A storyteller's voice

George Plimpton's son writes of his father's 'perfect voice':

It’s strange to think, but he would have been eighty-five this year: fourteen years older than my mom, fifty years older than me. He could as easily have been my grandfather as father. He had been in the war, if briefly (stationed in Italy towards the end of it, he’d missed action, but met the Pope, an early sign of the “great good fortune”—one of his favorite phrases—that marked his life). He was a Wasp (both of his parents came from old New England families, and had ancestors on the Mayflower). Above all, he was a gentleman, one of the last—a figure so archaic, it could be easily mistaken for something else. No, my father’s voice was not an act, something chosen or practiced in front of mirrors: he came from a different world, where people talked differently, and about different things; where certain things were discussed, and certain things were not—and his voice simply reflected this.

It has often been said that a distinctive voice is one of the most pleasing qualities for a writer to have (much has been said of Nora Ephron and Christopher Hitchens in this manner, both being writers whose prose style was, somehow, distinctively 'theirs').  Constance Hale, in a series hosted by the Times op-ed page, discusses the importance of a writer's 'voice'.