I learned a whole heck of a lot of trivia and quite a few life attitudes from John D. MacDonald's books--not just the Travis McGee novels, but his other stories as well. His characters were/are real.

There is a sentence in Michener's Drifters that impressed me a great deal, and still reminds me not to judge people by their surface persona. After a couple of hundred pages of consistently portraying the narrator as a serious Establishment wimp, Michener has him say, in a casual throw-away comment, something about "the last time I ran with the bulls [in Pamplona, Spain]". One sentence, yet it changed the way I thought about that character and his comments for the rest of the book. It's my understanding that the narrator (whose name escapes me, sorry) was patterned on Michener himself. I read that novel when I was about the same age as his characters, and Lord, I wanted to go buy a yellow pop-top Volkswagen bus and go to Europe! (I'm still thinking maybe one of these days...)

All Mary O'Hara's horse books: Thunderhead, My Friend Flicka, Green Grass of Wyoming, Walter Farley's Black Stallion stories, and Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf and The Dog Who Wouldn't Be. And of course The Yearling, already mentioned.

Actually, I can't recall any one book that "influenced" me. I think the fact that I've always read everything I could get my hands on is the "influence" you're asking about. There have been many, many worlds I've taken part in through books that I wouldn't have been able to touch any other way.

Thanks for the memory tweak, Peter T.

Lin