I think I first read a Walt Whitman poem in high school, and that wasn’t one of Walt’s really passionate ones, it was the one about the spider. It wasn’t until I was in college that a friend turned me on to the whole of Leaves of Grass. There are a few authors I don’t think my friends should go through life without knowing about, and Walt is one of them.
Another is J.D. Salinger. A link on Robot Wisdom just lead to this free early chapter of The Catcher in the Rye.
…I’m not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything. I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy. I mean that’s all I told D.B. about, and he’s my brother and all. He’s in Hollywood. That isn’t too far from this crumby place, and he comes over and visits me practically every week end. He’s going to drive me home when I go home next month maybe. He just got a Jaguar. One of those little English jobs that can do around two hundred miles an hour. It cost him damn near four thousand bucks. He’s got a lot of dough, now. He didn’t use to. He used to be just a regular writer, when he was home. He wrote this terrific book of short stories, The Secret Goldfish, in case you never heard of him. The best one in it was “The Secret Goldfish.” It was about this little kid that wouldn’t let anybody look at his goldfish because he’d bought it with his own money. It killed me. Now he’s out in Hollywood, D.B., being a prostitute. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies. Don’t even mention them to me….