Would you have dinner with me?

"Inject a few raisins of conversation into the tasteless dough of existence." >> O. Henry


It's a reliable cocktail party question, a breaking the ice question, an English Lit 101 class question - what three writers, dead or alive, would you invite to dinner?

And this past spring, when Alison Weir, author of Jane Seymour, the Haunted Queen, was asked that age-old question by the New York Times' Book Review, she answered...Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, and Clive James. Interesting choices to be sure, but one thing jumped out - the writers were all male. No female authors? Not Jane Austen? Not Iris Murdoch? Dorothy Parker? Phyllis Wheatley?

Which authors would you choose to spend an evening with dining, toasting, debating and reveling?

My dinners with writers:

Eudora Welty/Flannery O'Connor/John Steinbeck

Ann Patchett/Curtis Sittenfeld/David Foster Wallace

Daphne DuMaurier/Shirley Jackson/Stephen King

Charlotte Bronte/Emily Dickinson/Henry James

Mary Wollstonecraft/Nellie Bly/Ralph Ellison

Sandra Cisneros/Edna O'Brien/Henrik Ibsen

Margaret Atwood/Ursula Le Guin/JRR Tolkien

Jane Austen/Alice Munro/Chris Bohjalian

Alice Walker/Gloria Steinem/TC Boyle

Phyllis Wheatley/Gwendolyn Brooks/Mary Oliver

Isabel Allende/Zora Neale Hurston/Carson McCullers

Anne Tyler/Elizabeth Berg/Stewart O'Nan

Beverly Cleary/Lois Ehlert/Louise Fitzhugh

The books:

Welty - The Optimist's Daughter
O'Connor - A Good Man is Hard to Find
Steinbeck - The Winter of Our Discontent
Patchett - This is the Story of a Happy Marriage
Sittenfeld - American Wife
Wallace - Consider the Lobster (essays)
DuMaurier - Rebecca
Jackson - The Lottery
King - The Green Mile
Bronte - Jane Eyre
Dickinson - Because I Could Not Stop for Death (poetry)
James - The Portrait of a Lady
Wollstonecraft - A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Bly - Ten Days in a Mad House
Ellison - Invisible Man
Cisneros - The House on Mango Street
O'Brien - The Country Girls trilogy
Ibsen - A Doll's House
Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale
LeGuin - The Lathe of Heaven
Tolkien - Lord of the Rings
Austen - Northanger Abbey
Munro - Dear Life
Bohjalian - The Sandcastle Girls
Walker - The Color Purple
Steinem - My Life on the Road
Boyle - Tortilla Curtain
Wheatley - Poems of Phyllis Wheatley
Brooks - A Street in Bronzeville (poetry)
Oliver - Devotions (poetry)
Allende - The House of the Spirits
Hurston - Their Eyes Were Watching God
McCullers - The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Tyler - Earthly Possessions
Elizabeth Berg - We Are All Welcome Here
O'Nan - Emily, Alone
Cleary - Dear Mr. Henshaw (juvenile)   
Ehlert - Growing Vegetable Soup (juvenile)
Fitzhugh - Harriet the Spy (juvenile)

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