tsuwm > "was this really the sort of stuff I read during my formative years?" (which I take to mean those writers and that work that profoundly influenced my use and abuse of language today)

These are the books, more or less in order my Father chose from his library when I asked for grown up books. I was about 10-year-old.
Conan Doyle's "The Complete Sherlock Holmes" unabridged.
1. The short stories of Guy de Maupassant.
2. Agatha Christie "Ten Little Indians" (I remember reading that during summer)
3. "Les Miserables"
Those books were wedged between school and all the reading required by the Good Sisters.which included poets Wordsworth, Longfellow, Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice" and "MacBeth" The Old and New Testaments, et al)
Then about age 14 (1943) a leap into a lot of the war-experience books prevalent at the time : authors I cannot recall
4. "My Three Interview with Hitler"
5. "Guadalcanal Diary"
6. Rickenbacher's survival story "200 (?) Days On A Raft" number of days may be wrong. I'm sure 7 and 8 too were war stories.
9. "Madame Bovary (at about age 16 ... a lesson in morality???)
10. The sonnets of Shakespeare and Lord Byron's poems ....
And I was off and running!