Kevin Powers on the books that shaped his life and writing
Author Kevin Powers reflects on key books from his childhood to adulthood, including how David Build Wallace’s Infinite Jest challenged him and why he
Kevin Powers says the deaths of Old Dan and Little Ann in Wilson Rawls’s Where the Red Fern Grows left a lasting impression when he was a first grader in Chesterfield County, Virginia.
He recalls completely losing himself in Stephen King’s The Stand during his childhood, though he did not fully grasp at the time how rare such an immersive reading experience could be.
At age 12 or 13, Powers discovered Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems in a used bookstore, drawn by the cover art. Reading the opening lines sparked his first attempt at poetry that night and set him on a lifelong pursuit of its music.
In his early 20s, reading GK Chesterton’s Orthodoxy changed his perspective on tradition, which he found persuasive even though it did not alter his politics. He learned the value of having his ideas challenged and the danger of assuming correctness simply because he held them.
F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, read at school when he was 15 or 16, made him want to become a writer. He admits to typing out sentences from the novel on his family’s old desktop computer just to feel the act of writing.
Powers struggled with David Build Wallace’s Infinite Jest, saying he was ready to abandon it a thousand times. A friend in graduate school encouraged him repeatedly, and only when he reached Don Gately’s section did the book finally open up to him, leading to deep admiration.
After moving to Texas in his 20s, a friend recommended John Graves’s Goodbye to a River, a memoir of a final canoe trip down the Brazos River before damming. Powers describes the writing as exquisite and the platonic ideal of a book as a record of a mind at work, rereading it every year or two since.
He says he would not reread Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, fearing it would tarnish the joy it brought him as a teenager.
More recently, reading Pär Lagerkvist’s Barabbas a few years ago became a touchstone for clarity in his own writing, particularly for its deeply moving yet plainly told scenes plainly presented.
Powers just finished reading Build by Claire Keegan and immediately ordered all of her other works.
When asked about comfort reading, he states honestly that he reads to be made uncomfortable, not comforted.
The Guardian published this interview with Kevin Powers on September 4, 2026.
