The Books That Shaped America, Let The Controversy Begin!
The Library of Congress has come up with an 88 volume list, Books That Shaped America.
“This list is a starting point,” said Librarian of Congress James H. Billington. “It is not a register of the ‘best’ American books – although many of them fit that description. Rather, the list is intended to spark a national conversation on books written by Americans that have influenced our lives, whether they appear on this initial list or not.”
Hey, sounds like fun! Spark it up Sparky, let the conversation begin!
Here’s the list…
“Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain (1884)
“Alcoholics Anonymous” by anonymous (1939)
“American Cookery” by Amelia Simmons (1796)
“The American Woman’s Home” by Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe (1869)
“And the Band Played On” by Randy Shilts (1987)
“Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand (1957)
“The Autobiography of Malcolm X” by Malcolm X and Alex Haley (1965)
“Beloved” by Toni Morrison (1987)
“Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” by Dee Brown (1970)
“The Call of the Wild” by Jack London (1903)
“The Cat in the Hat” by Dr. Seuss (1957)
“Catch-22″ by Joseph Heller (1961)
“The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger (1951)
“Charlotte’s Web” by E.B. White (1952)
“Common Sense” by Thomas Paine (1776)
“The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care” by Benjamin Spock (1946)
“Cosmos” by Carl Sagan (1980)
“A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible” by anonymous (1788)
“The Double Helix” by James D. Watson (1968)
“The Education of Henry Adams” by Henry Adams (1907)
“Experiments and Observations on Electricity” by Benjamin Franklin (1751)
“Fahrenheit 451″ by Ray Bradbury (1953)
“Family Limitation” by Margaret Sanger (1914)
“The Federalist” by anonymous/ thought to be Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay (1787)
“The Feminine Mystique” by Betty Friedan (1963)
“The Fire Next Time” by James Baldwin (1963)
“For Whom the Bell Tolls” by Ernest Hemingway (1940)
“Gone With the Wind” by Margaret Mitchell (1936)
“Goodnight Moon” by Margaret Wise Brown (1947)
“A Grammatical Institute of the English Language” by Noah Webster (1783)
“The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck (1939)
“The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
“Harriet, the Moses of Her People” by Sarah H. Bradford (1901)
“The History of Standard Oil” by Ida Tarbell (1904)
“History of the Expedition Under the Command of the Captains Lewis and Clark” by Meriwether Lewis (1814)
“How the Other Half Lives” by Jacob Riis (1890)
“How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie (1936)
“Howl” by Allen Ginsberg (1956)
“The Iceman Cometh” by Eugene O’Neill (1946)
“Idaho: A Guide in Word and Pictures” by Federal Writers’ Project (1937)
“In Cold Blood” by Truman Capote (1966)
“Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison (1952)
“Joy of Cooking” by Irma Rombauer (1931)
“The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair (1906)
“Leaves of Grass” by Walt Whitman (1855)
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving (1820)
“Little Women, or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy” by Louisa May Alcott (1868)
“Mark, the Match Boy” by Horatio Alger Jr. (1869)
“McGuffey’s Newly Revised Eclectic Primer” by William Holmes McGuffey (1836)
“Moby-Dick; or The Whale” by Herman Melville (1851)
“The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” by Frederick Douglass (1845)
“Native Son” by Richard Wright (1940)
“New England Primer” by anonymous (1803)
“New Hampshire” by Robert Frost (1923)
“On the Road” by Jack Kerouac (1957)
“Our Bodies, Ourselves” by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective (1971)
“Our Town: A Play” by Thornton Wilder (1938)
“Peter Parley’s Universal History” by Samuel Goodrich (1837)
“Poems” by Emily Dickinson (1890)
“Poor Richard Improved and The Way to Wealth” by Benjamin Franklin (1758)
“Pragmatism” by William James (1907)
“The Private Life of the Late Benjamin Franklin, LL.D.” by Benjamin Franklin (1793)
“The Red Badge of Courage” by Stephen Crane (1895)
“Red Harvest” by Dashiell Hammett (1929)
“Riders of the Purple Sage” by Zane Grey (1912)
“The Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
“Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” by Alfred C. Kinsey (1948)
“Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson (1962)
“The Snowy Day” by Ezra Jack Keats (1962)
“The Souls of Black Folk” by W.E.B. Du Bois (1903)
“The Sound and the Fury” by William Faulkner (1929)
“Spring and All” by William Carlos Williams (1923)
“Stranger in a Strange Land” by Robert E. Heinlein (1961)
“A Street in Bronzeville” by Gwendolyn Brooks (1945)
“A Streetcar Named Desire” by Tennessee Williams (1947)
“A Survey of the Roads of the United States of America” by Christopher Colles (1789)
“Tarzan of the Apes” by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1914)
“Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
“To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee (1960)
“A Treasury of American Folklore” by Benjamin A. Botkin (1944)
“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” by Betty Smith (1943)
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852)
“Unsafe at Any Speed” by Ralph Nader (1965)
“Walden; or Life in the Woods” by Henry David Thoreau (1854)
“The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes (1925)
“Where the Wild Things Are” by Maurice Sendak (1963)
“The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” by L. Frank Baum (1900)
“The Words of Cesar Chavez” by Cesar Chavez (2002)
Glancing at the list, I count 20 that I have read, not including the ones I started and got bored with.
