David Hudson passes along this list of books that notables fell in love with in college. While Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban’s plaudits for Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead are preposterously predictable (“I don’t know how many times I have read it, but it got to the point where I had to stop because I would get too fired up”), but it’s interesting that George Saunders was such a big Thomas Wolfe fan.

Surpisingly, however, there’s no Orwell for Hitch.

As for me, the writers that blew me away when I was a lad of twenty-one (and that I discovered in the library almost entirely by accident) were John Cheever (which I liked for his attention to manners), Erskine Caldwell (which I liked for the sex), Guy de Maupassant (which I liked for the sex and the twist endings), the stories of Somerset Maugham (who led me to de Maupassant) and Thomas Wolfe (which, like Saunders, I enjoyed for his heartiness).

What authors did you discover or read in your undergraduate days?

[UPDATE: Jenny D lists her choices, a far more impressive selection than mine.]