I have already mentioned that in the Appendix I am listing all the books I can ever recall reading. There are a number of reasons why I am doing this. One is that I enjoy playing games, and this is one of the oldest of games: the pursuit game. A better reason is that I have never once seen a list of the books read by any of my favorite authors. I would give anything, for example, to know all the titles of the those books which Dostoievski devoured, or Rimbaud. But there is a more important reason still, and it is this: people are always wondering what were an author's influences, upon what great writer or writers did he model himself, who offered the most inspiration, which ones affected his style most, and so on. I intend presently to give the line of my descent, in as strictly chronological order as possible. I shall give specific names and I shall include a few men and women (some of them not writers at all) whom I regard as "living books," meaning by this that they had (for me) all the weight, power, prestige, magic and sorcery which are attributed to the authors of great books. I shall also include a few "countries"; they are, all of them, countries I have penetrated only through reading, but they are as alive for me and have affected my thought and behavior as much as if they were books.

But to come back to the list... I wish to emphasize the fact that I am listing both good and bad books. With respect to some I must confess that I am unable to say which were good for me and which bad. If I were to offer my own criterion of good and bad with respect to books, I would say- those which are alive and those which are dead. Certain books not only give a sense of life, sustain life, but like certain rare individuals, augment life. Some authors long dead are less dead than the living, or, to put it another way, "the most alive of the dead." When these books were written, who wrote them matters little. They will breathe the flame of life until books are no more. To discuss which books belong in this category, to dispute the reasons pro and con, are futile, in my opinion. On this subject each man is his own best judge. He is right, for himself. We need not agree as to the source of a man's inspiration or the degree of his vitality; it is enough to know and to recognize that he is inspired, that he is thoroughly alive.

Despite what I have just said, there will be endless speculation as to which authors, which books, influence me most. I cannot hope to arrest those speculations. Just as each man interprets an author's work in his own limited way, so will the readers of this book, on scanning my list, draw their own conclusions as to my "true" influences. The subject is fraught with mystery, and I leave it a mystery. I know, however, that this list will give extraordinary pleasure to some of my readers, perhaps chiefly to the readers of a century hence. Impossible as it is to recall all the books one has read, I am nevertheless reasonably sure that I shall be able to give at least half. I repeat, I do not regard myself as a great reader. The few men I know who have read widely, and whom I have sounded out on the extent of their reading, startle me with their replies. Twenty to thirty thousand books, I perceive, is a fair average for a cultured individual of our time. As for myself, I doubt if I have read more than five thousand, though I may well be in error.

When I look over my list, which never ceases to grow, I am appalled by the obvious waste of time which the reading of most of these books entailed. It is often said of writers that "all is grist for the mill." Like all sayings, this one too must be taken with a grain of salt. A writer needs very little to stimulate him. The fact of being a writer means that more than other men he is given to cultivating the imagination. Life itself provides abundant material. Superabundant material. The more one writes the less books stimulate. One reads to corroborate, that is, to enjoy one's own thoughts expressed in the multifarious ways of others.

In youth's one appetite, both for raw experience and for books, is uncontrolled. Where there is excessive hunger, and not mere appetite, there must be vital reason for it. It is blatantly obvious that our present way of life does not offer proper nourishment. If it did I am certain we would read less, work less, strive less. We would not need substitutes, we would not accept vicarious modes of existence. This applies for all realms: food, sex, travel, religion, adventure. We get off to a bad start. We travel the broad highway with one foot in the grave. We have no definite goal or purpose, nor the freedom of being without goal or purpose. We are, most of us, sleepwalkers, and we die without ever opening our eyes.

If people enjoyed deeply everything they read there would be no excuse for talking this way. But they read as they live- aimlessly, haphazardly, feebly and flickeringly. If they are already asleep, then whatever they read only plunges them into a deeper sleep. If they are merely lethargic, they become more lethargic. If they are idlers, they become worse idlers. And so on. Only the man who is wide awake is capable of enjoying a book, of extracting from it what is vital. Such a man enjoys whatever comes into his experience, and, unless I am horribly mistaken, makes no distinction between the experiences offered through reading and the manifold experiences of everyday life. The man who thoroughly enjoys what he reads or does, or even what he says, or simply what he dreams or imagines, profits to the full. The man who seeks to profit, through one form of discipline or another, deceives himself. It is because I am so firmly convinced of this that I abhor the issuance of lists and books for those who are about to enter life. The advantages to be obtained from ordinary methods of education. Most of the books given on such lists cannot begin to be understood and appreciated until one has lived and thought for himself. Sooner or later the whole kit and caboodle has to be regurgitated.

And now here are names for you. Names of those whose influence I am aware of and which, through my writings, I have testified to again and again. To begin with, let me say that everything which came within the field of my experience influenced me. Those who do not find themselves mentioned should know that I include them too. As for the dead, they knew in advance, doubtless, that they would put their seal on me. I mention them only because it is in order.

