The Sketch Book — The Last of the Mohicans — American Poems (1625-1892) — Representative American Short Stories — Emerson’s Essays — The Scarlet Letter — The Rise of Silas Lapham — Tom Sawyer — The Pit — The Gentle Reader — Ethan Frome — The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page — FOOTNOTES:
SOME GREAT AMERICAN
BOOKS
Out of a hundred great American books,
which every American ought to know, what
ten or twelve shall I suggest for this course?
A difficult question. No two persons would make the
same selection. Yet no one, I venture, will say that
those I am taking are not eminently worth while.
But, first, may I make a few suggestions on how
to read, before I offer advice on what to read? “Not
how many but how good books” is the secret of being
well read, according to an ancient saying. But very
much depends on how well you read those good books.
Put no premium on speed. Don’t dawdle; but take
your time. Read the great book sympathetically and
in a leisurely way. Be positive about it. Be aggressive,
even pugnacious, rather than listless and languishing.
Read the stirring sections over and over.
Store them in your memory. Cite them in talk and
letters—anything to make them yours. Get your
friends to reading the same things at the same time.
Associate, if you can, with those who do read. Don’t
be a literary “soak,” a mere absorber of print. The
real reader is critical, which means appreciative of
the good and the poor in a book. He stops to enjoy
a fine passage in the text as a traveler stops to enjoy
a lovely scene in the landscape. He is just as ready
to debate a point with his author also—to hold out
against him here; to approve and yield the point
there; and often to forget the book altogether in his
attempt to follow a gleam which, starting out of some
illuminating line of the page, goes wavering through
the twilight of the reader’s dawning thought,
“And, ere it vanishes
Over the margin,
After it, follow it,
Follow the gleam.”
Again, learn to read aloud—not every book, to be
sure, yet as many of these as you can. There is
much reading for information and mere pleasure
which must be done silently and swiftly, and even
with judicious skipping for the sake of speed. The
books we are going to read are for pleasure and for
information and for something even greater—a spiritual
something, a noble companionship and stimulus
hard to define, which is as much found in their manner
as in their matter, or, as we say, in their style. Good
prose is as full of music as good verse. What is
sweeter to the hearing ear than the rhythms of prose
like John Muir’s or Lincoln’s or Poe’s? English is
a beautiful language, containing the most glorious
literature ever written. We should revel in its harmonies
no less than wrestle with its thoughts.
There is no invariable answer to the question, how
to read, any more than to the question, what to read,
because books are of so many sorts and values, and
readers are just as diverse. Much reading is required
for general intelligence. A wide acquaintance with
good books is about all there is to an education. You
may have a college diploma or you may not; but if
you are not a reader, no matter how many degrees
you may possess, you are not possessed of an education.
To know the King James Version of the
Bible, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Don Quixote,
Mother Goose, Uncle Remus, and such books—this
is to be on speaking terms with the learned and cultured
of the world.
We are Americans, and this is a course in American
books, but we and our books are very much what the
past, the Old World and its books, has made us.
Any wide course of reading ought to include the great
books of that Old World out of which we have come,
books which all the world loves and has gone to school
to. The spirit and institutions of our country are
English, like our language. So true is this that we
can hardly understand our American mind and customs
unless we read the history and the literature of
Old England. The great English authors like Chaucer,
Spenser, Burns, Wordsworth, Burke, and Dickens
belong as much to us as to England, and not
to know them is not to know whence we came and who
we are in the way of feeling and thought. No time,
no nation, no book, no man, lives to himself alone,
or is self-begotten and wholly original.
This is not a required course, and all that I can
do is to suggest some of the books which have meant
much to me, and which have a durable place in our
love and thought. It would be well should I name
one hundred titles, say, and let you choose. That is
about all that one can do.
