Denis Donoghue, one of my favorite literary critics, died recently (1928-2021) and I thought I would honor him by reading (or rereading) some of his books that gave me pleasure over the years. I thought I would start with The American Classics (2005) which Donoghue wrote after teaching a graduate course called FIVE IN AMERICAN LITERATURE at New York University. To Donoghue’s surprise, he found that most of his students had very little exposure to these “classics.”
“It turned out that none of the students had read all the books. Some of them had read one or two of them, but only in excerpts: two or three of the more agreeable chapters of Walden, the “Custom-House” introduction to The Scarlet Letter, a few anthology poems from Leaves of Grass. When I pressed the matter, I was allowed to think that Ayn Rand had a more palpable presence in their high schools than Whitman or Melville. The students did not dispute that the five books are somehow privileged in American culture, but so are the heads on Mount Rushmore; stared at rather than otherwise appreciated. I gathered from the students that the five books had little provenance in their own early education. To Kill a Mockingbird meant more to them.” (p. 2)
In High School English class, we read The Scarlet Letter. I didn’t like it (neither does Donoghue). We read selections from Walden and Leaves of Grass. We read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer but not The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
In the chapter on Whitman, Donoghue quotes the prickly critic Yvor Winters who wrote, “The doctrine of Emerson and Whitman, if really put into practice, should naturally lead to suicide.” It’s nuggets like this that made me want to read Denis Donoghue.
Have you read these American Classics? What do you think of them? GRADE: A
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction: After Emerson — 1
1. Emerson and “The American Scholar” — 23
2. Moby-Dick — 55
3. The Scarlet Letter — 101
4. Walden — 137
5. Leaves of Grass — 177
6. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — 217
Afterword — 251
Notes — 263
Acknowledgment — 281
Index — 283
I’m not sure about Walden but the other books I got from our city library still at the Gymnasium (high school preparing you for university). The “America House” library in the near university city of Tübingen brought new books to our city library every two weeks – and I tried to read all of them – of course all in German translations.
My first foreign languages were French and Latin and it took me some years at university to be able to read and understand English/American literature.
Wolf, many of the early American “classics” are problematic.
I didn’t like The Scarlet Letter either. I would much rather read To Kill A Mockingbird. I liked Moby Dick better when I read it in college than when I read it in high school. I think it’s a bit difficult for high school students. Never read Leaves of Grass. Read Walden. Huck Finn is one of my favorite books but I think schools hate having to deal with the n word. My hatred was for having to read Silas Marner. My grandson had to read it last fall. Can’t believe that is still required. That novel has probably killed more teenagers interest in reading than anything else.
Steve, I’m with you on SILAS MARNER. Very mawkish and sentimental. Somehow it survives the periodic purging of “The Canon.” Don’t ask me how.
I suspect SILAS MARNER remains on the required reading list because it is so short. Eliot’s MIDDLEMARCH is so much the better book (for that matter, so is ADAM BEDE), but is extremely long. This is not the generation of students who are going to happily read a 700-plus page book.
reply to Deb: unless it’s 700 pages of Stephen King.
Rick, the last Stephen King book I read, http://georgekelley.org/later-by-stephen-king/ was only about 250 pages.
The only one I read and liked was HUCK FINN, although I think I read it on my own rather than having it assigned. THE SCARLET LETTER was assigned, and I hated it. The only virtue of the novel is that it’s relatively short. Take the length of THE SCARLET LETTER and that’s about how much of MOBY DICK I got through, although I still hold out hope of reading it someday. I’ve read bits of WALDEN and LEAVES OF GRASS.
I’m too old to have had TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD assigned but I have read it and still wonder what the big deal is. Surprisingly, for a raging progressive, I have read, and sorta liked, ATLAS SHRUGGED. It really helps if you read it when you’re young and stupid, which I was. I thought it was SF, which it could rightfully be considered. Also read THE FOUNTAINHEAD. No book here can even approach the sheer horror and boredom of having to read CLARISSA.
Michael, I read Richardson’s CLARISSA in one of my doctoral classes. It was the unabridged version over 1000+ pages long. Written in letter format, the novel about an aristocratic rake who wants to seduce an innocent girl drags a bit after 800 pages.
I remember Bill Crider writing about PAMELA and CLARISSA. He read them too. The only one of those older novels I remember reading was Fielding’s JOSEPH ANDREWS. Why that and not TOM JONES, don’t ask me.
Jeff, I confess: I have not read TOM JONES although I have at least three different editions of it.
