In summer of 2002, M. Mark e-mailed the following query to the members of PEN American Center for issue 3's Forum:

Subject: What's your literary lineage?
From: PEN America
To: PEN Members

Seventeenth-century Cavalier poets called themselves the Tribe of Ben, in tribute to the influence of Ben Jonson's work. Some writers continue to define their heritage narrowly (the School of "The Red Wheelbarrow," the Tribe of The Wretched of the Earth, the Evil Spawn of Monty Python); but modern lists of literary influences tend to be more complex, mixing works and writers that seem to stand for contradictory impulses.

Who and what have helped to make you the writer you are? Are you descended from connoisseurs of silence or of repetition, from realists, surrealists, magic realists, fantasists, ironists, romantics, revolutionaries, clowns? Do you trace your tribal ancestry through Saint Augustine, Lady Murasaki, Rumi, Montaigne, Cervantes, Sterne, Equiano, Austen, Douglass, Woolf, Freud, Kafka, Tagore, Marx (Karl or Groucho), García Márquez? If you claim, say, Joyce or Borges or Rushdie as an ancestor, how do you relate to the multitude of ancestors each of them has already claimed? The challenge: Can you reduce your lineage to a hyphenated phrase? (An example might be the School of Dickinson-Stevens-Bishop-Ashbery, courtesy of Harold Bloom; perhaps your tribe has a wider cultural and geographical range, perhaps not.)

Joan Schenkar: The Miss Barnes and Mr. Beckett School of (Jacobean-Modernist, Expressionist-Ciceronian, Post-Structural Feminist-Alt-Rock) Careful Construction and Violent Prose.

Stewart O'Nan: To borrow the format of The Player, I'd say my work is more Virginia Woolf meets Night of the Living Dead. Or maybe Alice Munro dates the Ramones.

Irene Tierstein: Pared-down Proust.

Simon Schama: Rabelaisiano-Vicovian-Hazlittishy-Carlylian-Dickensiana-Michelettisch-Sveviano-Nabokovian.

Gerald Weales: I am by James Whitcomb Riley out of Robert Benchley.

Robert Gluck: Keats-O'Hara-Proust-Bataille-Language Poetry-Acker-Blanchot.

Aleksandar Hemon: My father-Flaubert-Joyce-Borges-Schulz-Kiš-Nabokov-Hitchcock-French New Wave-Lennon-McCartney-Bach-Mahler-Sonic Youth-Public Enemy-Sarajevo-Chicago.

Scott Spencer: My lit lineage gives me the energy to write, supplying not necessarily the how but the why, and it can be short-handed like this: Nabokov-Cain/Chandler/Highsmith-Greene. Considering this little list, I cannot help but wish it were otherwise, but only the very fortunate are immune to the wish to have come from a different family.

Denise Duhamel: The school is called Dreamers of Jeannie. Our lineage can be traced as Cap'n Crunch-Frank O'Hara-Lawrence Ferlinghetti-SpaghettiOs.

Fenton Johnson: Tribe of Gilgamesh-Homer-Bible (Hebrew and Christian)-Augustine-Jefferson-Lincoln-Faulkner-Welty, with appropriate acknowledgment to the dean of Kentucky writers, Wendell Berry.

Ted Solotaroff: I am descended from the tribe of Yiddish literary journalists. So I have been told and believe, though I don't know Yiddish.

David Grimm: Though descended from the cruel house of Marlowe (by way of the British B-boys-Bond, Brenton, Barker, Barnes), with a streak of the perverse (care of that distant bastard cousin, Orton), it is to that great-grandfather of all dramatists, Bill Shakespeare, that I owe my heart and soul.

Karen Malpede: Marjorie Morningstar, My Friend Flicka, Tennessee Williams, Joyce-Bergman-Genet-Faulkner, Aeschylus-Sophocles-Euripides, Woolf-Pat Barker-Sebald.

Rick Moody: School-of-second-wave-experimental-writing-with-predictable-interest-in-Melville-Beckett-
Pynchon-Woolf-Gaddis-Nabokov-and-disagreeable-love-of-popular-culture.

John Jakes: I would say mine is The School of 19th-Century-Triple-Decker-Writers.

Mary Gordon: On my father's side, it's the line of Ford Madox Ford, passing from him to the women he influenced and often published: Katherine Anne Porter, Jean Stafford, Eudora Welty. On my mother's side, the line of Virginia Woolf, going from her to Katherine Mansfield to Elizabeth Bowen.

