Best books…chosen by Jeff Daniels

Screen and stage actor Jeff Daniels is a two-time Emmy winner who was Tonynominated for his turn as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. Daniels has created a new audio memoir, Alive and Well Enough, that’s available exclusively on Audible.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967). I read Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece last fall. What a magnificent imagination he had. The stories he tells here, and the way he weaves them through several generations, will always mark this novel as a majestic achievement.

The Civil War: A Narrative by Shelby Foote (1958–74). To play Civil War hero Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain in Gettysburg, I devoured Shelby Foote’s trilogy. A quote from Foote has been on my office wall for years: “I’m privately convinced that most of the really bad writing the world’s ever seen has been done under the influence of what’s called inspiration. Writing is very hard work, and knowing what you’re doing the whole time.” He was right.

Rust Belt Boy: Stories of an American Childhood by Paul Hertneky (2016). Researching another role led me to Paul Hertneky’s memoir, which perfectly set the tone with its stories about growing up in blue-collar Ambridge, Pa., in the 1960s. My character lived in that book.

Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee (1997). Reading McKee’s guide to the craft of writing for the screen is like taking Latin. Before you break the rules, it’s good to have some idea of what the rules are. The best race-car drivers know how their engines work. Writers shouldn’t be any different.

Danny and the Boys: Being Some Legends of Hungry Hollow by John D. Voelker (1951). My play Escanaba in Da Moonlight was inspired by this novel. A Michigan Supreme Court justice who wrote under the pen name Robert Traver, Voelker is far better known for his later novel Anatomy of a Murder, which became a 1959 James Stewart film that was shot in the Upper Peninsula—and featuring Howard C. Treado Jr., my wife’s father, as a background actor.

Getting Even by Woody Allen (1971). Alongside its 1975 follow-up, Without Feathers, Woody Allen’s essay collection showcased comedy writing as an art, requiring effortless precision and plausible unpredictability, which you could either write or you couldn’t. Woody could.