Next Big Book Thing: Mark David Major – Authors I Admire @markdmajor

Authors I Admire
By Mark David Major, Co-author of An Infinitesimal Abundance of Color

I’ll try to cover the ‘usual suspects’ in this article as well as some (hopefully) unexpected choices:

• J.R.R. Tolkien for the breath-taking scope of his vision in creating Middle Earth (The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings) and its influence on subsequent generations of writers (see next writer on the list);

• J.K. Rowling for inviting us to have as much fun reading about the characters of the Harry Potter universe as she seemed to have writing about them… whether it was really fun or not for her, either way equates to great writing;

• Ray Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451) for writing prose in a style that is almost lyrical in its simplicity;

• Isaac Asimov (Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation) for imagining the future in words so the rest of us can share in the seemingly infinite possibilities for humanity’s tomorrows.

• Frank Herbert (Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune) for drawing on historical/religious archetypes and re-imagining them entirely anew to uniquely paint a universe that is, at once, hauntingly familiar and strangely different;

• Marion Zimmer Bradley (The Mists of Avalon) for re-imagining the story of King Arthur from the perspective of its female characters, thereby producing (to my mind) the definitive version of the Arthurian legend that simultaneously manages to be realistic and magical;

• Stephen King (Salem’s Lot, The Shining, The Stand) for scaring the bejesus out of me on several occasions;

• Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Immortality) for having something substantive to say about the human condition and the audacity to actually write himself as one of the characters in Immortality, one of the most emotionally devastating novels I’ve ever read due to the truth lurking under the cover;

• Nigel Nicolson (Portrait of a Marriage) for having the courage to eloquently express the truth about his parents’ marriage (poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West and politician Harold Nicolson) based on the revelations he discovered in mother’s diaries;

• Ulysses S. Grant (Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant) for writing a first-hand account of a existential moment in American history (U.S. Civil War), thereby offering (to my mind) the greatest memoir ever by a U.S. President;

• Thomas Jefferson (with an assist from Benjamin Franklin and John Adams) for putting universal truths into elegant words, the ideals of which will long endure after the country they founded disappears into mists of history;

• Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird) for writing a novel that tackles sensitive subjects (racial prejudice, growing up, people are not always as they seem) while still being an unapologetic love letter to the American South;

• F. Scott Fitzgerald for writing the Great American Novel (The Great Gatsby), the truths about American character lurking in its pages are as relevant today as when he first wrote the words; and,

• Anne Frank (The Diary of a Young Girl) for gracing this life – if only for an all-too-brief time – and forcing us face the reality of all of the stories never told and all of the diary pages never written in…