Gail Caldwell: Cicero-Song of Solomon-Faulkner-Hank Williams Sr.

Alfred Corn: I am a Bible-Homer-Sappho-Dante-Giotto-Shakespeare-Bashoo-Vermeer-Bach-Mozart-Wordsworth-Keats-
Whitman-Baudelaire-Melville-Dickinson-Tolstoy-Rilke-Matisse-Stevens-Marianne Moore-Joyce-Kafka-Colette-Hart Crane-Langston Hughes-Auden-Borges-Balanchine-Celan-
Charlie Parker-Bishop-Miles Davis-Anonymous writer. (Tennyson's Ulysses said, "I am a part of all that I have met," which can mean that a writer learns from every writer she or he has ever read. I have certainly tried to. And I've learned from people I've spoken with who were not artists, represented here in the aggregate term "Anonymous.")

Amanda Vaill: I see myself in the tribe of Bloomsbury with a bar-sinister connection to S. J. Perelman. Make of that what you will . . .

William H. Gass: A note in one of Schoenberg's rows or Arnie's Army.

Dean Kostos: I belong to the unlikely lineage of Hopkins-Breton-Plath-Neruda-Bishop-Oulipo. I love Surrealism and Formalism and find that they overlap in the way constraint triggers the subconscious, hence my interest in Oulipo.

William Allen: Homer-Herodotus-Heine-Hölderlin-Hawthorne-Hopkins-Hikmet-Hughes-Hurston-Harjo-Heaney.

Michael Kandel: Kafka-Phil Dick Wannabe.

Richard Kostelanetz: As I work in more arts than writing, J. S. Bach, Charles Ives, John Cage. Otherwise, for essays, George Orwell; for fiction, James Joyce.

Michelle Tea: Charles Bukowski's alcoholica school of hard knocks via Eileen Myles's lesbionic cultural reality check.

Christopher Keane: The Hemingway-Robbe-Grillet-Salinger school of spunky/spiky realism.

Delia Sherman: I am of the School of Shakespeare-Morris (William)-Zola-Carter (Angela)-Dunnett.

Ethan Bumas: punk rock cervantes smash the windmill.

Tom Lewis: Hammett-MacInnis-Fleming-McDonald-McBain-Higgins.

Charles Patterson: School of Amos, Dante, Joyce, and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Donald Breckenridge: The old school of a winded Emmanuel Bove drinking a six-pack of Rheingold with Alfred Döblin and Claude Simon on Juan Carlos Onetti's stoop while enduring a Brooklyn heat wave.

Ilma Wolitzer: Before I even learned to read, I belonged to the kitchen table (at and under)-bedroom wall School of Listening and Imagining.

Berel Lang: I'm of the Plato-Borgesian tribe.

Robert Kornfeld (playwright who is a Southerner-New Englander-New Yorker-stranger): As a writer I am a Bardist-Chekhovian-Ibsenesque-Faulknerite.

Sam Abrams: School of the Outer Boroughs / Whitman's Brooklyn Section.

Bryce Milligan: I am a Jack-of-all-Genres-Stateless-Servant-of-the-Muse. JGSSMs are the most common of all the writerly tribes, owing allegiance only to family, food, and creativity.

Katharine Weber: Maugham-Spark-Hazzard.

William Borden: Aristophanes-Cervantes-Rabelais-Fielding-Sterne-Cabell-Donleavy-Henry Miller.

Sanford Sternlicht: A cocktail of G. Manley Hopkins, John Masefield, Padraic Colum, and Henry Roth.

Lisa M. Steinman: The School of Stevens-arguing-with-Moore, anticipating Josephine Miles.

X. J. Kennedy: My literary lineage is from a long line of rhymesters and tub-thumpers.

A. D. Winans: The school of Blake, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Kaufman, and Charles Bukowski.

Richard J. Brenner: lyrical-rationalist, rational-lyricist.

Leonard S. Marcus: self-educated (school of Yale).

Harriet Zinnes: As a contemporary poet my literary lineage is hardly unusual: School of Dickinson-Pound-Stevens-Bishop-Ashbery-Bernstein.

Michael Lally: For prose, Shandy-Joyce-Rilke (that's right, his prose, especially The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge)-Rhys-Saroyan (William)-Kerouac! For poetry, Whitman-Williams-Cendrars-Rukeyser-Snyder-O'Hara.

