Susan Rubin Suleiman is a Professor of Romance and Comparative Literature at Harvard University and most recently the author of Budapest Diary. When asked about books which had influenced her, Ms. Suleiman responded with the following brief essay: "How does a young Hungarian girl become an American teenager?" I was 11 years old when I arrived in the U.S., knowing no English but wanting very much to be American. Books were both my passion and my best teachers in that process. Besides Little Lulu and Archie comics, or Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, which I consumed in huge doses, my education into Americanness was accomplished by Little Women and its sequels, Little Men and Jo's Boys; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; Gone With the Wind ; and a long narrative poem about the Civil War by Stephen Vincent Benet, "John Brown's Body." The world they represented, of small towns, clapboard houses and close-knot families, even if ripped apart by war, appealed immensely. "How does an American teenager become a Francophile intellectual?" At 17, I went off to college in New York and discovered the wide world again; suddenly, I realized that it was acceptable for an American to look toward Europe, my first home, for inspiration. Among my favorite books during the next four years, all read "outside of class," were Simone de Beauvoir's autobiographies, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter and The Prime of Life ; Thomas Mann's novels The Magic Mountain and Dr. Faustus ; and the collected poems of W. B. Yeats. Although very different from each other, all of these writers were immensely learned, with a strong awareness of contemporary history and a sense that writers had social responsibility. I thrilled to that. Return to the Writers Read List

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