When
I think of books and some of the greatest writers, I rarely note if the author
is American or how his or her works contribute to our nation’s literary
experience. But one book, Our Literary Heritage: A Pictorial History of the Writer in America,
is a nice attempt to capture the writers of the United States from
1800-1915. The book authored by Van Wyck
Brooks and Otto Bettmann, was published in 1956 by E.P. Dutton & Co.
I
came across this book at Here’s A Book Store, Inc. located in the heart of the
Brooklyn neighborhood I grew up in. This
used bookstore has been serving the community for over four decades. I used to come there as a teenager, sometimes
selling books to them, other times, snatching up old books that interested me,
usually about baseball and later on, philosophy.
The
book presents itself as “a history of American life seen through the literary
window.”
It
opens up discussing how Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography “was the first
American book that was certainly a classic.” Washington Irving is labeled as
“the first literary talent that the country had known,” and Edgar Allan Poe was
viewed as “a literary genius without a parallel on the American scene.”
The
book’s strength is that it offers over 500 photographs and drawings that
reflect upon our nation’s rich literary history from several centuries.
Many
authors are featured or mentioned, including ones we still talk about today,
including Noah Webster, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Henry Thoreau, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Emily Dickinson,
Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Henry Adams, Stephen Crane, Jack
London, Ellen Glasgow, Gertrude Stein, Sinclair Lewis, and Eugene O’Neill.
These
writers wrote under such different eras and conditions than anything today’s
writer confronts. It’s almost impossible
to compare the works of the 19th and early 20th century
with life and literature in 2017.
Though
many creative works, whether from 1817 or 2017 cover issues that every
generation must confront – life, death, love, war, politics, and the pursuit of
our dreams, there is little correlation between America’s earlier days and
today’s times. Technology, globalization, and mass communications dramatically
alter today’s landscape.
The
earlier books of our country’s days seem more serious, profound, and urgent
than today’s books. Of course that’s
just a generality, but the works from say 150 years ago just sound more
sophisticated, saying so much with so few utterances. More books back then revolved around issues
of life and death. Talking about the
Civil War seems far more important than 50
Shades of Grey. But we can’t put
down today’s books. Many of them reflect
struggles and important matters but most of them involve individuals rather
than a nation or planet under attack. Even books on terrorism don’t feel the
same way as when reading about World War I. Even the level of vocabulary and word-selection used by writers from a century or two ago seems to reflect a more serious tone and representative of a more thoughtful and insightful era.
Brooks,
who won a Pulitzer Prize, and Bettman, one of the world’s most noted experts in
the field of the graphic arts, team up to put together an intriguing book that
peers into lost times.
Twain, Melville, and Whitman noticeably got more ink than any other writer shown in
this 242-page book. Perhaps that tribute is the testament to the impact those
writers had on scholars back in 1956.
Our
American literary heritage has plenty of great writers and books. I consider any book sold in America to be
American, regardless of where an author was born or a work originally
published. Shakespeare is as American to
me as anyone else, as his works continue to influence and inspire our culture
here, despite the fact this playwright from England died several centuries
before America was even founded and colonized.
So
whether you loved Crane’s The Red Badge
of Courage, Melville’s Moby-Dick,
Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter, or
Irving’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow,
you’ll find a stroll down memory lane as you turn the yellowed pages of Our Literary Heritage. It’s a beautiful
view.
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