Now that I’m writing my life story, I’d like to be able to tell you that I received the unusual name Auden because of my parents’ love of the famous British poet, W.H. Auden, who was born in England and moved to America and published a million poems and essays. And I’d like to be able to tell you that I inherited the poet’s gigantic brain and gift for snappy alliteration. But that would be a lie. Sadly, there was no literary endowment intended in my naming, and any quality approaching talent I may have can only mean that I actually learned something from the thousands of books I’ve read—although my primary objective each time I opened a book was to avoid doing other things.
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In university, I actually took a twentieth-century literature course that featured Auden’s poetry and a book
