After reading tons of palaver by some of the more reactionary conservatives on this board re: how liberals hate American, would rather side with France, hate all religions except Islam, blah blah blah, and after reading a thread on the books page about the classics of American literature, I started thinking, hey, have these champions of America actually read these classics? Do they have an actual appreciation of the cultural history of our country? I admit, I'm coming into this with a pretty serious preconception--no, Ann Coulter probably hasn't actually read Moby Dick. But maybe I'm wrong. So, for fun, I came up with a list of classics of American literature that anyone with a high-school diploma could read and understand. (Sorry, GringoTex, this means that Faulkner--one of the two or three best writers in the history of our country--gets left out.) It's by no means exhaustive, but I think that each of the books/authors listed is uniquely American (except, perhaps, for James). Libs, feel free to answer, too. Washington Irving--anything The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn The Scarlet Letter Moby Dick The Great Gatsby Hemingway--anything longer than a short story Leaves of Grass Henry James--anything Emily Dickinson--anything Native Son
Allen Ginsberg, especially Howl and Kaddish. Name me another American writer who pissed off the authorities enough that he got thrown out of not one but two communist countries. Can't get more patriotic than that.
Ironic; I've read much of this stuff, and hated most of it........although I have an almost irrational hate for the Hawthorne/Melville/Emerson/Thoreau generation. God did it suck plowing through that stuff in school. Moving to the 20th century was great.
Sorry, I just want to clarify: I'm not compiling a list. I just want to know which of these books and authors the Reeps and "patriots" have read. So, IntheNet, Ian, et al. . . . have you done your homework? The list could easily be 20 times as long, but I wanted to keep it as basic as possible.
Do you seriously think Howl and Kaddish are worthless? Thankfully, people who actually read poetry disagree with you.
It's a good thing Reeps don't read, because otherwise the brilliant Joseph Heller would be in Guantanamo Bay right now, as a subversive commie. If he is alive, that is.
Part of me agrees with you...the prose "style" of that generation was stilted and artificial, completely out of sync with their subject matter. All of American literature seemed stuck in VERY ill-fitting suits, just waiting for Mark Twain to say "It's OK to sound like ourselves." Which makes me think of Sinclair Lewis, our Greatest Bad Writer. Guy had some important things to say, but man, was he clumsy with the language. And his plots were as labored and unrefined as his prose was leaden and earnest.
My worst writer award goes to Solzhenitsin. Nice guy, but god DAMN could he not write. Joseph Conrad takes an honorable mention; reading "Heart of Darkness" was like plowing through a thick fog; painful and confusing. I discovered my own preference for simplicity in language and the avoidance of horrifically structured language that Hawthorne employed. Which was painful to read. I'm always reminded of Babel who used to say that he would start with a short story, then take out all the extra words. Then he would do so again. Then a third time. Finally coming up with 3 pages. Brevity is the soul of wit, I think. (Even if I am a fan of certain voluminous works.)
You don't think that the language of Moby Dick suits its subject matter? Nic and I have disagreed about Melville elsewhere. I love the guy. Reading MD is like reading a comic book. My financee, however, hates him with the heat of a thousand suns. Kudos to Alex for (A) answering the questions, and (B) having read some of the books. Have you read "Leaves of Grass," by chance? It's the quintessential American poem.
Nah, I've read some other stuff by Whitman and didn't really like it (I hate poetry as a general rule, with a few exceptions such as Homer's stuff and Beowulf, never read any of it other than what was assigned in school). From your list I've read Huck Finn, Scarlet Letter (countless hours of my life that I will never get back), Moby Dick, Great Gatsby, some Hemingway stuff (Old Man and the Sea and a bunch of short stories), and Native Son (which sparked an interesting discussion in my high school English class--the teacher, and most of the kids, were saying that the guy got railroaded, while I argued that he deserved to be executed, only for killing his girlfriend in cold blood rather than for killing the white chick by accident).
I like Melville more than the others. So, no, I think he's exempt. Gotta agree about Conrad--he's agonizingly clumsy with words.
If you definition of a "nice guy" is broad enough to include delusional reactionary anti-Semites, then... I guess...
I had a professor who referred to him as a "jew-hating Czarist sympathizer," which I guess is the same thing.
I've already pointed out to nicephoras that his inability to appreciate great authors like Dostoevsky lies in his own deficiencies rather than those of the books, and I see no need to pick that old sore again, but I don't think I've pointed that out to you yet.
One of his novels includes a Jewish character, a Gulag bigwig (of course!), who laments the late-1940s rise of government anti-Semitism. He then remembers a slim, blond-haired Russian boy who went to his high school and was beaten up and ratted out to the authorities by his Jewish classmates for attending church. Yes, we deserve all we get, reluctantly concludes the Jewish Gulag bigwig. What an amazing piece of writing! Even literature's best-known bearded mad anti-Semite, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, tried to be a bit more subtle.
I completely and utterly refuse to believe that I am deficient in any way for finding Dostoyevsky a droning, moralizing, utterly useless bore, completely void of any literary talent whatsoever.
You're right- "deficient" is not the right word. We'll just chalk it up to a lack of a good arts education.
Once again, I must thank the pretentious Western literatti for finding a facile and somewhat typical Russian author like Dostoevsky so remarkably interesting. What would we Russians have done without them pointing out our greatest authors to us? Pushkin, you say? Who? Oh, he's not Fyodor, so he can't be any good.
To correct myself - before Solzehnitsin went completely insane, he was a nice guy. Although, perhaps I should have been more careful in choosing words (in a hurry right now) and said "sympathetic figure". Given that he was a Russian, I sort of expect anti-semitism from him. Its almost de rigeur. Hell, Chekhov is one of my favorite writers, but boy oh boy was he not fond of the chosen people.
After you tried to push Turgenev off on us, we figured you guys needed a little help in the "Appreciating Your Own Culture" department.