Out of the following twenty-five great American
books, for example, which ten or twelve shall I suggest
for reading: The history of Plimouth Plantation;
the Autobiography of Jefferson; the Autobiography
of Franklin; Lodge’s Life of George
Washington; Tarbell’s Life of Abraham Lincoln;
The sketch book; Walden; Essays of Emerson;
The scarlet letter; The pit; The rise of Silas Lapham;
The gentle reader by Dr. Crothers; Our national
parks by John Muir; Wake-robin by John
Burroughs; Parkman’s Oregon trail; Dana’s Two
years before the mast; Tom Sawyer; The Americanization
of Edward Bok; Uncle Tom’s cabin;
The life and letters of Walter H. Page; Uncle Remus;
Bradford’s Lee the American; The last of the
Mohicans; Poems of Longfellow; Wharton’s Ethan
Frome.
Barely glancing at such a list you will instantly
ask: “Why don’t you include Woodrow Wilson,
Theodore Roosevelt, Anna Howard Shaw, Bryant,
Whittier, Zane Grey?”—but I must stop you! There
are so many! Yet if this list I am making for you
stirs you to make a better one for yourself—then
that is exactly the best thing it can do for you.
Styles in writing change as do styles in dress, and
in order to be sympathetic with books not of our own
day it is necessary often to know something of the
times in which they were written. So a book on the
history of American literature, such as W. C. Bronson’s,
is a good thing to study along with the reading.
And this book is delightful to read, as is also, What
can literature do for me, by C. Alphonso Smith.
A convenient way to handle the history of American
literature is to divide it as the textbooks do into
three periods: The Colonial from 1607 to 1765;
the Revolutionary, from 1765 to 1789; and the Period
of the Republic, from 1789 to the present.
Each of these periods has its own peculiar literature,
for books reflect not only their writers, but also
their times. So true is this, that you will find out
about a nation more accurately from reading its
stories, poetry and plays, than by studying its records
and histories. And so, because we are Americans with
a peculiar history, and a peculiar and a great destiny,
and because our American books best interpret us to
ourselves, every American ought to know the outstanding
books of each of these periods.
The writing of the Colonial Period was for the most
part crude and imitative. The Pilgrims and Puritans
were not book-loving people. They were deeply religious
folk, deeply daring, and masterful, fighting
with such odds as few men in all history have met and
conquered. They did original things, but not in
books with their pens. Yet the famous Mayflower
Compact and Bradford’s History of Plimouth Plantation
are enough to glorify any time or people.
Books were not the natural product of the Revolutionary
Period, either. Men do not fight and write
at the same time. Nor do they build empires and
books together. Think of what filled the minds and
imaginations of the “Founding Fathers” as the late
President Harding called them—the war with England,
the dreams of independence, of a new and different
nation, of vast states lying westward, farms
and factories, and all the mighty machinery, all the
wealth required to build and establish their new nation!
It was a time for much political thinking, a
time not only for stump pulling, but for stump speaking.
And as a matter of fact, the best writings of
this period were letters, like those of Jefferson, and
political pamphlets, like those of Hamilton and
Thomas Paine (everybody should read his Common
sense and The crisis), and orations, like those by
Patrick Henry and James Otis.
There are two great and simple books, however,
belonging here which are pure literature and worthy
of a place among the twelve which I have chosen:
the Journal of the Quaker, John Woolman, and the
Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, the wise man
of the world. Quakers may be wise, too, but for
canny wit, common sense, humor, honesty and everything
else you can think of, especially learning and
industry, as making up the typical Yankee, you find
them shaken down and running over in B. Franklin
of Boston and Philadelphia, and the world, and all
time. You must read this autobiography, though
it is not in the list of twelve.
We really find the culture, the leisure, the perspective
for literary work for the first time in America
during the Period of the Republic, which follows the
colonizing, the pioneering, and the fighting. We are
still a westward-moving people, still on the frontier,
spreading, multiplying, building, growing rich and
strong and united. But we are a nation now; the
spirit of democracy has taken hold on our social life;
we have a social philosophy, a proud past, a thrilling
present, and a mighty future. Now we can speak,
for now we have something to say.
