This study will examine four articles on writing by Max Apple, Paula Fox, Louis Simpson, and Alice Walker. Based on the four writers' accounts of their development as artists, the study will focus on the most important, common influences in the making of a writer.
First and foremost as a force in forging a writer is the family. Every article puts the family at the center of the development of both the writer and the person. Although the four writers were born and raised in very different social, ethnic and economic environments, their families played central roles in their creative evolution.
Apple's grandmother, for example, educated him as to the differences between Jews and goyim, and made him proud to know and speak Yiddish, although he would write in English. His grandfather was a baker, his mother ran the household, and his father was a scrap dealer.
Fox begins her account with "My father was an itinerant writer" (Fox 7) and she focuses primarily on his influence on her writing development.
Louis Simpson focuses on his Jamaican-born father and Russian-born mother, declaring "I trace my beginnings as a writer to the stories my mother read to me" (Simpson 11).
Alice Walker puts great emphasis on the influence of her mother in her connection with life and imagination, although more than any of the other three writers she focuses on the general influence of families---particularly mothers and grandmothers.
The point to be understood here is not that the mothers, fathers or other relatives of these writers were writers themselves whose direct influence led them to become writers as well. Only one of the four, in fact, had a parent who was a writer. What is important here is that the family was a source of inspiration or material in one way or another. The writer to be effective must have his or her world grounded in the details and specifics of the real world, no matter how imaginative the writing perspective...