Some great American books

by Dallas Lore Sharp

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.