The Gods of Mars

"Who's your favorite author?" my students used to ask me, back in a previous lifetime when I taught literature classes.
"Oh, man," I would say. "You mean this week?"
But college students are relentless burrowers, thankfully, and they always compelled me to reply. At different times and places I answered Shakespeare, or Homer. Katherine Anne Porter, Faulkner, Frost or Robert Graves. Plato or Dante. Kyriacos Markides or Stephen King. Once I said the two great postwar American writers will turn out to be Annie Dillard and Joan Didion.
Another time, to dispel the creeping feeling that I was in some elitist way cultured, I replied William Burroughs.
But my answers to this embarrassing question seem superficial, at best. They scratch the surface; they skirt the real issue. I was indeed preoccupied with Shakespeare, at one time. But that changed. Later I dug into Stephen King, and later still, William Burroughs. They all have their value but provide it in different ways, at different times, to different people.
But when I'm asked, "What book changed your life?" that's a different question. The experience of reading is different from the idolatry of authors. I can tell you exactly what book changed my life.
I was 13 years old and sick with the flu. My mother was worried, I think, that I was sinking into a pit of boredom each day I was missing school. I liked to read, and so she stopped at the armory book sale and bought a beat-up old paperback for 10 cents and gave it to me.
It took me several days to tunnel through it. But during those days I had something like a visionary experience. I entered the book's landscapes, became attached to the characters and involved in their wars and narrow escapes.
In fact, the book virtually transported me to another planet - it was The Gods of Mars, a science fiction novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs. A story so pulpy it was actually a precursor (I later learned) of the pulp-fiction era by decades. Talk about a lack of culture. Burroughs!
After I read The Gods of Mars, I searched out and read the rest of Burroughs' Martian books, and also his Tarzan books. It was as if a tremendous rose blossomed in me while I was reading. It was as if a dimension of the cosmos opened to me and I could jump into it any time.
And these science fiction novels provided me not only with places to go, but also with an identity: I was part of a distinct group, the science fiction readers, and suddenly my childhood inclinations had a focus - The Gods of Mars taught me who I was.

From then on I knew I wanted to travel to, explore, inhabit and describe other worlds. And those dimensions were immediately available to me by delving in books. Some books, it so happens, outstrip others in dimensionality. This realization led me from Edgar Rice Burroughs' world of Barsoom to the introspective worlds of Hermann Hesse and the visionary worlds of John Lame Deer, and eventually to the multidimensional realities of Shakespeare, Plato, the Bible and quantum physics.
After a while, I started scraping my living together by teaching other people ways they might discover their identities, if not the deep dimensions of existence, in words. Imagine cultured college professors uncovering anything of value in Stephen King and Edgar Rice Burroughs. But every reader is different. No one can copy someone else's experiences by tagging along after the same set of writers. Each person finds his or her own home - and book.
Burroughs. The real question is not, "Who's your favorite author?" The real question involves your own deep inclination, and the words that link you to it.

Dana Wilde, a former English professor, U.S. Fulbright scholar and NEH fellow, holds a doctorate in English and now works as a news editor for the Bangor Daily News. His academic and other writings have appeared widely in national and international publications.