Which writers or artists most influenced your work?

Originally asked

The Paris Review, to novelists and poets, The Art of Fiction

A durable Art of Fiction question asked through named literary influences and artistic models.

You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.

Recorded Ernest J. Gaines said elsewhere, not written here
I read Turgenev, Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons , and that book had a tremendous impact on me. It was about a young man who came back to the old village to visit the old people after he had graduated from his university, and he used to be a doctor, and falls in love with a beautiful woman and all that sort of thing. They lived out in the country. When I was writing my first novel, Catherine Carmier — I started writing it in ’58, I think, ’58, ’59 — I knew nothing about writing a novel, and I used that Fathers and Sons as sort of my Bible, my guide. My first novel was about a young man who had been away from the old place, and then returning, and falls in love with a beautiful girl, and he loses her. I was really very much impressed by — influenced by — Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons at that time, but then I started reading other books, of course. I was reading other books at the same time, but that was the book that had the earliest influence on my structure

Academy of Achievement interview, San Antonio, Texas, 4 May 2001 source ↗

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