Last year and through spring I started a series here at Liberty Island and at my “Mad Tab” personal blog highlighting the novelists and non-fiction culture/history writers who I regarded as “essential” for myself and recommend to the writers with whom I collaborate.

Here are the writers I’ve featured thus far and a fun video presenting one of the coolest ideas from the last one listed:

  1. Andrew Klavan
  2. Camille Paglia
  3. James Wasserman
  4. Douglas Rushkoff
  5. Ayaan Hirsi Ali
  6. Andrew Breitbart
  7. Ben Shapiro
  8. Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa
  9. Glenn Reynolds
  10. Howard Bloom

Come join us next Tuesday for the first installment in this new series — the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides — and then check out new posts in the coming weeks and months on:

  • Paul Johnson
  • Robert Anton Wilson
  • Tevi Troy
  • Lewis Carroll
  • Aleister Crowley
  • Neil Gaiman
  • Frank S. Meyer
  • John Dee
  • Barry Rubin
  • Leszek Kolakowski
  • James C. Bennett and Michael Lotus
  • Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  • Raymond Chandler
  • Allan Bloom
  • William Strauss and Neil Howe
  • Thomas Sowell
  • William F. Buckley, Jr.
  • Gary Lachmann
  • Virginia Woolf
  • Reinaldo Arenas
  • Michael Walsh
  • Edward Jay Epstein
  • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  • William Shakespeare
  • Rudyard Kipling
  • Frederick Douglass
  • Niccolo Machiavelli
  • Ray Kurzweil
  • G. K. Chesterton
  • C.S. Lewis
  • J.R.R. Tolkien
  • Alejandro Jodorowsky
  • Sun Tzu
  • Goethe
  • Kay Redfield Jamison
  • Theodore Dalrymple
  • Richard Brookhiser
  • Michael Barrier
  • Saul Bellow
  • Grant Morrison
  • Tom Wolfe
  • John Waters
  • (More authors to be added as I feel like it.)

I’ll be explaining in brief why each writer’s work strikes me as useful for counterculture conservative creatives and how they have influenced my worldview. This is not a complete list yet, rather just some key favorites off the top of my head. More will be added and links inserted as each receives an entry.

Which other authors should be included as essential study for today’s aspiring authors? Submit a 200-700 word blog post or 701-1600 word essay to [email protected]