Niles Goldstein: The School of Moses-Augustine-Dante-Melville-Hemingway-Faulkner-(Tennessee) Williams-Mishima.

Jules Older: I'm a direct descendent of the Joad-Doc-Spenser-Hawk clan.

Helen Duberstein: The tribe of Duras-Joyce-Genet-Woolf-G. Stein.

Edward Foster: Emersonian-by-way-of-Spicer-and-Bronk.

Arthur Gregor: My lineage is Bach, Stevens, Eliot, Frost, Dickinson, Bishop, and Rilke.

Catherine Hiller: Social satirists and sexual explorers: Austin/Lawrence/McCarthy/Updike-via Erica Jong!

Joan Crowell: Blake, Yeats, Léonie Adams, Szymborska, Billy Collins . . .

Elinor Lipman: Well . . . modesty aside: The Austen-Algonquin Tribe.

Eleanor Munro: Waves-out-of-Winesburg: a long Middlemarch-to-Originals.

Regina Weinrech: Beat generation: Twain-Blake-Dostoyevsky-Burroughs-Ginsberg-Kerouac.

Win Blevins: I see myself as continuing the work of those twentieth-century writers who strove best to understand American culture deeply, Bernard De Voto, and Wallace Stegner. If I could find a way to get the spirit of E. E. Cummings into my prose, I would.

Patricia Volk: I am a direct literary descendant of Thurber-Melville, who met cute in Litchfield County. On my father's side, it's Joyce Carey-Kingsley Amis, despite the fact grandpa hailed from Vilnius.

David Bergman: I consider myself one of the many sons of Howard-Richard Howard, that is, whose generosity, intelligence, and urbanity have inspired several generations. Of course, being a son of Howard means that your genetic material is English, French, and secularly Jewish, as well as deeply American. As his literary child, one finds oneself not "alone with America" but crowded by the world.

Lucy Ferriss: The School of Sappho-Sontag-Simones (Weil and de Beauvoir, that is)-the literary influences on a woman writer who does not want to be boxed into the domestic or nonpolitical sphere but seeks rather a female language of engagement.

Laura Newman: Tribe of Global Dreams-Chan-Gordimer-Payer-Shange-Sebald.

Sally Chappell: Count me in on the "Midwest Paeans: Cather-Sandburg-Least Heat-Moon tribe." (My latest book is a deep time study-from the Big Bang to the present-of a six-square-mile area in the heart of Illinois. Now a UNESCO World Monument site, this little-known American Indian city was larger than London in 1000 A.D.)

Marilyn Yalom: "feminist scholar."

Saul Bennet: As it happens, my second collection was titled "Harpo Marx at Prayer," but Groucho has been the driving Marx source for me. In sum, I'm: The School of Hopkins-Marx (Groucho)-Frank O'Hara.

Teres Svoboda: In fiction: as one of Lish's Ladies, I'm Defoe-Carpentier-Michaux-Spark. In poetry: the conglomerate of Eliot and Walcott (Elicott? or Waliot?) but definitely post-Empire, the tribe of When.

Vincent Katz: I am an Alexandrian-Augustan-Apollinaireian poet.

Beth Gutcheon: The query, I take it, doesn't allow for wishful thinking-not whom would you like to claim as lineal ancestors, but whose markers are you in fact exhibiting. Unfashionably, I'm afraid, it's Charles Dickens and Scott Fitzgerald, and wouldn't they be surprised to find themselves on a family tree together. (This seems to me to mean accessible social fiction, based on observation, data gathered from both inside and outside the temple but always with the outsider's eye.) As no writer would aspire to the late career of either one, I'm hoping I get to describe my own arc from here on out.

Arnold Kramish: My grandfather, Abram, was a roofer in Lubartow, then part of czarist Russia. Although illiterate, he was an accomplished fiddler. One day, Cossacks stormed into town, shooting all Jews in sight, including Abram, roofing. Verily, he was the "Fiddler on the Roof"! (The story was family lore long before the musical, and was recently confirmed by Lublin records.) Does this qualify as literary or musical lineage?

