At the New York Times, Min Jin Lee looks back on the literature she grew up with, which included books by Theodore Dreiser, Nella Larsen, Thomas Hardy, and Frederick Douglass, and it they allowed her to see her own path to becoming a writer. “All those shelves of books had built my mind,” Lee writes, “teaching me how to shape a narrative about my people, from what they had lost and found. In life, even in my life, there was a coming-of-age, tragedy and meaning.”
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