Serious literature has always been important to me. I am the generation that found James Joyce, T.S. Elliot, W.H. Auden, Hesse, Rilke, Dylan Thomas, May Sarton, William Blake, Joseph Campbell, Virginia Woolf, Edward Albee, Arthur Miller, Eugene ONeil, J.M Synge, Gertrude Stein and tons of others as my affirming voices in a materialistic world that ignored the human condition and made wealth, power, sex, war, greed and much more their priorities. Being "serious" was essential to life.