Analysis and Response
In this article originally published in The New York Times, on January 9, 1983, Marshall is discussing how she became a writer and what her influences were. Some of her influences were conventional:
I was sheltered from the storm of adolescence in the Macon Street Library, reading voraciously, indiscriminately, everything from Jane Austen to Zane Grey, but with a special passion for the long, full-blown, richly detailed 18th and 19th century picaresque tales: Tom Jones, Great Expectations, Vanity Fair, (6)
Elsewhere she mentions other famous white writers: Czeslaw, Milosz, Flannery O’Connor, Thackeray, Fielding, and Dickens. However, Marshall’s ...