35 Writers Who Have Influenced Me Most

Yes, that will be 35 blue ribbons, please.

Fiction writers, essayists, pulpsters, playwrights, comic book writers, literary gods and genre hacks, famous and not, they all have one thing in common -- they have influenced either my writing style, writing life, writing career, or most likely some combination of the three. 

NOTE: This is not an endorsement of these writers' beliefs or viewpoints necessarily, just a comment on their storytelling influence on me.  

1. Ernest Hemingway
2. Raymond Carver
3. Ed McBain
4. C.S. Lewis
5. Shusaku Endo
6. Philip Yancey
7. Annie Dillard
8. Flannery O'Connor
9. Ray Bradbury
10. Robert Heinlein
11. John Fischer
12. Chuck Dixon
13. Steve Seagle
14. Shakespeare
15. Neil Gaiman
16. e.e. cummings
17. Frank Fradella
18. T.S. Eliot
19. Zora Neal Hurston
20. Langston Hughes
21. Dashiell Hammett
22. Raymond Chandler
23. Christa Faust
24. Donald Westlake
25. H. Rider Haggard
26. Bobby Nash
27. Edgar Rice Burroughs
28. Ed Brubaker
29. Chris Yost
30. Devin Grayson
31. Henrick Ibsen
32. Tennessee Williams
33. Garth Ennis
34. Warren Ellis
35. Tom Waltz