Exactly. Like Huckleberry Finn, the American writer must make the choice, sooner or later, between serving the powerful few or the disorganized many, the institutions of domination or the spontaneous, instinctive, natural drive for human liberation. The choice is not so easy as my loaded phrases make it seem: to serve the powerful leads to financial rewards, public approval and official honors, your picture on the cover of Time and Newsweek (or Pravda and Izvestia) and the eventual invitation to a White House (or Kremlin) dinner; to oppose the powerful creates difficulties, subjects you to abuse and scorn, leads often—as in the interesting case of Noam Chomsky, for example—to what we call the silent treatment in the literary press: your books are not reviewed; your views and reviews no longer appear in the New York Times or the New York Review of Books.

What is the author’s proper role? How should the writer view his art? Speaking for myself now, perhaps only for myself, this is what I believe. This is what I tell the young. Call it one writer’s credo:

Ignore the literary critics. Ignore the commercial hustlers. Disregard those best-selling paperbacks with embossed covers in the supermarkets and the supermarket bookstores. Waste no time applying for gifts and grants—when we want money from the rich we’ll take it by force.

A literary career should be not a career but a passion. A life. Fueled in equal parts by anger and love. How feel one without the other? Each implies the other. A writer without passion is like a body without a soul. Or what would be even more grotesque, like a soul without a body.

There is a middle way between subserving the mass market and pandering to our Jamesian castrati literati. You do not have to write endless disquisitions about computer science professors seeking God while pursuing faculty wives. You do not have to write about male mutilation, lesbians in bearskins, Toyota dealers or self-hating intellectuals longing for hierarchy to work and live happily as a writer in America, God bless her such as she is.

You do not need to be analyzed, psychoanalyzed, Rolfed, e-s-t-ed, altered, gelded, neutered, spayed, fixed, acupunctured, Zenned, Yogied, New Aged, astrocharted, computerized, megatrended, and rogynized, evangelized, converted or even, last and least, to be reborn. One life at a time, please.

What is both necessary and sufficient—for honest literary work—is to have faith in the evidence of your senses and in your common sense. To be true to your innate sense of justice. To be loyal to your family, your clan, your friends and—if you’re lucky enough to have one—your community. (Let the nation-state go hang itself.) Among the Americans, read Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Henry Thoreau, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, B. Traven, Thomas Wolfe, John Steinbeck, Nelson Algren and Dr. William Carlos Williams. For example. Emulate them until you find others emulating you. And then go on.

Why write? How justify this mad itch for scribbling? Speaking for myself, I write to entertain my friends and to exasperate our enemies. I write to record the truth of our time as best as I can see it. To investigate the comedy and tragedy of human relationships. To oppose, resist and sabotage the contemporary drift toward a global technocratic police state, whatever its ideological coloration. I write to oppose injustice, to defy power and to speak for the voiceless.