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