Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

by Sarah Stodola

African novelists like Chinua Achebe, Camara Laye, Bessie Head, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Aimé Césaire, all black writers who didn’t write about black culture and characters as reflected through the eyes of white men,

The Broom of the System, in which the plot becomes secondary to the twenty-four-year-old protagonist’s doubt in her own reality and belief that word choices are controlling her life. Wallace himself was twenty-four years old when the novel came out.

Last Exit to Brooklyn,

The Essential Lenny Bruce.

Joseph Conrad’s Victory,

V. S. Naipaul and Edmund Wilson.

William Saroyan,

G. A. Henty.

“Premature success gives one an almost mystical conception of destiny as opposed to will power.”

F scott fitzgerald quote

Stephen French Whitman’s Predestined and Charles G. Norris’s Salt (both little read today). Also around that time, The Notebooks of Samuel Butler