Thanks. I may not have been clear. I was curious which authors have influenced the thinking of atheists and humanists on this forum. But those authors don’t have to have a particular philosophy, just people who influenced your thinking. A Christian or Jew or any non-atheist, non-humanist could also certainly be cited.
That would be a very long list. But the authors I appreciated most over the years were the ones that did NOT present me with any big answers, but instead presented me with the inextricable. With views of reality that could not be "worked out", or resolved.
There is a South African writer named J. M. Coatzee who wrote a lot of novels about complicity. He was a white boy grown up under apartheid, and experienced first hand the systemic subjugation and abuse of one race by another, ... from the position of the abusers. And he was never able to reconcile his having been forced by his own white skin color (and his own fear and confusion) into being a benefiting member of a cultural system that was so clearly evil. The first book of his I read was called, "Waiting For The Barbarions" and it was so good that I read a half dozen more of his novels, all dealing in one way or another with the main character not knowing how to deal with being born into an abusive system, as a member of the abusers. Being guilty by an association that one did not ask for, and yet benefits from, regardless.
Those novels had an impact on me because they showed me how culturalized evil becomes a kind force of it's own, and creates it's own momentum that eventually sucks in and destroys
everyone, even those who think they are the big "winners". It's a lesson I wish we in the United States right now could somehow come to understand, before we all get sucked into the abyss of a culturalized evil of our own making. He was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2003.