And then the... the powerhouse of powerhouses is, of course, Faulkner.  And there's a series of books he wrote between, I think, 1929 and 1932, something like that, which include As I Lay Dying, which to my mind may be the best book of the first 50 years of the 20^th century, in literature, American literature.  It's... it's a remarkable book, it's... it's horrifying, it's funny, it's... it's ingenious, and Faulkner is... can be difficult.  That's not... that's not a particularly difficult book, but he can be very difficult, he is in say, Absalom, Absalom!.  So what you do when you read those difficult books is you get as much as you can get.  And don't worry about the rest.  Just don't be impatient when you're reading.  But they... they are hard, I know from teaching them to... to students.  But he's a visionary, he's a chronicler, both at the same time.  And he's a great fountain of language.  He is... Faulkner is his fountain and Bellow is his fountain and... and Thomas Wolfe is his fountain.  They all have different fountains and then there's someone like Dreiser who doesn't have a... a fountain of language, who sort of clunks along, you know, but these stories that he... he tells are terrifically powerful and for me the great powerhouse of a book is American Tragedy.