In the year following the adoption of the Constitution,
when the young nation was getting its breath and
bearings, our writers multiplied tremendously, especially
the poets, long-winded, pony-gaited mavericks,
who should have been hitched to the plow. But
that was the trouble with American literature, everybody
had been hitched too much to the plow and too
little to the pen. Yet how could it be otherwise in a
land so new, so hardly won? But all of this poor
poetry was a preparation—first, of the minds of the
people for the greater work to come; and, second, of
the pens of the masters who were already in training
and about to come. When a great wave breaks
crashing on the shore, you know the swell started
away off at sea. So with every great wave of literature.
The Golden Age of American letters, beginning
with Bryant and closing with the death of Oliver
Wendell Holmes, took its very definite start in the
tremendous years from 1789 to 1809. But those
years themselves have left us almost nothing. The
year 1809, however, is one to remember. Knickerbocker’s
history of New York was published that
year, and real literature in America began. Mark
that date in red.
But meantime if everybody was writing, everybody
was reading. The spread of the newspaper and
the birth and growth of the magazine were two of the
notable literary signs of these early years of the new
Republic. The people were hungry for reading. The
whole nation was like a man who has always been
denied books and pictures and music, and who, at
thirty-five or forty, wakes up to a keen realization of
his loss.
The nation had dreamed and dared, had fought and
plowed and broken trails, had leveled forests, peopled
prairies, opened mines, built mills and roads, and now
was pausing to look about and ask what it meant,
and what it was all to mean. Bread the nation had.
Now it wanted books. A body it had. But did it
have a soul? To do and to have—that is first; to
know, to feel, to be—that is second, but it is an even
deeper need.
Along with the spread of periodicals came the
drama, the short story, and the novel. Our first
professional man of letters, the first American to devote
all of his time to literary work, Charles Brockden
Brown, published in 1798 a powerful and terrible
novel called Wieland, which perhaps should be reckoned
as the first piece of durable fiction done in our
country. What a flood has followed it! Brown himself
did ten such tales. And they are worth reading.
If you want to feel your hair curl into barbed wire
on your bare skull, and your spinal column walk off
and leave the rest of your congealed anatomy, read
Wieland or Edgar Huntley.
Washington Irving was our first international
writer. With the publication of
in 1820, a certain Englishman’s contemptuous question
“Who reads an American book?” was forever
answered. Everybody read, and still reads, “Rip Van
Winkle”[1] and “The legend of Sleepy Hollow,” two
of the pieces in The sketch book. It is for these two
stories particularly that I have chosen The sketch
book as the first reading in this course.
I envy the man who has never read them. He has
two evenings of pure chuckles in store for him. Shiftless,
lazy Rip! The dear old toper is as real a person
as George Washington, and so much more human!
“There is no finer character-sketch in our literature
than the lovable old vagabond, as he goes slouching
through the village, his arms full of children, a troop
of dogs at his heels, and the shrill pursuing voice of
Dame Winkle dying away in the distance.” I lived
long enough ago to see Joseph Jefferson play the
part of Rip—one of the sinful sweet memories of my
Methodist youth! Rip made it hard for Mrs. Van
Winkle, and she made it hard for him—and there is
much to be said on both sides.
“The legend of Sleepy Hollow” is a twin story of
the early Dutch settlements along the Hudson, in
which you will make the acquaintance of another immortal
character, one schoolmaster by the name of
Ichabod Crane.
Comment is unnecessary. Irving is to be read, like
most story-tellers, and enjoyed. If you like his
poetic, tender, genial, and humorous style there will
be nothing in this course which you will not enjoy.