Let’s see…that works out to roughly 23% of the list which, is a little disappointing. I mean, not bragging or anything but, I feel like I’ve read a good bunch of books in my life maybe, not enough of the Nation-shaping genre though.
How many have you read?
Any thoughts on what should be on or off the list?
One that I missed somehow....
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3 Responses to “The Books That Shaped America, Let The Controversy Begin!”
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Pribek At Zazzle
The post to blame: Most Peculiar Mama (Don't Eat Your Cat)
I weigh in with 25 or so … same as you. I read poetry which probably accounts for the two difference…
I would say that with all due respect; the USA has no shape. What ever it is we are as a nation feeling today is a lack of shape. And that is the bargain for our melting pot status. Each new “group” that prevails in numbers will have their own pile of books to look upon. Therefore this list is “evolving,” at best.
There are no Spanish authors in this list, yet we will be in Texas a Latin majority in the near future.
I can think of many books left out of this list… as can others find titles that might “shape” our nation. But again with all due respect the USA is a mere child at the bosom of world’s cultures. India alone has books that go back ten or fifteen thousand years, sanskrit epics, … that have diagrams of vimanas, flying chariots… and you could not sell me when I was twenty on the ‘Ramayana and Mahabharata,’ when the hare krishnas came a knocking on my door…
Japan has writings that predate the pyramids, and then what is all that hieroglyphic madness on Mayan temples?
First we should be humble that we have any books at all… then we should look at the cultural wealth that each of our “groups” has brung to this ball. Then we should dance with the ones who have brung us … that is my take on the shape we’re in.
If there was a “book” that could shape the USA into a valid concept… I would submit it would have this history…
HERE The world renown Sefer Raziel HaMalach, or Book of Raziel the Angel, is said to hold all forms of secret knowledge regarding the universe and spiritual world, and is widely considered to be a book of spells and magic. Supposedly the archangel Raziel stands close to God’s holy throne, and thus he hears God speak of all the truths and mysteries regarding creation. Raziel then writes down all that God says. Legend has it that Raziel gave the Sefer Raziel HaMalach to Adam and Eve shortly after they sinned against God in Eden by eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Once they were expelled from the Garden, it is said that they would never be able to find their way back home. So Raziel gave them his book so that both of them could indeed return some day again, and also so that they could learn more about the God that they sinned against. Other angels were appalled by Raziel’s act of kindness, and destroyed this magical book.
Some say that after a group of heavenly angels destroyed the Book of Raziel the Angel, by casting it into the ocean, descendants of Enoch would eventually find it washed ashore. This book was then passed down from generation to generation finally arriving in the hands of Enoch, who is said to have used it to transform himself into the angel Metatron. Before Enoch turned himself into an angel, supposedly he expanded the Sefer Raziel HaMalach with some of his own heavenly knowledge. It is then said that Enoch eventually gave the amended version of the Book of Raziel to the archangel Raphael, who then passed it on to Noah. Using the book, Noah was able to perfectly construct the ark. After Noah died, the book continued to change hands, eventually ending up in the possession of King Solomon. From there the holy book was said to have continued passing through the generations, and some claim that it exists to this very day.
That’s my “little” brother…painter, poet, musician, cartographer, journalist, cartoonist…some of that book could be swirling around in these blogs, Hermano. “I’ve read a good bunch of books” says a lot and I’ll stick with that.