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“Give me a list of books published during the last ten years that should be included in college English laboratory classes in literature. I want your list. I have my own, but fear it is too academic.”
The following list is an offhand attempt to comply with this request. It is offered merely for the suggestions it may contain. If the ten year restriction is rigid we ask pardon for such titles as may be a little older than that. Strike them out.
For Kansans: Willa Sibert Cather’s novels, O Pioneers! and My Antonia, chronicling people and epochs of Kansas-Nebraska. William Allen White’s A Certain Rich Man and In the Heart of a Fool, less for their Kansas-ness than for their Americanism and humanity.
For Middle Westerners: Meredith Nicholson’s The Valley of Democracy. Zona Gale’s Birth. Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems. Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology. Vachel Lindsay’s longer poems. Mary S. Watts’s Nathan Burke and Van Cleve: His Friends and His Family. Lord Charnwood’s life of Lincoln. William Dean Howells’s The Leatherwood God. Booth Tarkington’s The Conquest of Canaan (first published about fourteen years ago) and The Magnificent Ambersons. Gene Stratton-Porter’s A Daughter of the Land, her Freckles and her A Girl of the Limberlost. One or two books by Harold Bell Wright. The Passing of the Frontier, by Emerson Hough, and other books in the Chronicles of America series published by the Yale University Press.
For Americans: Mary S. Watts’s The Rise of Jennie Cushing. Owen Wister’s The Virginian (if not barred under the ten year rule). Booth Tarkington’s The Flirt. Novels with American settings by Gertrude Atherton and Stewart Edward White. Mary Johnston’s The Long Roll and Cease Firing. Willa Sibert Cather’s The Song of the Lark. Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome. Alice Brown’s The Prisoner. Ellen Glasgow’s The Deliverance. Corra Harris’s A Circuit-Rider’s Wife. All of O. Henry. Margaret Deland’s The Iron Woman. Earlier novels by Winston Churchill. Ernest Poole’s The Harbor. Joseph Hergesheimer’s The Three Black Pennys, his Gold and Iron and his Java Head. Historical books by Theodore Roosevelt. American biographies too numerous to mention. From Isolation to Leadership: A Review of American Foreign Policy by Latané (published by the educational department of Doubleday, Page & Company). Essays, such as those of Agnes Repplier.
Each of these enumerations presupposes the books already named, or most of them. Don’t treat them as pieces of literary workmanship. Many of them aren’t. Those that have fine literary workmanship have something else, too—and it’s the other thing, or things, that count. Fine art in a book is like good breeding in a person, a passport, not a Magna Charta. “Manners makyth man”—yah!