33 Writers Share The Books That Inspired Them To Write

    "I thought, 'you can do that?!'"

    We asked writers at the annual Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference which book inspired them to write. Here are their answers.

    1. Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

    2. The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

    3. Skin by Dorothy Allison

    4. Under a Soprano Sky by Sonia Sanchez

    5. Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

    6. And Her Soul Out Of Nothing by Olena Kalytiak Davis

    7. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

    8. The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich

    9. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

    10. Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko

    11. Samuel Johnson Is Indignant by Lydia Davis

    12. Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

    13. Dispatches by Michael Herr

    14. Light in August by William Faulkner

    15. Red Under the Skin by Natasha Sajé

    16. Little Savage by Emily Fragos

    17. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

    18. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

    19. The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka by Franz Kafka

    20. Punching Out by Jim Daniels

    21. Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

    22. Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

    23. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

    24. The World Doesn't End by Charles Simic

    25. The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander

    26. A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham

    27. Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder

    28. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

    29. Jane: A Murder by Maggie Nelson

    30. Middlemarch by George Eliot

    31. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

    32. Sphere by Michael Crichton

    33. Matilda by Roald Dahl

    Are you a writer? Tell us which book inspired you to write in the comments below!

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