All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
Like every child growing up in America, I read 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' and 'Huckleberry Finn.' I liked them well enough, but I didn't love them.
I'm more comfortable weaving Indian flavors into American classics.
Alas, those six unfortunate souls who have made their way through my books know that every one of them is about Emerson and Thoreau and their dark counters, Melville and Emily Dickinson. Try as I might, I can't get their inspirations, their challenges and sentences and wisdom and questions out of my head.
I really like musicals - 'The Music Man,' 'Oklahoma!,' 'Li'l Abner,' 'Annie Get Your Gun.'
I lived an idyllic 'Huckleberry Finn' life in a tiny town. Climbing trees. Tagging after brothers. Happy. Barefoot on my pony. It was 'To Kill a Mockingbird'-esque.
Everyone has a first love, and mine was the western. When I was a child and dreamed of the movies, it was always as a cowboy on a white horse.
Field of Dreams is probably our generation's It's A Wonderful Life.
But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.
I come from Kansas; we're steak-and-potato boys. I grew up on meat.
I'm really influenced by Southern novelists, not many movie people. More like John Faulkner, William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Flannery O'Connor, John Steinbeck, and people like that.
For me, when you are talking about perfect songs, you're talking about Gershwin, 'Someone To Watch Over Me.' Or Larry Hart and Richard Rodgers. Or some of the great Cole Porter songs, whether it's 'Night and Day' or some of the comedy songs. Or Irving Berlin, of course.
The sights and sounds and smells, the whole genre of Westerns - I love them.
I've been singing Rodgers and Hammerstein all my life.
The best American writers have come from the hinterlands -- Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Steinbeck. Most of them never even went to college.