First of all come the books of childhood those dealing with legend, myth, tales of imagination, all of them saturated with mystery, heroism, supernaturalism, the marvelous and the impossible, with crime and horror of all sorts and all degrees, with cruelty, with justice and injustice, with magic and prophecy, with perversion, ignorance, despair doubt and death. These books affected my whole being: they formed my character, my way of looking at life, my attitude towards women, towards society, laws, morals, government. They determined the rhythm of my life. From adolescence on, the books I read, particularly those I adored or was enslaved by, affected me only partially. That is, some affected the man, some the writer, some the naked soul. This perhaps because my being had already become fragmented. Perhaps too because the substance of adult reading cannot possibly affect the whole man, his whole being. There are exceptions, to be sure, but they are rare. At any rate, the whole province of childhood reading belongs under the sign of anonymity; those who are curious will discover the titles in the Appendix. I read what other children read. I was not a prodigy, nor did I make special demands. I took what was given me and I swallowed it. The reader who has followed me thus far has by this time gleaned the nature of my reading. The books read in boyhood I have also touched upon already, signaling such names as Henty first and foremost, Dumas, Rider Haggard, Sienkiewicz and others, most of them quite familiar. Nothing unusual about this period, unless that I read too much.

Where the specific influences commence is at the brink of manhood, that, from the time I first dreamed that I too might one day become "a writer." The names which follow may be regarded then as the names of authors who influenced me as a man and as a writer, the two becoming more and more inseparable as time went on. From early manhood on my whole activity revolved about, or was motivated by, the fact that I thought of myself, first potentially, then embryonically, and finally manifestly, as a writer. And so, if my memory serves me right, here is my genealogical line: Boccaccio, Petronius, Rabelais, Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Maeterlinck, Romain Rolland, Plotinus, Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Dostoievski (and other Russian writers of the Nineteenth Century), the ancient Greek dramatists, the Elizabethan dramatists (excluding Shakespeare), Theodore Dreiser, Knut Hamsun, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Elie Faure, Oswald Spengler, Marcel Proust, Van Gogh, the Dadaists and Surrealists, Balzac, Lewis Carroll, Nijinsky, Rimbaud, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Giono, Celine, everything I read on Zen Buddhism, everything I read about China, India, Tibet, Arabia, Africa, and of course the Bible, the men who wrote it and especially the men who made the King James version, for it was language of the Bible rather than its "message" which I got first and while will never shake off.

Where were the subjects which made seek the authors I love, which permitted me to be influenced, which formed my style, my character, my approach to life? Broadly these: the love of life itself, the pursuit of truth, wisdom and understanding, mystery, the power of language, the antiquity and the glory of man, eternality, the purpose of existence, the oneness of everything, self-liberation, the brotherhood of man, the meaning of love, the relation of sex to love, the enjoyment of sex, humor, oddities and eccentricities in all life's aspects, travel, adventure, discovery, prophecy, magic (white and black) art, games, confessions, revelations, mysticism, more particularly the mystics themselves, the varieties of faith and worship, the marvelous in all realms and under all aspects, for "there is only the marvelous and nothing but the marvelous."

Have I left out some items? Fill them in yourself! I was, and still am, interested in everything. Even in politics- when regarded from "the perspective of the bird." But the struggle of the human being to emancipate himself, that is, to liberate himself from the prison of his own making, that is for the supreme subject. That is why I am powerfully drawn to the men of wisdom, the men who have experienced life to the full and who give life- artists, religious figures, pathfinders, innovators and iconoclasts of all sorts. And perhaps- why not say it? - that is why I have so little appreciation of the transitory revolutionaries. For me the only true revolutionaries are the inspirers and the activators, figures like Jesus, Lao-Tse, Guatama the Buddha, Akhnaton, Ramakrishna, Krishnamurti. The yardstick I employ is life: how men stand in relation to life. Not whether they succeeded in overthrowing a government, a social order, a religious form, a moral code, a system of education, an economic tyranny. Rather, how did they affect life itself? For what distinguishes the men I have in mind is that they did not impose their authority on man; on the contrary, they sought to destroy authority. Their aim and purpose was to open up life, to make man hungry for life, to exalt life- and to refer all questions back to life. They exhorted man to realize that he had all freedom in himself, that he was not to concern himself with the fate of the world (which is not his problem) but to solve his own individual problem, which is a question of liberations, nothing else.

And now for "the living books" ... Several times I have said that there were men and women who came into my experience, at various times, whom I regard as "living books." I have explained why I refer to them in this fashion. I shall be even more explicit now. They stay with me, these individuals, as do the good books. I can open them up at will, as I would a book. When I glance at a page of their being, so to speak, they talk to me as eloquently as they did when I met them in the flesh. The books they left me are their lives, their thoughts, their deeds. It was the fusion of thought, being and act which made each of these lives singular and inspiring to me. Here they are, then, and I doubt that I have forgotten a single one: Benjamin Fay Mills, Emma Goldman, W.E. Burghardt Dubois, Hubert Harrison, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Jim Larkin, John Cowper Powys, Lou Jacobs, Blaise Cendrars. A curious assemblage indeed. All but one are, or were, known figures. There are others, of course, who without knowing it played an important role in my life. who helped to open the book of life for me. But the names I have cited are the ones I shall always revere, the ones I feel forever indebted to.