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.