Eleanor Lerman: I'm a Cohenite, with a touch of Tate. When I was in my teens and writing wild poetry permeated by drugs, sex, and rock 'n' roll (which my teacher said was terrific, but too scary to read to the class at Far Rockaway High School), I happened upon The Spice-Box of Earth by Leonard Cohen in, of all places, a drugstore rack of books on Mott Avenue in Far Rockaway. I took it home and read it over and over again; from Cohen I learned discipline; I learned to write endings to poems and to respect the notion that beautiful language seemed all the more beautiful when it was set against a spare background. A year or two later, in the lost and lamented Eighth Street Bookstore in the Village, I came across The Oblivion Ha-Ha by James Tate, and from him I learned that humor can also be an integral part of poetry. Beauty, humor, and discipline: these two extraordinary poets gave me everything I needed to go on by myself into my own future as a poet.

Scott Hightower: I consider myself a third-generation Audenite. If I am not mistaken, when he was the judge of the Yale Younger Poets Prize, he selected Merwin, Merrill, Rich, Hollander, and Ashbery as young prizewinners. While I was an undergrad (I was born in 1952), these were the leading names of the day . . . along with Bishop, Hugo, Howard, and Ammons. Later McClatchy, Matthews, Corn, Heaney, and Ponsot became important to me. Notions of shaped and concrete poetry and syllabic poetry were also in the poetry landscape. Auden's formal historical breadth and his interest in a kind of "moral" poetry-the questions of the balance between the human to each other, god, and society (an intertwine of aesthetics and ethics)-were part of my first understandings of poetry. While part of my love is Shakespeare, Keats, H. D., Frost, Dickinson, and being an expanding contemporary working artist . . . first loves are always great loves. I often reread Auden's "The Dyer's Hand" and "Forewords and Afterwords" for "handles" on parsing other poets' visions and for keys to my own mysticism.

June Akers Seese: I came from a lower-class neighborhood where folks said what they meant. My father was from the South and came like many white and black men to Detroit to get a job on Ford's assembly line. Instead he worked with wood, putting glass in window sash at a company that stayed in business through the many recessions and the Great Depression. We had no books in the house on shelves, but The Grapes of Wrath and God's Little Acre lay under the mattress in the single bedroom. I slept on the studio couch in the living room and did a lot of listening. Those were the days of the razor strap being the ordinary means of holding children in line. I learned fast and kept my mouth shut. In high school, two teachers made their libraries available to me; and I got a job at 14 to save for college. In those days, getting pregnant was the kiss of death to any girl with ambition, so I became a cheerleader and ran the school paper though I hated sports and inky mimeo machines. College liberated me. A city college has folks from everywhere and Detroit had its marble public Library and the college library at Wayne State. Bliss. I became an English teacher and stayed in the city. Happy Days. I began writing fiction at 45 and am now 66 with 3 books to my credit and a stint at Yaddo. I hate bullshit, but there is so much of it around these days, one needs fishing waders to survive it. Writing is one way of telling the truth, compressing it, and remembering all the dialogue I heard all my life that really means something more than a surface description. I love my work and would never stick myself with a label. Though "irreverent" might do.

Nasdijj: You asked. My literary lineage is Athabaskan. I hear Changing Woman in my head. I listen to trees, rocks, deserts, crows, and the tongues of wind. I am Navajo and the European things you relate so closely to often simply seem alien and remote. I do not know them. What I know is the poetry of peyote, the songs of drums, and the dancing of the boy twins, Tobajishinchini and Neyaniinezghanii-Child Born for Water and Monster Slayer. They are warriors who sing everything I put on paper.

Robert Lima: I cannot claim adherence to any literary tribe, although I was a Greenwich Village and East Village café poet in the 1960s and read with the Beatniks, among many others (Blackburn, Levertov, Ignatow, Bly, Wakoski, etc.). But in those years I most admired Dylan Thomas (I visited his grave & the Boat House in Wales) and T. S. Eliot, along with García Lorca, Neruda and Borges (the latter three of whom I've translated & written criticism about). As for prose, I admit to having a long-term appreciation of Hemingway, about whom I wrote my senior paper in college, while on the Spanish side, I have read and taught works by the Generation of 1898, especially Valle-Inclán. All of these poets, playwrights, and prose writers have been and continue to be my touchstones.

Daniela Gioseffi: I'd say my literary lineage is Dickinson-Whitman-Millay by way of Hawthorne and Shakespeare. Where would Dickinson, Whitman, or Millay be without Hawthorne, the best of the earlier Americans of Concord, and Shakespeare, to whom anyone who writes in English must harken? As a girl of eleven, I memorized every great soliloquy and most of the sonnets of the Bard. Then at sixteen, I won a Forensic Society competition in school by reciting "Renaissance" by Edna St. Vincent Millay, who naturally thrilled a young girl's heart with her poetry and crafty sonnets. In college, Hawthorne's "Maypole of Marymount" became my favorite story-and should be studied by any American student, as it epitomizes the struggle of the American soul to escape Puritanism and hypocrisy-along with The Scarlet Letter. Next it was on to reading all of Dickinson and Whitman and being thrilled into becoming a writer myself.

