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 Richard
Peck
The literature of our childhood
becomes our lifelong luggage. I believe Alice in
Wonderland was the first book to change my life,
thought I don't think I've yet read it right through.
My mother read it to me when I was five. She read to
me sedulously, having no intention of sending off an
ignoramus to first grade. One afternoon my aunt came
in and said to her, "What are you reading to him?"
"Alice in Wonderland,"
my mother said.
"What's it about?" my aunt asked.
"I wish I knew," my mother answered.
I was struck dumb. At five I thought my mother knew
everything. If there were depths in books that even
she hadn't plumbed, that was the life for me.
In grade school when I was reading for myself, Robert
Benchley was my author-of-choice. Where I found his
essays I can't imagine. But they made me long to be
a confused bachelor who lived in New York and dressed
for dinner. That he was confused by alcohol got past
me, which only proves that reading can never corrupt
a child.
But more profoundly, Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi
was the book that really changed my life. It didn't
make me want to be a riverboat pilot; it made me want
to be a writer. It even gave a kind of fugitive permission.
Mark Twain could make poetry out of the prosaic midsection
of America where I was growing up. From Mark Twain I
learned that humor is anger sent to finishing school.
I got a career of my own out of that.
Richard Peck
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