Which author or literary character would you most want to be - and why?

Do you really need to ask?
The name is Bond, James Bond.

But how do you like your martinis, Bond?

Vodka of course , and shaken not stirred.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be Huck Finn, or one of the kids in Swallows and Amazons.

Both represented a freedom from convention, adventure on the water without privation.

Later, I’d have to say Sam Spade.

Superman, because Superman.

Q

Ursula K LeGuin. So talented, so accomplished, so wise!

Character: Edmond Dantes

Author: Herman Hesse

Author – Alistair Maclean
Character – Fletcher Christian

(@Crow – I didn’t say you had to write a novel in the style of your authorganger!)

Dr. Seuss

This is a great question and tough to answer as there are so many tough choices. Right off the bat, I’d say I’d like to be Jonathan Livingston Seagull. He had it all figured out… and he could fly.

I think it would have been great to be Martha Gelhorn, Ernest Hemingway’s third wife. She was incredibly smart, good-looking, talented, had an indomitably independent spirit, and eventually had the respect of her professional and social peers. And she had better ethics and much bigger balls than her husbands. She was a better journalist than he and, unlike Hem, actually was reporting from the front lines during the Spanish Civil War, the Japanese invasion of China, and the resultant civil war led by Chian Kai Shek on one side and Mao Zhedong (or however they spell it nowadays) on the other. She was welcome for tea and interviews with both Chiang and Mao, and gave good balanced reportage during that conflict. She later was one of the few western journalists Mao would allow an interview to.

She covered WWII after D-Day and the liberation of the camps in Germany, the progress of the Marshall Plan, the Korean War, the Berlin Airlift, and the War in Viet Nam. She’d met Ho Chi Minh through Mao during the Japanese occupation and was able to interview him during the Viet Nam war. Because of this and her refusal too totally demonize Mao, she fell out of favour with her long-time US editors and moved to London in the 1960’s. She had this amazing life and dedication as a journalist that many around her didn’t. She seemed to also be very much in control of it, which was difficult to do, I think, as a independent woman of her time, professional free-lance journalist, war correspondent and travel writer. I think the reason she is nearly unheard of in the States is because of her reportage from Nam. She criticised the war from early on and you just didn’t do that in those days. If she is known at all, it is as Hem’s third wife, and she hated that. There was so much more to her and if the subject was ever brought up in interviews, she would end it right then and there.

I think it would be cool to be King Solomon from the OT for a couple of years.

I’d like to have been Bertram Thomlinson, an American journalist, travel writer, art critic, and art procurer for American museums and private collections in Montmartre from about 1875 to 1914, then move operations to Montparnasse from 1914 to May, 1939, the latter Belle Epoche through the end of the Third Republic—and know what I know now. Being a buyer would put me in the catbird seat with many of my all-time favourite artists, musicians and writers, since there is no way my artistic talents could compare to theirs.

There are so many more great people and fictional characters I’d to be or be close to when things happened…

Sorry, bebe, you shouldn’t ask such stimulating questions on such slow nights!

P.S. Since when is our Spell Check British?

Writer – Sylvia Plath.

Charachter – Miss Havisham.

Oh my @ZEPHYRA – nobody happier?

Jim Digriz
aka: Slippery Jim
aka: The Stainless Steel Rat

Gertrude Stein’s brother, Leo.

@Espiritus_Corvus I’ll be Gertrude and you can be Leo. We’ll have such fun buying art!

And our Salon would be always packed with the most interesting people, and Ms. Tokla’s fine cooking. And those special cookies for that California Goose Rancher when she shows up.

Not exactly a literary character but, I am madly in love with Gary Larson & The Far Side works. His humor is brilliant and so out of the box, the best and funniest cartoonist of all time.
His characters and wit are unmatched!

Joseph Heller / Yossarian

Yossarian lives!

@Coloma The one I remember most was the cows in the pasture standing around on their hind legs talking and the one near the road yelling, “CAR!” Larson was good.

@Espiritus_Corvus My favorite, amongst multiples, is the cat plastered to the window surveying a wreck between two trucks..” Bobs assorted rodents” and “Als small flightless birds.” LMAO!

Dirty Harry. I realized recently that I’m more and more like him.

I must split my answer:

Author – Victor Hugo

Character – Lady Arwen of Rivendell (from The Lord Of the Rings)

For some reason I read this as ‘most want to meet’. I finally came up with an author I want to meet (there are so many, it took me a while to narrow it down) and now I read the question correctly!