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Title: Some great American books
Author: Dallas Lore Sharp
Release date: February 19, 2025 [eBook #75416]
Language: English
Original publication: Chicago: American Library Association, 1925
Credits: Bob Taylor, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOME GREAT AMERICAN BOOKS ***
Transcriber’s Note
Italic text displayed as: _italic_
Reading with a Purpose
A Series of Reading Courses
1. BIOLOGY _Vernon Kellogg_
2. ENGLISH LITERATURE _W. N. C. Carlton_
3. TEN PIVOTAL FIGURES OF HISTORY _Ambrose W. Vernon_
4. SOME GREAT AMERICAN BOOKS _Dallas Lore Sharp_
6. FRONTIERS OF KNOWLEDGE _Jesse Lee Bennett_
7. EARS TO HEAR: A GUIDE FOR MUSIC LOVERS _Daniel Gregory Mason_
8. SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS _Howard W. Odum_
10. CONFLICTS IN AMERICAN PUBLIC OPINION _William Allen White_
and _Walter E. Myer_
11. PSYCHOLOGY AND ITS USE _Everett Dean Martin_
13. OUR CHILDREN _M. V. O’Shea_
_Others in Preparation_
5. ECONOMICS _Leon C. Marshall_
9. THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES _E. E. Slosson_
12. PHILOSOPHY _Alexander Meiklejohn_
14. RELIGION IN EVERYDAY LIFE _Wilfred T. Grenfell_
15. THE LIFE OF CHRIST _Rufus M. Jones_
American Library Association
Reading with a Purpose
SOME GREAT
AMERICAN BOOKS
_By_
DALLAS LORE SHARP
[Illustration: Decoration]
CHICAGO
AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION
1925
COPYRIGHT 1925, BY THE
AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION
PUBLISHED AUGUST, 1925
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.
WHY THIS COURSE IS PUBLISHED
This course has been prepared for men and women, and for young people
out of school, who wish to know more about the literature of America.
It comprises a very brief introduction to the subject and a guide to a
few of the best books. The books are arranged for consecutive reading.
They should be available in any general library, or may be obtained
through any good book store.
A good general knowledge of the subject should result from following
through the course of reading suggested in this booklet—a knowledge
greatly superior to that of the average citizen. If you wish to pursue
the subject further, the librarian of your Public Library will be glad
to make suggestions. If you desire to increase your knowledge in other
fields, you are referred to the other courses in this Reading with a
Purpose series, and to your Public Library.
THE AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION
THE AUTHOR
Dallas Lore Sharp _has won distinction as naturalist, teacher and man
of letters_.
_As a country-bred boy, a student at Brown University, assistant
professor and since 1908 professor of English at Boston University,
for many years also farmer and naturalist at his home in the hills
of Hingham, father, teacher and comrade of four boys of his own, his
career has developed consistently and happily, work and recreation
following the same path. In his literary labors and teaching he has
never lost the enthusiasm of the amateur. He is a keen observer of
nature and human nature and a lifelong student, teacher and lover of
literature._
THE SPIRIT OF THE HIVE _is the latest of his volumes of essays which
include also_ THE HILLS OF HINGHAM, WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON, EDUCATION
IN A DEMOCRACY, THE MAGICAL CHANCE _and others. Mr. Sharp’s name is
especially familiar to readers of the_ ATLANTIC MONTHLY _where many of
his essays have first appeared. He has been well described as “a man
who sees the world as eternally new, who sees life as eternally young
and to whom living is a great adventure.”_
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
THE SKETCH BOOK
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
THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS
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
AMERICAN POEMS (1625-1892)
_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
REPRESENTATIVE AMERICAN SHORT STORIES
_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
EMERSON’S ESSAYS
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
THE SCARLET LETTER
_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’
THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM
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
TOM SAWYER
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
THE PIT
_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
THE GENTLE READER
_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
ETHAN FROME
_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,
THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF WALTER H. PAGE
_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.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] This story is found in the volume of _Representative American short
stories_ edited by Alexander Jessup and published by Allyn and Bacon.
See page 25.
[2] Scribner.
[3] Harcourt.
[4] Houghton Mifflin.
[5] Heath.
[6] See page 13.
BOOKS RECOMMENDED IN THIS COURSE
THE SKETCH BOOK _Washington Irving_
THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS _James Fenimore Cooper_
AMERICAN POEMS (1625-1892) _W. C. Bronson_, Ed.
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1912. $2.75
REPRESENTATIVE AMERICAN SHORT STORIES _Alexander Jessup_, Ed.
Allyn and Bacon, 1923. $4.00
ESSAYS, FIRST SERIES _Ralph Waldo Emerson_
THE SCARLET LETTER _Nathaniel Hawthorne_
THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM _William Dean Howells_
Houghton, 1885. $2.00
THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER _Mark Twain_
Harper, 1876. $2.25
THE PIT _Frank Norris_
Doubleday, 1903. $0.95
THE GENTLE READER _Samuel McChord Crothers_
Houghton, 1903. $1.75
ETHAN FROME _Edith Wharton_
Scribner, 1911. $1.75
THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF WALTER H. PAGE _Burton J. Hendrick_
Doubleday 1922. 2v. $10.00
A SHORT HISTORY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE _W. C. Bronson_
Heath, rev. 1919. $1.72
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOME GREAT AMERICAN BOOKS ***
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