by deadwhitemale » October 3rd, 2009, 4:21 am
I first started reading Lewis around 1979-1980, when I was 22 going on 23. George Macdonald and Charles Williams I was pretty directly led to by Lewis, some time later. Chesterton? Maybe, though far less directly, and rather more recently.
Eddison I was led to more by Fritz Leiber. Clark Ashton Smith and Lovecraft I discovered independently of Lewis -- indeed, long before I first read Lewis. I think I discovered Dunsany independently too. Perhaps I was pointed to them by Robert E. Howard, or Leiber.
Tolkien I was deliberately introduced to (via The Hobbit) by a seventh grade teacher, when I was about twelve. I started reading the Trilogy at about age 13 or 14, starting out of proper order, "in the middle of things" with The Two Towers.
Oddly enough, I was first led to read Shakespeare (voluntarily) by two essays I read about the same time -- one by Lewis, "Hamlet: the Prince or the Poem?" and the other by Fritz Leiber, about King Lear -- in the very early Eighties. Previously, in the early-to-middle Seventies, I had been so put off Shakespeare by the way it was taught and presented in high school, that I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole for years.
As well, I am sure I was first led to at least look up some classical and medieval authors by Lewis.
DWM
"It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun." -- Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim(1899?)