John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, Cannery Row, The Winter of Our Discontent, Sweet Thursday, Travels with Charley In Search of America, Of Mice and Men, Tortilla Flat) and Ernest Hemingway (For Whom The Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, The Old Man and the Sea), The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux.
Favorite Quotations:
“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, ‘Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing.” -From John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row” (1945): Preface, Paragraph One
“For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment.” -From John Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley In Search of America” (1962): Part Two, Paragraph Two
“No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod be washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.” -From John Donne’s “Devotions upon Emergent Occasions” (1623): Chapter XVII, Paragraph IV
“Wisdom enters not into the malicious heart, and knowledge without conscience is but the ruin of the soul.” -From François Rabelais’ “The Histories of Gargantua and Pentagruel” (1532) as translated by J.M. Cohen: Book Two, Chapter 8, Second to last Paragraph