For this is a reading program, not one of study. It
kills real literature to study it. Take James Fenimore
Cooper, our first, and still our greatest adventure
writer, and read—I don’t know which to say of
the Leatherstocking Tales! If I say The last of the
Mohicans, then I will wish I had said The deerslayer,
the first of the series, of which The pathfinder and
The pioneers, and The prairie are the rest. And if
I say one of these tales of the Indians, then I can’t
ask you to read The pilot, one of the best sea stories
ever written, and one of the first; nor can I tell you
that you ought, by all means, to read The spy, which
to my thinking, for sheer suspense, for escape, for
pathos, and nobleness of character, beats any other
book of adventure I know.
But it is the vast woods and prairies, the Indian,
and that early pioneer life of the frontier that Cooper
does best, and upon which rests his fame. No one
else will ever again paint for us, on so mighty a canvas,
with such fresh and splendid colors, the scenes
of that white-man-red-man time. Read
All five of these great tales are five acts in the
thrilling drama of Leatherstocking’s life, the most
complete character in literature, starting as a young
hunter in The deerslayer and disappearing westward,
an old man, in The prairie, shouldering his gun, calling
his dogs, hitting his last trail. Those five books
are our great American epic.
Don’t be over-critical, nor too grown-up in reading
Cooper. People who get that way die soon. Most
of them are dead inside already. Cooper is an adventure
writer, not a novelist of society. He can
draw a prince of an Indian, and a scout without an
equal; but you could whittle a better woman, a more
human one, I mean, out of a hickory stick. Never
mind his females. You will find enough of them in
the course of your reading. Be glad that they are
unnecessary here, and give yourself over to the woods,
the tracking, and the slaughter. Don’t skip the scenery.
Cooper’s woods are primeval, deep, shadowy,
full of shapes and sounds and terrors. There is
nothing left in the wild, nor to be found in other
books, so wild as Cooper’s woods.
And don’t be troubled with the goodness of Cooper’s
Indians. It is the adventure and the scene you
must get here. Ask yourself where you ever read a
better story, or anything more tragic, more dramatic,
more thrilling than the death of Uncas?
Turn now from the novel to a very different reading
in poetry. Everybody loves a story, and so does
everybody love poetry—the regular rhythm, the
measured line, the rhyme, the stanza. For these devices
are older than the mechanics of prose, more elemental,
and appeal more easily, more directly, to us.
That is why the oldest literatures are always in verse
form. It explains why children can read and love
poetry before they can read prose, and why it is that
the things we commit to memory, the things quoted
by a whole nation, and remembered by all the world
are in verse.
William Cullen Bryant, our first great American
poet, was born in 1794, five years after Cooper, and
had he written but his first poem, “Thanatopsis” (it
was done in his seventeenth year), he would have been
immortal. That poem (its Greek name means “a
view of death”), done in blank verse, the old heroic
line of the Latin and English writers, is one of the
stateliest, sublimest things ever written, “combining
the richness of the organ with the freedom of the
swaying woods and the rolling sea.”
In addition to “Thanatopsis” read “To a waterfowl”
which most critics pronounce the most perfect
poem from Bryant’s pen, and which perhaps is as
nearly “perfect” in its way as any American poem.
It is to a lone wild duck flying across the fading
autumnal sky.
“Whither, midst falling dew....”
—but I haven’t room to quote it. Learn it, all of it.
It will almost save your soul. And along with it read
“A forest hymn,” “The prairies,” “The yellow violet,”
and “Inscription for the entrance to a wood.”
What shall I do, give you only Bryant out of all
of our poets? And not let you have John Greenleaf
Whittier, or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, or Oliver
Wendell Holmes—to say nothing of the two greatest
geniuses of them all, Edgar Allen Poe and Walt
Whitman! If I could take but one of these I think
it would be Whittier, because he is the simplest, most
direct, most homely and American. He is to us what
Bobby Burns is to Scotland. If there is a single
American who doesn’t know “Snow bound” and “The
barefoot boy,” and “Telling the bees,” he ought to be
given a day in solitary confinement so as to catch up
with his needs. Whittier was a Quaker, and, consequently,
a fighter, ardent in his support of the
Union in the Civil War. His “Barbara Frietchie”
is the best ballad to come out of that awful conflict.
