In an essay on James, Elizabeth Hardwick wrote that “some of the enchantment of The Varieties comes from its being a kind of race with James running on both teams-here he is the cleverest skeptic and there the wildest man in a state of religious enthusiasm.” In fact it’s the duality that makes it so engaging. Professor Walter Houston Clark spoke for many of them when he wrote in the popular magazine Psychology Today that this is “certainly the most notable of all books in the field of the psychology of religion and probably destined to be the most influential book written on religion in the twentieth century. But its influence can’t be denied. “ Heart of Darkness has taken on some of the power of myth,” Harold Bloom wrote, “even if the book is limited by its involuntary obscurantism. Chinua Achebe famously called out the book for its racism, and others, including Harold Bloom, have noted its artistic defects. It didn’t become standard high school and college reading until after Conrad’s lifetime, so while it wasn’t particularly influential in the decade of its publication, it has been extremely so since-especially as a point of academic argument.
Now the story of Marlow’s trip up the Congo River is usually published as a standalone novella, but when it was originally published it got the least attention of the three tales.
#FAMOUS BOOKS 1800S SERIAL#
Point of order: Conrad’s novella was first published as a three-part serial in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1899, but it wasn’t published in book form until 1902-and even then only as the middle story in Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories. Washington “worked too hard to resist and overcome white supremacy to call him an accommodationist,” wrote Robert Norrell, “even if some of his white-supremacist southern neighbors so construed some of his statements.” Du Bois, criticized parts of the book and Washington’s philosophies, particularly characterizing Washington an accommodationist, while others praised his “realist” approach. It was also controversial, both with contemporary critics and later readers. Washington’s autobiography, chronicling his life from a childhood in slavery to an adulthood as an educator, and putting forward a theory for African American uplift and advancement, was a highly influential best-seller in the year of its publication and popular for many years afterwards. He certainly started a new era of children’s tales-and created something everlasting in the process.īooker T. It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heart-aches and nightmares are left out. Having this thought in mind, the story of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” was written solely to pleasure children of today.
Finally, two process notes: I’ve limited myself to one book per author over the entire 12-part list, so you may see certain works skipped over in favor of others, even if both are important (for instance, I’ll be ignoring Dubliners so later I can include Ulysses), and in the case of translated work, I’ll be using the date of the English translation, for obvious reasons. I’ve simply selected books that, if read together, would give a fair picture of the landscape of literary culture for that decade-both as it was and as it is remembered. And of course, varied and complex as it is, there’s no list that could truly define American life over ten or any number of years, so I do not make any claim on exhaustiveness. Though the books on these lists need not be American in origin, I am looking for books that evoke some aspect of American life, actual or intellectual, in each decade-a global lens would require a much longer list. The Great Gatsby wasn’t a bestseller upon its release, but we now see it as emblematic of a certain American sensibility in the 1920s. Of course, hindsight can also distort the senses the canon looms and obscures. Still, over the next two and a half weeks, we’ll be publishing a list a day, each one attempting to define a discrete decade, starting with the 1900s (as you’ve no doubt guessed by now) and counting down until we get to the (nearly complete) 2010s. In the moment, you often can’t tell which books are which.
Others stick around, are read and re-read, are taught and discussed: sometimes due to great artistry, sometimes due to luck, and sometimes because they manage to recognize and capture some element of the culture of the time. Some books are flashes in the pan, read for entertainment and then left on a bus seat for the next lucky person to pick up and enjoy, forgotten by most after their season has passed.