Diane Ravitch: I count myself as an adherent of the School of Bagley/Kandel/Hutchins/Bestor/Orwell. William Chandler Bagley and Isaac Kandel were educators whose work was highly critical of present practice and whose voices were unjustly forgotten by the triumph in education of their professional adversaries; my work attempts to revive their ideas about standards, substance, and excellence. Robert Hutchins was the clear-thinking president of the University of Chicago, who wrote many books about education. Arthur Bestor wrote Educational Wastelands in the 1950s, a book that shook up education then and continues to be highly readable and credible (and relevant) today. All of these writers have shaped my own philosophy. George Orwell, of course, was known for telling unfashionable truths about his time. Orwell has shaped my dedication to writing clearly and forcefully.

Carol Frost: the school of Passionate Syntax, lineage through Donne, Blake, Dickinson, Hopkins, Yeats, Crane, Stevens, and Berryman.

James M. Nordlund: Quixotic, Thoreauesque, Dickinsonian, Thomasian, Nerudan, unbeat evolutionary, with hues of Goya, gestures of Morris, contours of Picasso, and tones of Kitaro; in a word, reality.

Aida E. Marcuse: Proust-Ionesco-Villon-Pedro Miguel Obligado.

Michele C. Cone: I worshipped at the altar of Harold Rosenberg and would like to be as good an autobiographer as Georges Perec in W ou le souvenir d'enfance.

Michael Andre: Pre-Anti-Post-Modernism. Not too many people know about pre-anti-post-modernism. It has been described as "anti-intellectual intellectualism." Pre-anti-post-modernist thugs would like to beat up post-modernists. "Dull!" they would scream, with each blow. "Dull!" The late twentieth century was at times modernist, at other times post-modernist. Upon these two bodies of literature has descended a multitude, a swarm of maggots. Corruption tingles the noses of the critics, of the maggot-watchers. They idle in daydreams of deconstruction. "Wake up!" shouts the thug. The thug is sensual and prophetic and righteous. He bops a critic of the post-modern on the head. The maggots are disturbed; they arise. The thug shouts: "The end was then! New is tomorrow!"

Carmen Boullosa: Pure chance has made me a woman, and my writing isn't marked by it. Still, I am very clear who my mothers are, though my fathers' identities are in doubt. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (the father might be Quevedo, or Nezahualcóyotl, or Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, or Góngora), Delmira Agustini (Rubén Darío or Whitman?), Teresa de la Parra (Stendhal or Proust?), Rosa Chacel (Ortega y Gasset or Clarín?), Silvina Ocampo (her close friend Borges, or her husband Bioy Casares?), and Elena Garro (her ex-husband Octavio Paz, or Juan Rulfo?). I could list more possible fathers. Fate decrees that mothers are clearly visible, and fathers remain blurry. No tribe. Some brothers (Fabio Morábito, Francisco Hinojosa). No sisters.

Shayla A. Hawkins: The writers who have most influenced (and the impact their work has had on) me are as boundless as the universe. But the following chain is a good model and beginning for my literary family tree: King David-King Solomon-Isaiah-Jeremiah-Ezekiel-Jonah-Nehemiah-St. Paul-St. John-Sophocles-Chaucer-Milton-Shakespeare-Donne-Herbert-Keats-Brontë (Emily)-Brontë (Charlotte) -Wheatley (Phillis)-Hardy-Poe-Yeats-Dickinson-Dunbar-Hughes (Langston)-Brooks-Hayden (Robert)-Cummings-Robinson (Edwin Arlington)-Cullen-Kafka-Nash-Miller (Arthur)-O'Neill- Williams (Tennessee)-Gibran-Neruda-García Márquez-Esquivel-Cleary-Bloom-Keene-Conford (Ellen)-Naylor-Angelou-Baca-Clifton (Lucille)-Lee (Harper)-Lee (Li-Young)-Wilson (August)-Giovanni (Nikki)-Hurston (Zora Neale)-Kingsolver-Morrison-Danticat (Edwidge)-Szymborska. I hope that someday my writing will be included in someone's literary lineage-and that it will be worthy of the inclusion.

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