A List! Books that define America

Oh I do hate lists. My brain turns to jelly everytime I’m asked to make one.

But the temptation is sometimes great. Here’s a question from the cassandra pages that I invite you to consider:

If you were recommending, say, five to ten books you most felt would “explain America” to a foreign person who had never been here in person, what would they be? In other words, when the shoe is on the other foot, what fits – or is this, as I suspect, an impossible request?

This question was prompted by an earlier meditation on Naguib Mahfouz:

One thing my reading has shown me is how important it is to read widely within a particular context, keeping an open mind and an awareness of how much one doesn’t know. (Could an accurate picture of America be formed by reading three novels, even great ones? Ten? Which ones would we recommend?) My current reading of Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, set in contemporary Turkey, has certainly been informed by some of what I learned about Ottoman and post-Ottoman culture from Mahfouz. And with their help, I’m well past the point of seeing that part of the world in black-and-white.

So, if you were going to recommend books to help some one like say the women of Tehran understand what it means to be an American, where would you start?

Responders at the cassandra pages have made some predictable choices: Whitman, Twain, Thoreau. And some not-so-predictable: On the Road, Ai’s Cruelty/Killing Floor, Shelby Foote’s The Civil War.

“American” is a big concept, and technically should take in Canada and Mexico at least. What’s more, I suspect each person’s America is unique. I would have no idea where to begin. But I know a few books I’ve read that have defined me to myself as an American.

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Emily Dickinson
William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
e e cummings
Eudora Welty, Thirteen Stories
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

And all this, if nothing else, shows me where my literary prejudices lie.

Though in all honesty, I’d probably also need to add some more popular stuff, like Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner (for the Perry Mason good-guy ethic), Zane Grey. Or perhaps better than Grey, Owen Wister’s The Virginian. (“Smile when you call me that.”) I wasn’t too big into Nancy Drew, though. But I love Ray Bradbury.

Any thoughts?

Link found by way of Heraclitean Fire, who has his own ideas about books that might define the U.K.

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Esther Whitley

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