Writers who influenced me...

...who are yours?

We all appreciate good writing, and I am flattered to have you following my Substack, which, as you know, is a lot of writing.

One of the things I enjoy discussing is writing influences, and, since we’re here and looking for a little break from The Trump Madness Machine, let’s talk about writers.

As a young person, one of the earliest writers I really enjoyed was Jean Shepherd. As some of you may know, Jean Shepherd was a long time radio personality on WOR-AM. He was renowned for intelligent pranks, such as the time he promoted a non-existent book called I, Libertine, by a wholly non-existent author named “Frederick R. Ewing”. Epic troll—Shepherd then got two people to write I, Libertine.

They aren’t that clever now on The Morning Zoo.

Shepherd also was a brilliant extemporaneous speaker; his monologue on the JFK assassination on November 25, 1963 is absolutely stunning. Listen to it here. When I was growing up in the oh-so-quiet suburb of Arden Hills, Minnesota in the 1970s, I read his In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash and Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories. He was able to articulate teenage angst in a way that I haven’t really experienced since.

I had lots of teenage angst that needed to be articulated.

I once had the opportunity to hear and meet Mr. Shepherd at a speaking engagement at Reed College in Portland—probably in the late 1990s. He gave it everything he had. Sweaty in a seersucker suit, he even looked like one of his characters from “Hohmann, Indiana,” (Hammond) where he grew up—maybe even his “Old Man”, which was his appellation for his dad.

Of course, Shepherd was most famous for A Christmas Story, which I found fun but not as insightful and amusing as some of the other essays I loved in the aforementioned books.

I was also obsessed with many of the 1930s New Yorker writers from the 1930s and 1940s. I even had a Franklin P. Adams collection. I loved E.B. White’s essays, but I was really into James Thurber.

It’s no surprise that someone like me would love Thurber—who doesn’t?— for the obvious reason that he was a cartoonist and a writer, something I always aspired to.

Thurber was nearly blind, and drew with a massive magnifying lupe. He was asked if his vision went completely away, would he miss cartooning? He said he wouldn’t—that was a side hustle. He said he’d miss writing.

Thurber’s comedic timing was astounding, and he gave flight of fancy new meaning.

My first job in editorial cartooning was at The Columbus Dispatch in 1981, and Thurber loomed large in the city. I really wasn’t that into Columbus at all; I found it parochial and staid then. It was run by a few really dreadful families who I will not name here for various reasons. But one of them was actively and viciously anti-semitic, and even told a family member they were under no circumstances to date a Jewish friend of mine there.

It’s much nicer now—I hope. Someday I’ll write about my year there soon.

Thurber once called Columbus the “World’s Largest Hick Town”, and that was about right then when I was there.

Garrison Keillor was also hugely influential to me in my twenties and thirties.

I read all of his earlier books, but, oddly, really didn’t listen to A Prairie Home Companion much at all in high school. A lot of people thought he was kind of a weirdo poseur in his Hawaiian shirt, white suit, and Panama hat—who isn’t, I guess—but he definitely grew on me as I got into my thirties, since I missed Minnesota.

My favorite book of Keillor’s is Happy to Be Here—his first book of essays published in 1981. Period. Some of these essays were stunning. I think I read it when I was about 22 or so. I did read a lot of his stuff about Lake Wobegon, and particularly enjoyed We Are Still Married. Later, I become friends with a very talented couple who wrote for him.

I asked, “What is he really like?”

The woman said, “The more you get to know him, the less you know him”.

In one of his later books, he settled on aggressive score-settling as a main theme, and I was familiar with the St. Paul columnist he excoriated. He also had a lot of strange poop humor, which was creepy. I haven’t read a thing he’s written in book form since. I find his writing colorfully meandering sometimes.

I did go to see him in San Francisco in 2018, and wept throughout, mostly because he made me think of my late Minnesota father.

When I went to my truck after his gig, someone had broken into the window and stolen $12,000 worth of stuff, including draft notes of my daughter’s second novel.