Read them all to some extent except Moby Dick. We read a lot of Hardy in my school. They liked his punitive plots. TKAM would have been considered popular fiction in the mid-sixties. I read so much and so widely then it is hard to separate what was assigned from what I just read. I think we read GRAPES OF WRATH but I am not sure. It might have be OF MICE AND MEN. We read a lot of poetry and Shakespeare-two plays a year. It was a Christian school so of course, we read THE SCARLET LETTER and I think we read THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. Also we read George Elliott-THE MILL ON THE FLOSS,. Also SILAS MARNER. We read so much more than what’s assigned today. And we wrote papers on them all. I had to write a 20 page paper on THE CANTERBURY TALES, as a senior honors paper.
I think I was smarter then than now.
Patti, when I attended Marquette University, the Jesuit professors assigned a book per week per course. In effect, I read five books per week just to keep up! Today, the reading requirements are much less in colleges and universities. I think we were all smarter back then!
MOBY, FINN and LETTER. All were school or college requirements. Somehow, being required to read a book is like being told to eat my spinach.
Dan, same here. That’s why I’m not in a Book Club. I don’t want to be told what to read. And, by the way, I like spinach (especially on a pizza)…but not being forced to eat it.
Read them all—but I think that was most likely in college, not high school (although time & memory have blurred the boundaries between the two). I liked them all to a certain extent—although I though MOBY DICK had some tedious, long-winded passages and I still think Hawthorne’s ambiguous short stories (“Nathaniel Hawthorne’s multiple choice of meaning” as one of my college professors referred to them) are so much better than THE SCARLET LETTER.
In high school, our curriculum required us to read GREAT EXPECTATIONS, THE CALL OF THE WILD, THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER, THE GREAT GATSBY, and CATCHER IN THE RYE. Honors classes were given an additional list of books to choose from—which is where I found BARCHESTER TOWERS and THE GOLDEN BOWL and started my Trollope and James fan-girling. As for what is read in high schools today, I’m not surprised Ayn Rand is on the required reading list—pushed through by conservatives on school boards who think (or have been told) her brand of “boot-strap selfishness” is perfect and have no insight into how atrociously written her books are. As for TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, it’s a “white savior” novel where the savior doesn’t actually save anyone! In order to buy into Atticus as a towering figure of integrity, you have to accept the social setup of the book. At least in THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER, there’s an acknowledgment that the social structure needs to be changed.
/Dismounting soapbox now!
Deb, I didn’t encounter BARCHESTER TOWERS until I read THE WARDEN in one of my doctoral classes. Then, I read the whole CHRONICLES OF BARSETSHIRE:
1.1 The Warden
1.2 Barchester Towers
1.3 Doctor Thorne
1.4 Framley Parsonage
1.5 The Small House at Allington
1.6 The Last Chronicle of Barset
I love Trollope and think it’s a shame that Dickens is so much more widely-read. Dickens was good at extremes and caricatured characters, whereas in Trollope very few characters, even the worst cads, are irredeemable.
George, like you, I read THE SCARLET LETTER but didn’t like it. Also read parts of LEAVES OF GRASS and WALDEN. I prefer HUCK FINN to TOM SAWYER. In fact, I reread the former a few years ago. We did read and study MOBY DICK, but it was obviously a heavily edited edition (otherwise we would have been reading it for months!). I’d definitely take HUCK FINN in this group.
I so agree with Steve about hating SILAS MARNER. Also, to a lesser degree, THE MILL ON THE FLOSS. And Hardy’s RETURN OF THE NATIVE. None are books I would have read unless I was forced to. Of all assigned books, I probably liked Dickens the best – A TALE OF TWO CITIES, DAVID COPPERFIELD, GREAT EXPECTATIONS. I did like WAR & PEACE, though again it was a heavily edited edition. I still mean to read the full edition one day. (It’s on my Kindle.)
Of course, these days I think of Elaine Bennis believing Jerry when he tells her the original title was WAR – WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR? (Absolutely nothing.)
Jeff, I read the complete WAR AND PEACE before Diane and I went to NYC to see: http://georgekelley.org/natasha-pierre-and-the-great-comet-of-1812/
Good for you! I have one of Deb’s mentioned favorites, MIDDLEMARCH, on the Kindle, but have not read it yet. Of course, I have the COMPLETE Trollope, as well as Dickens, Henry James, Wilkie Collins, and Edith Wharton.
Jeff, like you I have the complete Trollope, Dickens, and Henry James in Kindle format on my iPad. I have most of Edith Wharton’s books on my shelves.
I’ve read them all except WALDEN, of which I’ve just read some excerpts. I didn’t/don’t like MOBY DICK and don’t see the point of assigning it these days, I had to read it in high school. I loved the Dickens I was assigned, though, TALE OF TWO CITIES, GREAT EXPECTATIONS, DAVID COPPERFIELD. I later read THE PICKWICK PAPERS and MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT. I have read LEAVES OF GRASS at least twice through, a little here and there, and have (why I’m not sure) of it. Being in high school 1959-1963, I had the same assignments as many of the commenters here, I suppose, but did any of you get James Fenimore Cooper assigned?
No, but I still laugh my head off when I read Mark Twain’s JAMES FENIMORE COOPER’S LITERARY OFFENSES.
And it can be read at Project Gutenberg. Enjoy:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3172/3172-h/3172-h.htm
Deb, I laugh when I read Twain’s essay, too! And, Twain is spot on!
We did get assigned one Cooper, and it was not LAST OF THE MOHICANS but THE SPY. I’m pretty sure I was bored.
Other assigned work: GIANTS IN THE EARTH (a real laugh riot), MARTIN EDEN (another barrel of laughs, by Jack London), THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY (well, it was short), CATCHER IN THE RYE (which always makes me think of Bill Crider, who liked it a lot more than most), JANE EYRE, WUTHERING HEIGHTS, THE GOOD EARTH, HEART OF DARKNESS & THE SECRET SHARER, THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, LIGHT IN AUGUST, LOST HORIZON, BRAVE NEW WORLD, ANIMAL FARM and 1984, IVANHOE, THE PEARL and THE GRAPES OF WRATH, GULLIVER’S TRAVELS, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, ARROWSMITH, THE GREAT GATSBY, THE SUN ALSO RISES (I read FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS on my own), LAUGHING BOY (Oliver LaFarge). I took an advanced class my senior year and had to read DEATH IN VENICE, DUBLINERS and THE PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN, among others.
Jeff, your High School reading list exceeded mine. I agree with you on THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY: it’s short.
Rick, no James Fenimore Cooper in High School. I read Cooper in College and have to agree with Mark Twain’s essay, “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.”
Jeff attended the best school I have ever come across. I don’t know how you had time for any other courses. But look what a reader it made you.
I was in Honors classes in English and several other subjects.
Jeff, I was in Honor’s Classes in English, too. But the reading list we read was paltry compared to yours!
Patti, I wish I went to Jeff’s High School!
Reading those books is for suckers! I read the Classic Comic versions and skimmed right through them!
Bob, those Classic Comics are worth some money today!
Among the quintet, none were assigned in toto in my two HSes in which I took academic courses (vs. Kailua HS for driver’s ed one summer). I read FINN in the summer after 6th grade, in the course of reading all four Sawyer/Finn stories over the course of that year–FINN easily the best except for the final chapters, though perhaps ABROAD is the closest to being pure fun (FINN is of course Not That) (had read “Fenimore Cooper…” the previous year in the course of going through the fat Charles Neider volumes of Complete Short Stories and Complete Sketches). Have not yet read MOBY DICK, which is perhaps odd given how much I like “Bartleby”, BILLY BUDD et al. Some of the Whitman poems, but never the whole volume; “Civil Disobedience” was assigned in 8th Grade social studies; read WALDEN on my own; learning the degree to which Thoreau sponged off his wife during his non-conformity was sadly unsurprising.
As I recall, the assigned (more-or-less) book-length reading in the lit and associated classes I took at Londonderry HS and Punahou Academy:
1978-79 LHS:
1984, ANTIGONE and a fat Scott, Foresman text anthology (at Londonderry in 8th Grade, we’d had THE CATCHER IN THE RYE)
1979-80 PA:
ROMEO AND JULIET, THE GREAT GATSBY, SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER, THE SECRET SHARER
1980-81:
THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO, HAMLET, THE GOOD EARTH, NECTAR IN A SIEVE, FAREWELL TO MANZANAR
1981-82:
MACBETH, OEDIPUS REX, ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST, CENTENNIAL by Michener, a selection of Plato’s greatest hits, THE FOREST PEOPLE
It takes a Lot for me to enjoy assigned reading. Even self-assigned!
Todd, it seems to me that you and Jeff were assigned a lot more reading in High School than most of us. I made up for it in College, though.
Senior year, my two one-semeste lit classes were meant to be at the college level, and I took a theater class as well. In a sense, we read some texts advanced Spanish that year, as well, <> and a few other classics, and I did a Borges presentation.
Let’s put that into English (and I see WordPress doesn’t like using Spanish quotation marks!):
Senior year, my two one-semester lit classes were meant to be at the college level, and I took a theater class as well. In a sense, we also read some texts in advanced Spanish that year, excerpts from LAZARILLO DE TORMES and a few other classics, and I did a Borges presentation.
Todd, I wasn’t reading Borges until College. In retrospect, even the advanced English classes I took look watered-down.
George – You sparked a great conversation with this post. After reading it, I heard a writer on NPR talking about required reading vs. guilty pleasures. The transcript is here:
https://www.npr.org/2021/07/06/1013496234/poet-tess-taylor-tells-us-what-shes-reading-this-summer
Elgin, thanks for the link! As you know, a lot of smart people comment on this blog and there’s plenty of knowledge and opinions to revel in!