The Sketch Book

SOME GREAT AMERICANBOOKS

Outof 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 enjoya 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 vanishesOver the margin,After it, follow it,Follow the gleam.”

“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 theBible, 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 whowe 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; theAutobiographyof Jefferson; theAutobiographyof Franklin; Lodge’sLife of George Washington; Tarbell’sLife of Abraham Lincoln;The sketch book;Walden;Essaysof Emerson;The scarlet letter;The pit;The rise of Silas Lapham;The gentle readerby Dr. Crothers;Our national parksby John Muir;Wake-robinby John Burroughs; Parkman’sOregon trail; Dana’sTwo 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’sLee the American;The last of the Mohicans;Poemsof Longfellow; Wharton’sEthan 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’sHistory of Plimouth Plantationare 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 hisCommon senseandThe 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: theJournalof the Quaker, John Woolman, and theAutobiographyof 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. Butthat 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 Yorkwas 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 calledWieland, 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, readWielandorEdgar Huntley.

Washington Irving was our first international writer. With the publication of

in 1820, a certain Englishman’s contemptuous question “Who reads an American book?” was foreveranswered. Everybody read, and still reads, “Rip Van Winkle”[1]and “The legend of Sleepy Hollow,” two of the pieces inThe sketch book. It is for these two stories particularly that I have chosenThe sketch bookas the first reading in this course.

I envy the man who has never read them. He has two evenings of pure chuckles in store for him. Shiftless, lazy Rip! The dear old toper is as real a person as George Washington, and so much more human! “There is no finer character-sketch in our literature than the lovable old vagabond, as he goes slouching through the village, his arms full of children, a troop of dogs at his heels, and the shrill pursuing voice of Dame Winkle dying away in the distance.” I lived long enough ago to see Joseph Jefferson play the part of Rip—one of the sinful sweet memories of my Methodist youth! Rip made it hard for Mrs. Van Winkle, and she made it hard for him—and there is much to be said on both sides.

“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, likemost 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 sayThe last of the Mohicans, then I will wish I had saidThe deerslayer, the first of the series, of whichThe pathfinderandThe pioneers, andThe prairieare the rest. And if I say one of these tales of the Indians, then I can’t ask you to readThe 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 readThe 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

All five of these great tales are five acts in the thrilling drama of Leatherstocking’s life, the mostcomplete character in literature, starting as a young hunter inThe deerslayerand disappearing westward, an old man, inThe 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, themeasured 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.

“Whither, midst falling dew....”

—but I haven’t room to quote it. Learn it, all of it.It will almost save your soul. And along with it read “A forest hymn,” “The prairies,” “The yellow violet,” and “Inscription for the entrance to a wood.”

What shall I do, give you only Bryant out of all of our poets? And not let you have John Greenleaf Whittier, or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, or Oliver Wendell Holmes—to say nothing of the two greatest geniuses of them all, Edgar Allen Poe and Walt Whitman! If I could take but one of these I think it would be Whittier, because he is the simplest, most direct, most homely and American. He is to us what Bobby Burns is to Scotland. If there is a single American who doesn’t know “Snow bound” and “The barefoot boy,” and “Telling the bees,” he ought to be given a day in solitary confinement so as to catch up with his needs. Whittier was a Quaker, and, consequently, a fighter, ardent in his support of the Union in the Civil War. His “Barbara Frietchie” is the best ballad to come out of that awful conflict. We were all on one or the other side in that bitter time. There is no side now, thank heaven, but one glorious land, one national soul, one literature giving it life and form and color.

You will all say, “Why not take Longfellow?” We will if you say so. He certainly is America’s favorite poet. I remember when he died in 1882. I grew up on him. “Tell me not in mournful numbers” must have been read to me in my cradle. Read again forthis course, “Hymn to the night,” “A psalm of life,” “Paul Revere’s ride” (if you cannot already recite them from memory); and besides these, you should read “Evangeline” and “Hiawatha,” two of our long poems, one a story, the other an allegorical interpretation of the Indian, which are as fresh today as on the day they were published.

By asking you to read so many poems from so many poets I have made the exclusive selection of one poet’s work impossible. I am going to escape by taking a collection of the best of all of them. There are any number of good American anthologies, such as

Edited by W. C. Bronson

andAmerican poetryedited by Percy H. Boynton[2]. Both of these books have good notes and I am recommending the Bronson because I happen to be better acquainted with it, and because I think its notes fit very well into this reading scheme. This collection does not include any of our recent poetry, which is really in a class by itself and can best be had in such anthologies as Untermeyer’sModern American poetry[3]. I hate to leave this subject of poetry, forI have left unmentioned the three most original, most daring, most gifted of them all, Whitman, Emerson and Poe. I will take just space enough to mention two poems of each of these that everyone should know: “The problem” and “Days” by Emerson; “The haunted palace” and “The conqueror worm” by Poe; “Out of the cradle endlessly rocking” and “Come up from the fields, Father” by Whitman.

But I must now suggest a volume of short stories. Which volume? The short story as a literary form, in theory and conscious art, anyway, was invented by Edgar Allen Poe. He set a model for all time, and few, if any, of those who have followed him have equaled him in his own peculiar field. For there are many varieties of short stories that have been developed since Poe staked out the short-story claim. And as for short-story writers, they are as thick as fleas.

