I was asked recently by an esteemed college professor to list influences. Every professional writer has them.

Here is a list. Mind you, these are not necessarily my favorite writers, they are writers I was influenced by, which is, perhaps, a different criteria. I learned from these writers, in some cases from their writing style, and in some case from their POV as a writer.

Being influenced by is not the same as choosing to copy or emulate. On the contrary. When you are really influenced by a writer, it usually means you wouldn’t dare try to copy that writer. The thinking is, that has been done, and it can’t be done better…

Major influences:

1. Fyodor Dostoyevski – crime and society. The micro and the macro. To whom I owe everything.
2. Zora Neal Hurston – anthropological storytelling; diverse writing talent
3. Hunter S. Thompson – counterculture point of view; iconoclast
4. Norman Mailer – the audacity of the authorial voice; the big picture
5. Joan Didion – cool detachment and consummate research; the perfect sentence
6. Stephen Crane – exploring the social universe; the non-passive imagination
7. Albert Camus – applied existentialism
8. Chester Himes – the world within a world
9. Jean Genet – prison voices; society as a form of incarceration
10. James Baldwin – exposing the hypocrisy of white society and psychological horrors of the American project
11. William Kennedy – Irish American storytelling
12. Peter Maas – non-fiction crime narratives
13. Pauline Kael – verve in the prose, thinking and writing at the same time. Immediacy of the ideas.
14. James Joyce – self invention through writing
15. Edna Buchanan – a woman in a man’s world; reporting as an art form