Some great American books

by Dallas Lore Sharp

“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.