C.S. Lewis

Ignazio Silone

Irving Howe

Wendell Berry

Michael Walzer

Wilson Carey McWilliams

George Scialabba

The writers who do the kind of writing I want to be able to do aren’t necessarily the authors I most enjoy reading (although there’s considerable overlap there) or those I think are the greatest (that would be a much more diverse list – demographically, thematically, and above all temporally). These are writers whose works happen to have hit me at just the right time and who do things with words in a way that has left me wanting to be apprenticed to them. Perhaps there could have been others, but for me it has been them. (This is a running list: there may be some who belong here whom I haven’t thought of in a while, and I may add them later; I haven’t included anyone of my own generation; I might add some peers later, too.)

What do they have in common? (Some are living and some are dead, but I’ll use the present tense.)

  1. They write essays and essayistic books. (Those on the list who also write novels or poetry are here for the sake of their essays.)

  2. They are all members of or sympathizers with ethical socialist or egalitarian-communitarian traditions of political thought.

  3. Some hold academic positions and some not, but none are traditional academic specialists. Yet they’re not quite generalists or dilettantes either: each has a set of themes or problems that he returns to persistently. (Think of Silone’s remark: “I should gladly spend my life writing and rewriting the same book: the single book that every writer has within him that is the image of his soul and of which his published works are more or less rough fragments.” Every writer? I’m not sure. These writers? Yes.)

  4. Some are religious and some are ambiguous or ambivalent about religion, but none is resolutely and narrowly secular.

  5. They all write in a certain way. I know it when I see it, but find it difficult to describe. It is, among other things, unburdened, frank, subtle, self-questioning, principled without being didactic, at times personal but never self-indulgent, neither resting easy with their own answers to the questions at stake nor dodging the risks of answering as best they can.

The congruence of those features – the way they accord with one another – is probably what attracts me to these writers.