Source: Chicago Tribune [C Edition], 27 May 1991, v-- n-- p1

For all censorious parents who fear their children will be contaminated by exposure to such wicked writers as Judy Blume, Stephen King, V.C. Andrews and J.D. Salinger, my advice is this: Forget it. With any luck, your children will devour not only their books but those by other authors considered even more injurious to young and restless minds.

Based on my own adolescent reading habits, I suppose I have no business giving advice to anyone, parent or child. Even so, I will rashly hold myself up as an example, however imperfect. In the sordid excesses of my boyhood, there might be a perverse lesson in how good things can happen to readers of bad books.

Although the author's name has forever escaped me, I can hazily remember the title of the first book that really turned me on to reading, for reasons that were not remotely literary. It was "The Sailor's Revenge" (not to be confused with that other notorious but apochryphal book from the same era, "The Tiger's Revenge").

I can also recall the publisher: Gold Medal, whose reliably low-quality paperbacks made up the bulk of my friends' and my leisure reading then. While the cover could never deliver a fraction of what it so luridly promised, the novel had enough sleaze, violence and sex to satisfy our tastes in what might recklessly be called literature.

That was the crude awakening. In those impressionable days, my (male) companions and I consumed several megatons of raw and mostly unredeeming pulp. Among the gospels in our soiled and dog-eared canon were Erskine Caldwell's "God's Little Acre," Irving Shulman's "The Amboy Dukes" and Mickey Spillane's "I, the Jury" (plus almost everything else from the oeuvre of that bullet-headed godfather of dum-dum prose).

Perhaps the most affecting was "Knock on Any Door," Willard Motley's melodramatic tragedy about Nick Romano, the baby-faced Chicago punk whose credo was: "Live fast, die young, and have a good-looking corpse." Motley may have given us a romanticized vision of slum life, but his novel had an impact that Theodore Dreiser's "Sister Carrie," Richard Wright's "Native Son" and James T. Farrell's "Studs Lonigan" must have had on earlier generations.

By that point, something was stirring deep within our teenage hearts and minds besides hormones. Along with snooker and girls, we had acquired a voracious passion for books. In consuming so much junk fiction, it was perhaps inevitable that we would graduate to slightly more nourishing fare, from historical sagas (James Street's "Tap Roots") to war novels (Leon Uris' "Battle Cry").

Whether by caprice or design, my mother was also feeding my habit. As an alternative to "Mary Noble, Backstage Wife" and the other radio soap operas that filled those interminable afternoons when I was home sick from school, she brought me stacks of library books: Herman Wouk's "The Caine Mutiny," Morton Thompson's "Not as a Stranger" and Henry Bellamann's "King's Row," a pre-"Peyton Place" excursion into small-town sadism and dementia.

Midway through high school, I inadvertently fell under the influence of Pearl Brown, who taught a course in remedial English. It wasn't so much her classroom manner, best described as meekly authoritarian, as the reading list that she force-fed us. Thanks to her, I discovered the glory that was Whitman, the grandeur that was Poe (the mere mention of whose name still makes me want to stand up and recite: "Helen thy beauty is to me/Like those Nicean barks of yore. ...").

Reluctant as I was to admit it to my fellow incorrigibles, I found myself absorbed by Willa Cather's "My Antonia," Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' "The Yearling," Mark Twain's "The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson" and Sinclair Lewis' "Main Street" (admittedly a letdown after the provincial sensationalism of "King's Row").

By that wayward but serendipitous route, I got hooked on classics, without ever losing my appetite for less exalted literature (the work of such superior trash merchants as Irwin Shaw and Elmore Leonard, for instance). And to a large extent, books have provided me with a living, though it isn't an occupation that I'd recommend to anyone who assumes that graduation means an end to book reports, term papers and other forms of homework.

Despite Mark Twain's famous injunction at the outset of "Huckleberry Finn," it may be prudent to draw a moral here: Whatever your children want to read, try not to discourage them. Otherwise, they are in grave danger of being permanently seduced by TV, video games and other unnatural pursuits. If that happens, they are all a lost generation.

Full text © Chicago Tribune Co., 27 May 1991