Allan Poe

• Henry David Thoreau

• Henry James

• William Faulkner

• Ernest Hemingway

• William Carlos Williams

• Mark Twain

• Willa Cather

• Robert Frost

• Flannery O’Connor

Oates notes : This is a purely American list, suggesting, but not fully naming, the wide range and diversity of our native literature. As an American writer with a keen sense of history, I think of myself as having sprung from these nourishing sources, among others. And the list could go on and on…

Born on October 11, 1925, in New Orleans, Louisiana, Elmore ‘Dutch’ Leonard began writing novels while working as an advertising executive. His first successes were westerns, including The Bounty Hunters (1953) and Hombre (1961), before he turned to crime fiction with such bestsellers as Stick (1983), Glitz (1985) and Killshot (1989). Leonard’s novels have been the basis for many hit movies, including Barry Sonnenfeld’s Get Shorty (1995), Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997) and Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight (1998). His most recent works include his first children’s book, A Coyote’s in the House , and the thriller Mr Paradise , both published in 2004. Leonard makes his home outside Detroit, Michigan (the locale for many of his novels).

The first book that made me want to write, when I was still in grade school.

A book I studied almost daily when, in 1952, I began to write with a purpose.

The book that showed me the way I should be writing: not taking it so seriously.

The book that showed the difference between honest prose and show-off writing.

Twenty years ago George showed how to get into a scene fast.

An awfully good writer.

Especially moving at the time it was written. I like everything he did, from The Power and the Glory to Our Man in Havana .

Walker, the old pro.

Wonderful prose writer and great poet.

Collected short stories of Hemingway, Annie Proulx, Raymond Carver and Bobbie Ann Mason Have studied and I hope learned from all of them.

Born in 1914 in St Louis, Missouri, the rebellious William Seward Burroughs II grew up to be the disinherited heir of the Burroughs Adding Machine Corporation, a multimillion-dollar concern. During a drunken party game in Mexico, he accidentally killed his wife Joan as he aimed for a glass atop her head. Norman Mailer once termed Burroughs ‘the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius’. A former private investigator, reporter and exterminator, Burroughs earned a cult following with his novel Naked Lunch (1956), a surrealistic account of his experiences as a heroin addict. He wrote or collaborated on more than 35 books, including Queer and Nova Express . Towards the end of his life, he became a great lover of cats, writing The Cat Inside . He died in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1997 at the age of 83. He contributed this list to The Book of Lists in 1980.

• The Process by Brion Gysin

• The Satyricon by Petronius

• In Youth is Pleasure by Denton Welch

• Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles

• The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

• Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad

• Journey to the End of the Night by Louis Ferdinand Céline

• Querelle de Brest by Jean Genet

• The Unfortunate Traveller by Thomas Nashe

• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Process (1969) by Brion Gysin (1916–86) follows the bizarre adventures of a black American professor travelling across the Sahara Desert. English writer Denton Welch (1915–48) explored an English schoolboy’s sexual fears and fantasies in his second novel, In Youth is Pleasure (1945). Thomas Nashe (1567–1601), English pamphleteer and dramatist, anticipated the English adventure novel with The Unfortunate Traveller .

‘It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.’

‘Yes.’ I said. ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’

‘It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognised who it was.’

‘He is a gorilla.’

‘And however superciliously the highbrows carp, we the public in our heart of hearts all like a success story; so perhaps my ending is not so unsatisfactory after all.’

‘After all, tomorrow is another day.’

‘The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water…’

‘Then with a profound and deeply willed desire to believe, to be heard, as she had done every day since the murder of Carlo Rizzi, she said the necessary prayers for the soul of Michael Corleone.’

‘He loved Big Brother.’

‘And out again, upon the unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.’

‘On the way downtown I stopped at a bar and had a couple of double Scotches. They didn’t do me any good. All they did was make me think of Silver Wig, and I never saw her again.’