We were all on one or the other side in that bitter
time. There is no side now, thank heaven, but one
glorious land, one national soul, one literature giving
it life and form and color.
You will all say, “Why not take Longfellow?” We
will if you say so. He certainly is America’s favorite
poet. I remember when he died in 1882. I grew up
on him. “Tell me not in mournful numbers” must
have been read to me in my cradle. Read again for
this course, “Hymn to the night,” “A psalm of life,”
“Paul Revere’s ride” (if you cannot already recite
them from memory); and besides these, you should
read “Evangeline” and “Hiawatha,” two of our long
poems, one a story, the other an allegorical interpretation
of the Indian, which are as fresh today as
on the day they were published.
By asking you to read so many poems from so
many poets I have made the exclusive selection of one
poet’s work impossible. I am going to escape by
taking a collection of the best of all of them. There
are any number of good American anthologies, such
as
Edited by W. C. Bronson
and American poetry edited by Percy H. Boynton[2].
Both of these books have good notes and I am recommending
the Bronson because I happen to be better
acquainted with it, and because I think its notes fit
very well into this reading scheme. This collection
does not include any of our recent poetry, which
is really in a class by itself and can best be had in
such anthologies as Untermeyer’s Modern American
poetry[3]. I hate to leave this subject of poetry, for
I have left unmentioned the three most original, most
daring, most gifted of them all, Whitman, Emerson
and Poe. I will take just space enough to mention
two poems of each of these that everyone should know:
“The problem” and “Days” by Emerson; “The
haunted palace” and “The conqueror worm” by Poe;
“Out of the cradle endlessly rocking” and “Come
up from the fields, Father” by Whitman.
But I must now suggest a volume of short stories.
Which volume? The short story as a literary form,
in theory and conscious art, anyway, was invented
by Edgar Allen Poe. He set a model for all time,
and few, if any, of those who have followed him have
equaled him in his own peculiar field. For there are
many varieties of short stories that have been developed
since Poe staked out the short-story claim.
And as for short-story writers, they are as thick as
fleas.
As part of the object of this course is to scrape a
small acquaintance with American literature, as well
as to have a good time reading, I am going to suggest
that you take your choice of Poe’s Tales, Hawthorne’s
Twice told tales, a volume of Bret Harte’s
short stories, Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven, or
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s A humble romance. A
still better scheme would be to read one or two of the
best from each of these authors, as well as others
among our story writers. Suppose we take “The fall
of the house of Usher” by Poe; “The ambitious guest”
by Hawthorne; “The outcasts of Poker Flat” by
Harte; “A New England nun” by Mrs. Freeman;
“A man without a country” by Edward Everett Hale,
and “Posson Jone” by George W. Cable. They will
be equal in bulk to a fair volume, and equal in thrill
and fun to all winter at the movies.
No two of these are the least alike. If I had named
one of O. Henry’s, like “The gift of the Magi,” that
would still be different. O. Henry is the shortest of
short-story writers. From the slow discursive sketch
of Irving to the crisp brief incident, with the unexpected
turn at the end, as invented by “O. Henry”
(William Sydney Porter was his human name), runs
the short story, and represents the most highly developed,
most artistic of literary prose forms. These
that I have named and many more can be had in the
single volume
Edited by Alexander Jessup
May I put in here a strong word for the essay and
suggest that one of our dozen books be a volume of
Here are ten good reasons for my selection:
(1) Their sheer beauty of style; (2) their high moral
quality; (3) their eloquent majesty of thought; (4)
their pithy rememberable sayings; (5) their richness
of suggestion; (6) their stimulus to higher thought
and purer feelings; (7) their doctrine of individualism;
(8) their appeal for simple living; (9) their
universality; (10) their elemental themes.
You will not find them dry or hard or lacking in
direct appeal. They will challenge you. They will
blow through your thinking as a pure cold current of
mountain air blows through the fevered atmosphere
of a sick room. The essay, among all our literary
forms, with the exception of the letter, is the most
direct, most personal, best adapted for information
and persuasion. Nor is it, when handled by a master,
less satisfying artistically than story or poetry.
