by PBS
Copyright
Text copyright © 2018 by Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
PBS materials, logos, marks and foreword copyright © 2018 by Public Broadcasting Service.
Series materials copyright © 2018 by Nutopia Limited
Print book interior design by Joanna Price
Jacket design © 2018 SJI Associates for Public Broadcasting Service
Jacket design by Frances Soo Ping Chow
Jacket images © Getty Images except for whale fishing (iStock.com/ilbusca); man in cap (Alexey_M/shutterstock.com); Alice in Wonderland (iStock.com/Andrew_Howe); and Don Quixote (clipart.com)
Jacket copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers
Hachette Book Group
1290 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10104
www.hachettebookgroup.com
www.blackdogandleventhal.com
First Edition: August 2018
The Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to www.HachetteSpeakersBureau.com or call (866) 376-6591.
LCCN: 2018941274
ISBNs: 978-0-316-41755-6 (hardcover); 978-0-316-41754-9 (ebook)
E3-20180728-JV-PC
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword
Introduction
The Books
Once Upon a Time
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
The Alchemist
Alex Cross Mysteries
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Americanah
And Then There Were None
Talk the Talk
Anne of Green Gables
Another Country
Atlas Shrugged
Beloved
Bless Me, Ultima
The Book Thief
All Personality
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
The Call of the Wild
Catch-22
The Catcher in the Rye
Charlotte’s Web
The Chronicles of Narnia Series
Another Day, Another Dollar
The Clan of the Cave Bear
The Coldest Winter Ever
The Color Purple
A Confederacy of Dunces
The Count of Monte Cristo
Crime and Punishment
#RebelReader
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
The Da Vinci Code
Don Quixote
Doña Bárbara
Dune
Fifty Shades Series
“When It Is Finished, You Are Always Surprised”
Flowers in the Attic
Foundation Series
Frankenstein
Ghost
Gilead
The Giver
From Page to Stage and Screen
The Godfather
Gone Girl
Gone with the Wind
The Grapes of Wrath
Great Expectations
The Great Gatsby
Libraries to Long For
Gulliver’s Travels
The Handmaid’s Tale
Harry Potter Series
Hatchet Series
Heart of Darkness
The Help
Predictive Text
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
The Hunger Games Trilogy
The Hunt for Red October
The Intuitionist
Invisible Man
Jane Eyre
“What’s the Use of a Book Without Pictures?”
The Joy Luck Club
Jurassic Park
Left Behind Series
The Little Prince
Little Women
Lonesome Dove
If You Like…
Looking for Alaska
The Lord of the Rings Series
The Lovely Bones
The Martian
Memoirs of a Geisha
Mind Invaders
Boring, Strange, and Just Not Good
Moby-Dick
Nineteen Eighty-Four
The Notebook
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Outlander Series
The Outsiders
A Sense of Place
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Pilgrim’s Progress
The Pillars of the Earth
A Prayer for Owen Meany
Pride and Prejudice
Ready Player One
By Design
Rebecca
A Separate Peace
The Shack
Siddhartha
The Sirens of Titan
A Song of Ice and Fire Series
In a Manner of Speaking
The Stand
The Sun Also Rises
Swan Song
Tales of the City
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Things Fall Apart
Mothers, Lovers, and BFFs
This Present Darkness
To Kill a Mockingbird
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Twilight Series
War and Peace
Watchers
“There Are Better Ways to Starve to Death”
The Wheel of Time Series
Where the Red Fern Grows
White Teeth
Wuthering Heights
How to Read a Literary Text
Appendices
The Great American Read: 100 Books by Release Year
The Great American Read: 100 Books by Genre
Resources for Readers
On Devices
In Person
Image Credits
Newsletters
FOREWORD
DEAR FELLOW BOOK LOVER,
There are few things as satisfying and as long lasting as a beloved book. My favorite books have become the touchstones in my life; I remember where I was when they found me, why they spoke to me at that particular time, and how I’d often passionately recommended them to my friends. Many of my favorites still sit on my bookshelves as a reminder of the wonderful experiences they’ve brought to me. In quiet moments, I pull them from the shelves and revisit them like old friends.
With The Great American Read, PBS has set out to unite America around one powerful idea: What if we could forget for a moment all of the things that divide us and remember the ideas, the characters, the stories that make up our common thread? What if by celebrating our favorite books together, and by learning the unique history behind them, we could rediscover the joy the finest storytellers have brought us?
The book you are holding is an essential guide to this wonderful PBS initiative. Extensively researched, The Great American Read: The Book of Books includes summaries and the little-known backstories of every book and every author featured in
the television series, giving you a fresh perspective on how each of America’s top one hundred novels fits into the fabric of our history, both in America and abroad. Best of all, you are likely to draft a new reading list of your own, either of books to revisit or to discover for the very first time.
As you’ll soon see, the list of top one hundred novels America has chosen is intriguing in its scope—the earliest of America’s favorites dates from 1605, and the latest is from 2016. The range of experiences the list captures is equally fascinating. From the sumptuous to the scandalous, from the toughest neighborhood to the grandest mansion, these stories are the mirror of our culture, never the arbiter, and as such they suggest to us who we have been as a culture and we may very well be now. They also span the range of our reading experience, from books we might have read as children to books we might have recently discovered.
Perhaps the most satisfying aspect of The Great American Read: The Book of Books is the history that surrounds both books and publishing—the stories behind the story—provided by author Jessica Allen. Jessica and her team have delved deeply into publisher archives to bring you fascinating details about the books: little-known information about first editions, the stories behind famous books to film, several original author manuscripts, the day jobs of famous authors (did you know Harper Lee was an airline ticket agent and Diana Gabaldon was a science professor?), and more.
I hope you’ll join me and our friends at PBS in celebrating The Great American Read and that you’ll find The Book of Books as wonderfully entertaining as I have.
—Meredith Vieira
INTRODUCTION
More than 300,000 books were published in the United States last year. This number encompasses romances, mysteries, Pulitzer Prize winners, true crime, thrillers, literary fiction, natural science, travelogues, and religious tracts. Memoirs, essays, pop culture. The book destined to become someone’s best-loved, the book that turned a reluctant reader into a passionate one, the book that made a child want to become a writer. All of these, and so very many more, appeared on shelves and screens.
Even as television and social media compete for our attention, books remain. Indeed, they thrive. When I was a child, if my local library didn’t stock a title, I didn’t read it. Today we carry entire libraries around on a device no bigger than a paperback. We order titles published anywhere, to arrive on our doorstep within 24 hours. It’s a glorious time to be a reader.
The technology behind this growth in accessibility is extraordinary, but so is the technology at the heart of reading itself. Reading began as listening, when our ancestors started telling tales to pass collective knowledge from one generation to the next. In time, this transmission begat writing, which furthered the capacity for progress and widened humanity’s imaginative scope. The development of literacy has no serious competition as our species’ most significant achievement.
A few years ago I attended a talk given by artist Chuck Close. Speaking about the purpose and power of his materials, he noted, “Even colored dirt can make you cry.” So can black marks on a white page. We weep with sorrow, or joy. Our cares disappear, as do our surroundings, and we are transported, as if by some supernatural sleight of hand, into other times, minds, and places—all by reading. To remind yourself of the mystery of this process of comprehension and imagination, have a look at a book in a language you don’t know. You’ll instantly appreciate the tremendous power of what amounts to just a bunch of lines and circles.
“Tell me a story,” a little one begs, and we oblige. Like our prehistoric relatives, we continue to rely on narratives to entertain, to inform, and to instruct. