Here's my letter of introduction: J.D. Salinger (Antonia White, Hemingway, Waugh, Pynchon, maybe Scott Spencer and a few dozen others) were the reasons why I became an English Major. I quickly realized that I had made a mistake.--you see I liked the pictures that the books left in my head and the thoughts they would start humming there, but I didn't like to disect, analyze, or apply the words. Anyway I learned to pretend and do well, but I started to dislike reading whereas before I would practically eat the words. In the middle of my senior year, during one particularly grueling Prof.'s class, I (not to use sloppy metaphors) literally stopped eating for a while--the thought of ingesting and the digestive noises that might thereafter occur in class had me terrified. One day Kurt Vonnegut walked into our classroom wearing an old gray suit, a pair of Reeboks circa. 1980 and smoking a "100's" cigarette. He told us that what he felt was the "best"(sorry) writer of his generation had been silent for some time, adn that he thought that Salinger was coming towards some kind of cosmic answer in his stories. The sheer audacity of the comment threw me. If a student had suggested this, he probably would have been bounced from the class. Needless to say, I ate an entire snickers bar during the discussion. The feeling quickly left, though, because the day after my Prof., being the oracle that he was, told us that in 100 years people would still remember Hemingway, but nobody would have an inkling of who Vonnegut was (Vonnegut had made the fatal mistake of saying that young Hemingway was relieved when the girl died in in love and war.) ---I'm sorry that I subjected everybody to this long and convoluted story, but I guess what I'm trying to get accross is that I'm excited that this list exists and I will eat many candy bars while I am reading it. Liz.