Books That Shaped a Writer

by Gary Earl Ross
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15 books
I grew up surrounded by books—my parents’ books, those in the branch library near our inner city home, and eventually my own. My mother was an avid reader, especially of mysteries. After I went through fairy tales, children’s books, and DC comics, she began to pass grown-up books to me. After I decided to become a writer—around age ten—I reached the conclusion that if I wanted to learn how to write books, I had to read lots of them, as many different kinds as I could. If I wanted to write short stories, I had to read short stories. The same was true for novels and plays. To their credit, my parents never discouraged my dream. Mom continued to share books, and Dad gave me a typewriter. They were the reason I became an English major, English teacher, English professor, short story writer, novelist, and playwright. They both lived long enough to read several of my published short stories and my dedication to them in my first novel, though Mom passed away years before the book found a publisher and Dad lapsed into Alzheimer’s shortly before the book went to press. Sadly, neither ever saw a production of one of my plays. But they opened the door to what I would become. The books below—a small sampling of a lifetime’s reading—made me a writer.
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R is for Rocket

Ray Bradbury, 1962
When I was ten, Mom took us to the library on a wet Saturday in April. One of the two books I chose that day was one of Bradbury’s classic collections. Beautifully written stories ignited my imagination in a way no other book had. The consequences of time travel, the impact of an astronaut’s death on his widow and son, a planet where a lifespan was a single day—“A Sound of Thunder,” “Rocket Man,” and “Frost and Fire” were among the tales that made me say, “I want to write like that.” I began to try to write, but my first efforts at storytelling made no sense.

Twelve Stories for Late at Night

Alfred Hitchcock, 1976
I knew the name Alfred Hitchcock because if my cousin Bobby and I were well-behaved, we sometimes were allowed to watch Alfred Hitchcock Presents with our mothers. I didn’t realize then that the stories on the TV program originally appeared in print. But when my mother gave me Stories for Late at Night, I recognized some of the stories had been on Hitchcock Presents or The Twilight Zone, and “The Fly” had been made into a movie my father had taken my brother Steve and me to see. Without realizing it, I was getting a class in story structure to undergird the drive to write I’d gotten from Bradbury. At thirteen, I tried to sell my first story to a magazine. It was, of course, rejected. By the way, this book was so important to me that it went with me from house to house, job to job, and one marriage to another. One day, I discovered it was missing—in a house with five kids, their friends and other neighborhood kids who hung out there, and lots of other adults passing through, sometimes things disappeared. Immediately I went online, found a copy in England for sale, and bought it, reading through it again when it came.

From Russia with Love

Large Print
Ian Fleming, 2018
At thirteen I also saw Goldfinger, my first James Bond movie. I began to use my paper route earnings to buy 007 novels from the drug store that was at the end of my delivery route. Before the rerelease of the earlier films, Dr. No and From Russia with Love, as well as the fourth film, Thunderball, I bought and read every James Bond paperback. Though Goldfinger remains my favorite Bond film, From Russia with Love is my favorite Bond novel (followed closely by On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) because I began to recognize the human emotions that drove the story—Tatiana’s loneliness, the chip on Red Grant’s shoulder, the monstrousness of Rosa Klebb. This book helped me understand that stories are always about people.

A Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickens, 1993
In my sophomore year of high school, we read A Tale of Two Cities, and I fell in love with Charles Dickens. If stories were always about people, Dickens painted such vivid pictures of them that they became indelible in my mind. Mom said she was as haunted by Madame Defarge’s knitting as I was by Sidney Carton’s sacrifice. I still pick up the old hardcover edition from our home bookshelves and reread passages.

Animal Farm

George Orwell, 1990
Of the many classics I read in high school and later reread in college, Orwell’s Animal Farm is my favorite. I taught it in both my high school classes and one of my undergraduate classes. When a university secretary who hadn’t read the book asked why I liked it so much, I said, “Animal Farm says everything you need to know about human nature,” and gave her a copy. She came to me the next day, laughing at the truth of what I’d told her.

The Man Who Cried I Am

John A Williams, 2024
Though I am African-American, few of the books that crossed my path in high school were by Black authors. The four most prominent exceptions were James Baldwin’s Another Country, The Autobiography of Malcom X, Richard Wright’s Native Son, and John A. Williams’ The Man Who Cried I AM, which I received as a gift. Though I did not realize at the time I was being shaped into a mystery and suspense writer, I liked the Williams book best for two reasons. First, it was about Black writers, not just about racism. Max Reddick and Harry Ames (a Richard Wright stand-in) were people with whom I could identify. Second—and most important—was the thriller plot, which involved a planned genocide for people of color. During my undergrad years, I got a chance to meet Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee after a campus presentation. Mr. Dee mentioned The Man Who Cried I AM as a book that deserved to be filmed.

Them

Joyce Carol Oates, 2000
My discovery of Joyce Carol Oates after I finished my undergraduate degree was a pivotal moment in my history as a writer. As I had with Bradbury, Fleming, Dickens, and Williams, I found myself falling in love with another writer who could mine the human experience for its pain. National Book Award winner Them was a searing examination of poverty, desire, race, social violence, and the hopelessness of hope, all explored with a prose style that was both hypnotic and terrifying. It is a mystery to me why Oates has not yet won a Nobel Prize for literature.