May I brag here? My daughter Jules is a novelist, and her second novel got picked up by Dial/Penguin Random House. You can imagine how I feel.

Keillor definitely influenced me. He has wonderful observational powers, and an interesting elliptical style that makes for a lousy political column, but makes him a great social observer.

Please don’t rat me out here. He’s a great, but flawed talent, like a lot of people like him. I don’t excuse what he did at all.

When I was in high school, I was very much a student of William F. Buckley, Jr., and I am sure that might be something of a surprise given my politics. I watched Firing Line quite often—not obsessively—and enjoyed (crazy, right?) reading National Review when I was in high school, while agreeing with virtually none of it.

I even had a National Review subscription well into the 1990s, along with the American Spectator and The Weekly Standard. You know, back when conservatism was predictable.

I think my favorite Buckley book was Overdrive, which was a memoir of a week in his life. He was crazy busy, a true polymath (harpsichordist, sailor, mayoral candidate), and I think a lot of his instincts came from being the son of an oil executive. But I did find his writing fascinating stylistically. He also gave me something to discuss with conservative friends (we used to have them, then), and I know he hated Trump, so there’s that.

I even read Christopher Buckley’s Losing Mum and Pup, which I found an incredibly poignant journal of his parent’s decline.

Oddly, I wasn’t remotely into comic books as a kid, like many of my political cartoonist friends are.

My father’s reading habits influenced me as well, although he was very dismissive of some of my childhood tastes, which I found hurtful. I loved reading a series in the 1960s about Freddy The Pig. One morning while I was idling in bed, he said, “Why are you reading that crap?”

He then gave me a copy of The Wreck of the Mary Deere, a shipwreck novel I was utterly bored by.

I read a lot of baseball books then, like Strange But True Baseball Stories, and young war books like John Hersey’s PT-109 and Guadalcanal Diary. All little boys my age were experts on World War II, which is now ancient history to most kids. Many of my friend’s fathers and my uncles were in WWII, and my dad was in the Korean War, where he was awarded the Bronze Star with “V” device.

I also read The Death of a President by William Manchester when I was ten. This was far too young to read that book, and my mother warned me about it. I found it unbelievably upsetting then, and now. I sobbed at the Dealey Plaza scene. I shouldn’t have read it then.

My Aunt Elsie saw that I was a reader, and so she routinely sent me Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, which are probably an abomination, but I still enjoyed them as an eight year old. I particularly remember Tom Sawyer, but probably didn’t get through The Scarlet Pimpernel.

I’m still not sure what a pimpernel is.

My dad also subscribed to the Time-Life Great Books series, and I read some of those, too, or tried to.

But there is one writer who really influenced me.

Bill Mauldin.

Period.

Bill Mauldin was one of the most brilliant cartoonists of his era, or any era. He was noa beautiful artist, but my dad had a copy of Up Front, the stunning World War II memoir that was not only magnificently executed on every level, but was written in such a conversational manner that an eight year old could understand it.

If I could name any one person as most influential in my career, period, it’s Mauldin.

Later, I read A Sort of Saga, Back Home, and The Brass Ring, and they are all beautifully written books. When I won the Pulitzer, my first clear thought was, I did what Mauldin did.

In my own Minnesota way.

I once had a phone conversation with him. His wife’s family lived in Yamhill County, Oregon, and he was visiting. My dear old reporter friend Norm Maves was interviewing him for The Oregonian, and Norm patched me through to him. We spoke for a few minutes, where he seemed to lightly know who he was talking to, and I was so overly effusive, he said, “Whoa! Calm down, buddy!”

If you knew me then, you’d find that familiar.

I am sorry to say I never had the opportunity to speak with him again.

Let’s hear about your writers in the comments, please. I would really enjoy that.

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Hey, You Betchapeeps!: Gotta eat something, maybe the wings I bought that I will instruct my son to fix! Also, I need to watch this Blazers-Utah game. You may look at your IRA and 401-K again. Have a great evening.—J.