Sure, everyone's read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and hopefully loved it but have they recognized the incredible range that Mark Twain produced?

Brilliant novels, from gritty realism to outlandish time-travel; incisive essays, including some remarkable travel writing; and a gift for epigrams both hilarious and wise.

I only hope that all those gay men whining about turning 30 end up nearly as well as Gore Vidal.

At the age of 73, he's just released his latest novel and a new production of his political satire, The Best Man, opened on Broadway in the fall of 2000.

His United States essays are required reading for anyone. They're witty, entertaining and provocative -- much like the man himself.

While I thrill to Allen Ginsberg's passionate ravings and marvel at William S. Burrough's dark imaginings, Jack Kerouac is the only member of the holy Beat trinity with whom I feel some kinship.

Poor Jack -- a lapsed Catholic desperate for sensation and salvation. "I want to see God," he'd assert and tried to find Him in Zen Buddhism, writing, travel, drugs, sex, jazz and, sadly, ultimately, the bottle. But he got it all down and took the reader on the road with him, with his rambling tales of desperation and wonder.

Barbara Ehrenreich has been hailed as "smart, provocative, funny and sane in a world that needs more of all four." Reading her essay collection, The Snarling Citizen, was like a splash of cold water on a hot day -- brisk and necessary.

"I am forced to admit that the difference between a religion and a cult is chiefly a matter of size. Forty-eight people donning plastic bags and shooting themselves in the head is a 'cult', while a hundred million people bowing before a flesh-hating elderly celibate is obviously a world-class religion."

As America struggled towards its Day of Independence, Thomas Paine led the charge with clear-headed and passionate leaflets condemning religious and governmental oppression. In short, the first political journalist.

When the author of The Rights of Man has been deemed the spiritual father of both America itself (by Thomas Edison, no less) and the Internet (by Wired magazine), one must pay attention.

His motto was then shocking, now simple: "My country is the world and my religion is to do good."

Anyone who's ever felt caught between the demands of the head and the heart will thrill to reading Paul Monette.

When I voraciously read through Becoming a Man and Last Watch of the Night, they blazed with his crisp intelligence and wit, enhanced -- not distracted -- by flashes of simmering rage and generous joy.

"To have greatly loved is to sail without ballast -- with neither chart nor cargo, not bound for the least of kingdoms. Nothing remains, except this being free."

Michael Rowe is the one person on this list I've had the good fortune to meet and consider a friend.

I read his masterful interview collection, Writing Below the Belt, right when I needed the wisdom it contains (notably Pat Califia!) and Looking for Brothers is inspiring journalism.

"Every time someone sits down with a writer and tells him their story, they are offering it up to the larger world and trusting the writer to tell it honestly...It's not a privilege I have ever taken for granted."

George Orwell would make my list merely for writing 1984. Or for writing Animal Farm, a satire too sharp for T.S. Eliot, who refused to publish it. He might even make the list for bravely writing about his own poverty in Down and Out in London and Paris.

That he wrote all three, along with all his essays and articles, makes him a legendary inspiration. As critic Lionel Trilling observed, Orwell embodies the "virtue of not being a genius, of fronting the world with nothing more than one's simple, direct, undeceived intelligence."

Jessica Mitford hasn't achieved the posterity of novelist sister Nancy but her funeral industry expose The American Way of Death led Time to appoint her "Queen of the Muckrakers." Her annotated collection of articles, Poison Penmenship, wickedly spares no one -- not even herself:

"I wish I could point to some overriding socal purpose to these articles; the sad truth is that the best I can say for them is that I got pleasure from mocking these enterprises and the individuals who profit from them."

I've met Dan Savage and I smile at how someone so nice in person can be so deliciously mean in his Out and Savage Love columns.

"It's true, I am mean -- just mean enough to be entertaining, not mean enough to harm anyone."

That said, his adoption memoir The Kid: How my boyfriend and I decided to go get pregnant is not only mean and funny but surprisingly heartwrenching.

Stephen McCauley writes bittersweet novels about people who just haven't got the knack of life yet.

The Easy Way Out had a profound impact on me and I love this bit from The Man of the House:

"The depressing part was, I was stuck with what I'd made myself into and I couldn't pretend that it was only a matter of minutes before I turned everything around and started getting expensive haircuts and flattering eyeglasses. Some things have to be hammered out in youth. Past the age of thirty-three, no one ever becomes stylish or takes up smoking or develops a passion for John Steinbeck."

Here's Stephen King at his most widely-quoted: "I have seen the future of horror and his name is Clive Barker."

King wasn't kidding -- The Books of Blood contain some of the most horribly visceral and darkly sensual images I've ever come across -- but who knew that Clive wouldn't stop there?

His novel, Sacrament, astonished me with its compassion, humour and soul and his genre-busting has extended to film, painting, even video games.

Barker's own future may not be in horror but I can't wait to see it.

Christopher Hitchens appears to believe in the adage that the pen is mightier than the sword and he uses his to fight dragons. And not just any dragons, but big dragons that no one else wants to deal with or sometimes even see.

The Chinese government. The Pope. President Clinton. Even Mother Theresa, for which one critic said, "If there is a hell, then Hitchens is going there for this book [Missionary Position].

A hard man to like. An easy man to admire.

His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, is another religious leader loathed by Hitchens (here's why) but I'm including him on my list of writers for creating two marvelous books, Ethics for the New Millennium and The Art of Happiness, that have engaged and inspired me.

One is a quasi-political tract, the other a quasi-self-help book, but both are insightful and uplifting and they glow with the man's own warm rationality and compassion.

Beats the hell out of anything the Pope's come up with...

Henry James once told Edith Wharton that he read Walt Whitman in "a mood of subdued ecstasy." Now who am I to argue with Henry James?

Some critics have tried to paint Whitman as a sentimentalist but that's a weak dismissal of the sheer soul-stirring power that some of his poems have.

Reading Whitman makes one feel truly alive, overflowing with possibilities, and one poem in particular -- Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances -- speaks to me like nothing else.