Appointment Ranks Among His Top 10 Favs Illuminates Mailer's freshman year To Helen Morris, The Reader's Catalogue 627 Commercial Street, Provincetown, MA January 16, 1988 Dear Helen Morris, Appended is my list. With the exception of Huckleberry Finn, which I reread recently, the other nine books were devoured in my freshman year at Harvard, and gave me the desire, which has never gone completely away, to be a writer, an American writer. They're all selections from the mainstream of American novels, not a surprise on the list, which separates me, I suspect, from my colleagues. But it's an honest list, even if it doesn't bring a deserving writer out of obscurity. Freshman year at Harvard is luminous because of these books. Yours sincerely, Norman Mailer Ten Favorite American Novels U.S.A. John Dos Passos Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain Studs Lonigan James T. Farrell Look Homeward, Angel Thomas Wolfe The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway Appointment in Samarra John O'Hara The Postman Always Rings Twice James M. Cain Moby-Dick Herman Melville (Thanks to member Richard Rabicoff for submitting the above, gleaned from the current issue of The New York Review of Books). |
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