Beloved

Toni Morrison, 2006
The late Toni Morrison did win a Nobel Prize for work that is haunting and compelling and refuses to shy away from human horror. Nowhere are her literary gifts more prominently displayed than in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved. A ghost story like no other, it is a novel about the scars of slavery on the individual, the mind, the family, and the country. Despite modern apologists who push the offensive notion that slavery was a kind of vocational education, the true horror of the institution that built America was the evil it forced so many people to perform.

Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express

Agatha Christie, Ken Ludwig, 2016
I read a few Agatha Christie novels in my youth, but after a graduate school experience steeped in world literature and literary criticism, I was delighted to rediscover Christie and the sheer joy of reading for pleasure. Christie’s work is a dance between the writer and reader. Christie gives the reader an array of interesting, often quirky characters of various backgrounds who are on the scene when someone is murdered. Then her sleuth or another protagonist must work through all the information presented to reveal who committed the murder. While her work has been satirized, imitated, and updated to change some of the characters’ backgrounds, surface readings of Christie’s work miss the depth of humanity displayed by her characters, whose actions and dialogue reveal struggles with the most basic human qualities. While I am very fond of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, A Pale Horse (which actually saved the lives of several victims of thallium poisoning), Death Comes As the End, and Witness for the Prosecution (her Edgar Award-winning play), Murder on the Orient Express is the template for a solid Christie story—a gathering of suspects, a murder aboard a snowbound train, and the inimitable Belgian detective Hercule Poirot.

The Maltese Falcon

The Thin Man ; Red Harvest
Dashiell Hammett, 2000
While Christie wrote the quintessential British mystery, Dashiell Hammett is one of the fathers (along with Carroll John Daly, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain) of the quintessential American mystery, chiefly the private eye novel and the noir novel. Among his many short stories, screenplays, and five novels, The Maltese Falcon, about Detective Sam Spade’s efforts to solve the murder of his partner Miles Archer, stands out as a Great American Novel. It is laden with atmosphere, unique characters, an object of everyone’s desire, and several motives for murder, as well as a femme fatale. And I’ve dined at John’s Grill in San Francisco, which is depicted in the novel and calls itself the Home of the Maltese Falcon.

Black Betty

Walter Mosley, 2003
The Harlem detective novels of Chester Himes and the Shaft novels of Ernest Tidyman added more than a touch of color to the American crime novel, but Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins novels raised the Black detective story to the level of literature. My favorite in this series is Black Betty, wherein Easy, an unlicensed investigator who takes money to do investigative favors, must try to keep his friend Mouse in check. In a murderous mood because someone’s betrayal put him in prison, Mouse is determined to kill anyone who might have turned him in. If Mouse isn’t the scariest sidekick in all of crime fiction, I don’t know who is.

Collected Stories

Volume three
Richard Matheson, 2005
I have published nearly 100 short stories in various magazines, journals, and anthologies. One of the short story writers I read a lot in story collections when I was younger is Richard Matheson, whose clever twists showed up on Hitchcock and Twilight Zone. Among his work is the terrifying novel I Am Legend and the short story “Nigthtmare at 20,000 Feet,” which became a memorable Twilight Zone episode with William Shatner. My favorite Matheson story is “The Distributor,” about the practice of evil for evil’s sake. When I couldn’t locate the story in print, I ordered the three-volume collection of all his stories.

The Devil In The White City

Erik Larson, 2010
The only nonfiction book on this list is a dazzling Edgar Award-winning account of a World’s Fair and America’s first major serial killer. In parallel threads, Erik Larson depicts all that went into building the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and the life of Herman Webster Mudgett, AKA H.H. Holmes, whose rooming house for fairgoers was actually a dungeon often described as a murder palace.

Kindred

Octavia E. Butler, 2022
I have always enjoyed science fiction but never trusted my scientific knowledge enough to feel comfortable writing it. My favorite SciFi subgenre—since Bradbury’s “Sound of Thunder”—has been time travel, and I’ve published time travel short fiction. Like Morrison’s Beloved, Butler’s Kindred explores the horrors, both internal and external, of American slavery. The catch is that a modern woman travels into the past to interact with her ancestors, both Black and white. This book shows that slavery left no one complete.

Equus

Peter Shaffer, 2011
Because I thought I might want to write plays too, I began reading plays when I was about twelve—first Tennessee Williams, then Shakespeare, which I learned to appreciate more in high school. I also took drama classes. While I acted in a few plays before teaching and parenthood ate up much of my time, I remained a regular theater attendee. When I saw the Tony Award-winning Equus in the mid-1970s, I was blown away by this psychological mystery that seeks to explain why a stable boy blinded six horses with a hoof pick. Quickly becoming one of my favorite plays, Equus was a script I taught in one of my high school classes. Later, it influenced my first courtroom drama, Matter of Intent.