Some great American books

by Dallas Lore Sharp

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