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Who Are Your (Literary) Ancestors?
I walk down my street at night and listen. Mostly, since the pandemic, what I’ve heard is silence, a dog barking, perhaps a door slamming. Before that (and returning, no doubt, once it’s over) there was too much to hear: parties and laughter, raucous shouts and revving engines. But sometimes, just once in a while, I hear the echo of what I’ve been listening for. On my same street, once upon several different times, lived and worked literary luminaries: John Dos Passos and Mary Heaton Vorse, Eugene O’Neill and Susan Glaspell, Norman Mailer and Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Reed and Louise Bryant.
I’ve always listened for their voices. I’ve always wanted their inspiration. Just as others seek out their genealogies, trying to find the voices of their ancestors, their great-great-grandfathers and errant second cousins, I mine the literature, looking at ways these different voices have influenced me. They’re not my blood ancestors, but they’re my ancestors all the same.
I think that looking to (and for) our literary ancestors is an exercise that can benefit any writer. We’ve all been collecting voices along the way, haven’t we? There are the classics, the authors we studied in school — whether we…
