Robert Dean Lurie

My grandfather used to say that Ernest Gann's novel Benjamin Lawless summed up his life. I like that idea: that a book could speak for a person--that each of us might have a single book to which we could point and say, "This is me." It says something about both the power of books and the strange magic wielded by writers. And yes, I do believe it is magic.

In my own case, the representative books would be Thoreau's Walden and Kerouac's On the Road. There is a conflict at work in that combination: the wandering spirit vs the pressing need to retreat to a cabin and remain there indefinitely. Maybe every writer is like that. That's why we went into writing rather than, say, professional athletics.