My dad was a railroad engineer who became a contractor, and my mom was a waitress and became a teacher. I have been reading and writing for about sixty of my over seventy one years, never published, other than newspaper essays and letters. Some day I will transcribe my six pounds of poems and self-publish a tome...I like: John Steinbeck, Richard Henry Dana, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Vincent Benet, Jack Kerouac, Robert Penn Warren, Carson McCullers, Richard Brautigan, Robert Frost, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Pearl S. Buck, Henry Roth, and many more. 

Most of my citations are for my photography.