We have had the novel of adventure in Cooper,
purely romantic as against the realistic. In this
same realm, but dealing with utterly different material,
is
By Hawthorne
a tragedy of sin, an epic of the soul. To Hawthorne
the supernatural was as real as nature itself; good
and evil, inner and outer, are in constant conflict
throughout his pages. The scarlet letter Hester
wears is a symbol, and symbolism is the key to Hawthorne’s
method and meaning.
As a preparation for this novel one ought to recall
the spirit of the old colonial times in New England,
the deep religiousness, the belief in witches, and the
vivid sense of the supernatural. In order to enjoy
any story one must understand its background, must
be able to get out of his own day, away from his own
customs, back to the life of the story, as if he were
a very part of it.
This will have to be done for the next story,
William Dean Howells’
a realistic novel of the manners and ambitions of
Boston society some forty years ago. For a good
study of realism and romanticism in fiction, in fact
for a good study of this whole art of the novel, get
Professor Bliss Perry’s A study of prose fiction.[4] And
for a text covering in a brief illuminating way the
whole of American literature, take Bronson’s Short
history of American literature[5] mentioned above.[6]
The next book I will name is Mark Twain’s
though many critics would say Huckleberry Finn,
while others declare his Life on the Mississippi the
greatest of the three, and one of the permanent things
in American literature. They are really three in a
great trilogy—the story of his own life in the Mississippi
Valley, of a time now gone but which still has
mightily to do with the times that now are, and that
are to be.
Before closing this short list, may I be allowed to
hold open the door to the library a moment longer,
just to glance at a few more titles? There I see
By Frank Norris
a Chicago story of wheat and the Board of Trade—a
terrible tale which thrills of present-day American
life. I see too
By Samuel McChord Crothers
a volume of gentle, whimsical essays, which will be a
good test of your literary taste and appreciation.
Along with these stands
By Edith Wharton
a grim tale of inner torture against a bare New England
background—two lovers who tried to die together
but who only succeeded in making themselves
cripples, compelled to live the rest of their lives under
the same roof with the wife from whom Ethan tried
to escape.
And here, finally, is a book published only a few
years ago,
By Burton J. Hendrick
a biography but more than a biography, for it gives
not only a rich and illuminating life-story of our
ambassador to England during the World War but
an account, at the same time graphic and intimate,
of the world-important events in which he played a
vital part. Many of the letters are no less than a
revelation of Anglo-American relations leading up to
the entry of the United States into the war and of
the influence of certain men—President Wilson, Colonel
House, Lord Grey, Balfour and others—upon
those relations. The work of Mr. Hendrick in the
biography proper and in the connecting links between
the letters (a small proportion of the whole
book) is ably done but it is the letters themselves,
with their vigor, their humor, their charm of style,
that win for this book a place among biographies
which are also literature—and thus a place in this
course.
So I might go on until I had named a hundred, and
more than a hundred great American books, all of
them marked by both durable matter and manner,
books that not only get hold of the mind and heart,
but which also reveal to us glimpses of the past and
dreams of what the future of America shall be.
But these, together with Bronson’s Short history
of American literature, are the twelve which I have
chosen for this program: (1) The sketch book by
Irving; (2) The last of the Mohicans, a romantic
adventure by Cooper; (3) American poems (1625-1892)
edited by W. C. Bronson; (4) Representative
American short stories edited by Alexander Jessup;
(5) the Essays of Emerson (first series will be good);
(6) The scarlet letter by Hawthorne; (7) The rise
of Silas Lapham by Howells; (8) Tom Sawyer by
Mark Twain; (9) The pit by Frank Norris; (10)
The gentle reader by Samuel McChord Crothers;
(11) Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton; (12) The
life and letters of Walter H. Page by Burton J. Hendrick.
