![]() Of course, as a Mormon teenager-as a young priest who had to bless the sacrament every week-I also recognized that my identification with Hemingway’s or Steinbeck’s characters could only go so far. No Great War or Depression altered my life’s direction. Both works, with their settings in places far distant from the bland Ohio suburb I called home, made me long for some regional or international tragedy-some event that would narrow the distance between my life and that of Frederic Henry or Tom Joad. In those days, my favorite novels were Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. When I began taking literature seriously as a teenager, these encounters with characters so different from me and my surroundings were at once exciting and, for an awkward Mormon kid, somewhat perilous. ![]() ![]() Frequently, fiction provides readers with an opportunity to encounter difference. ![]()
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