Which American writers did I begin reading early on?  Those would be 19^th century writers.  Melville [Herman Melville] and Moby Dick and some of the brilliant shorter things like Benito Cereno and Bartleby, the Scrivener and so on.  I was... I was mystified by that book; its plenteousness was new to me when I read it.  I read Hawthorne [Nathaniel Hawthorne] and have read Hawthorne as an adult.  Of course, I have taught a couple Hawthorne books, The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables.  And I'm put off by something in the... in the diction, in the language, in the syntax that makes it semi-impenetrable to me.  Mark Twain I thought was wonderful.  I read Huckleberry Finn maybe every 10 years, and it's a stupendous book, and then as a figure, he's a stupendous... he's a stupendous figure.  Then I... when I was in graduate school I was very taken by Henry James.  I haven't read James in 30 years probably.  But back in the 1950s I... I took a course in Henry James and I was... and I was hooked.  It was... look, all this stuff was new to me then, so I could be hooked by Henry James and I could be hooked by Mark Twain.  Who... what two writers could be more different?