As part of the object of this course is to scrape a small acquaintance with American literature, as well as to have a good time reading, I am going to suggest that you take your choice of Poe’sTales, Hawthorne’sTwice told tales, a volume of Bret Harte’s short stories, Sarah Orne Jewett’sDeephaven, or Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’sA humble romance. A still better scheme would be to read one or two of the best from each of these authors, as well as others among our story writers. Suppose we take “The fallof the house of Usher” by Poe; “The ambitious guest” by Hawthorne; “The outcasts of Poker Flat” by Harte; “A New England nun” by Mrs. Freeman; “A man without a country” by Edward Everett Hale, and “Posson Jone” by George W. Cable. They will be equal in bulk to a fair volume, and equal in thrill and fun to all winter at the movies.

No two of these are the least alike. If I had named one of O. Henry’s, like “The gift of the Magi,” that would still be different. O. Henry is the shortest of short-story writers. From the slow discursive sketch of Irving to the crisp brief incident, with the unexpected turn at the end, as invented by “O. Henry” (William Sydney Porter was his human name), runs the short story, and represents the most highly developed, most artistic of literary prose forms. These that I have named and many more can be had in the single volume

Edited by Alexander Jessup

May I put in here a strong word for the essay and suggest that one of our dozen books be a volume of

Here are ten good reasons for my selection: (1) Their sheer beauty of style; (2) their high moralquality; (3) their eloquent majesty of thought; (4) their pithy rememberable sayings; (5) their richness of suggestion; (6) their stimulus to higher thought and purer feelings; (7) their doctrine of individualism; (8) their appeal for simple living; (9) their universality; (10) their elemental themes.

You will not find them dry or hard or lacking in direct appeal. They will challenge you. They will blow through your thinking as a pure cold current of mountain air blows through the fevered atmosphere of a sick room. The essay, among all our literary forms, with the exception of the letter, is the most direct, most personal, best adapted for information and persuasion. Nor is it, when handled by a master, less satisfying artistically than story or poetry.

We have had the novel of adventure in Cooper, purely romantic as against the realistic. In this same realm, but dealing with utterly different material, is

By Hawthorne

a tragedy of sin, an epic of the soul. To Hawthorne the supernatural was as real as nature itself; good and evil, inner and outer, are in constant conflict throughout his pages. The scarlet letter Hester wears is a symbol, and symbolism is the key to Hawthorne’s method and meaning.

As a preparation for this novel one ought to recall the spirit of the old colonial times in New England, the deep religiousness, the belief in witches, and the vivid sense of the supernatural. In order to enjoy any story one must understand its background, must be able to get out of his own day, away from his own customs, back to the life of the story, as if he were a very part of it.

This will have to be done for the next story, William Dean Howells’

a realistic novel of the manners and ambitions of Boston society some forty years ago. For a good study of realism and romanticism in fiction, in fact for a good study of this whole art of the novel, get Professor Bliss Perry’sA study of prose fiction.[4]And for a text covering in a brief illuminating way the whole of American literature, take Bronson’sShort history of American literature[5]mentioned above.[6]

The next book I will name is Mark Twain’s

though many critics would sayHuckleberry Finn, while others declare hisLife on the Mississippithegreatest of the three, and one of the permanent things in American literature. They are really three in a great trilogy—the story of his own life in the Mississippi Valley, of a time now gone but which still has mightily to do with the times that now are, and that are to be.

Before closing this short list, may I be allowed to hold open the door to the library a moment longer, just to glance at a few more titles? There I see

By Frank Norris

a Chicago story of wheat and the Board of Trade—a terrible tale which thrills of present-day American life. I see too

By Samuel McChord Crothers

a volume of gentle, whimsical essays, which will be a good test of your literary taste and appreciation. Along with these stands

By Edith Wharton

a grim tale of inner torture against a bare New England background—two lovers who tried to die together but who only succeeded in making themselvescripples, compelled to live the rest of their lives under the same roof with the wife from whom Ethan tried to escape.

And here, finally, is a book published only a few years ago,

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, andmore 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’sShort history of American literature, are the twelve which I have chosen for this program: (1)The sketch bookby 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 storiesedited by Alexander Jessup; (5) theEssaysof Emerson (first series will be good); (6)The scarlet letterby Hawthorne; (7)The rise of Silas Laphamby Howells; (8)Tom Sawyerby Mark Twain; (9)The pitby Frank Norris; (10)The gentle readerby Samuel McChord Crothers; (11)Ethan Fromeby Edith Wharton; (12)The life and letters of Walter H. Pageby Burton J. Hendrick.

FOOTNOTES:[1]This story is found in the volume ofRepresentative American short storiesedited by Alexander Jessup and published by Allyn and Bacon. See page25.[2]Scribner.[3]Harcourt.[4]Houghton Mifflin.[5]Heath.[6]See page13.

[1]This story is found in the volume ofRepresentative American short storiesedited by Alexander Jessup and published by Allyn and Bacon. See page25.

[2]Scribner.

[3]Harcourt.

[4]Houghton Mifflin.

[5]Heath.

[6]See page13.

Back to Index Next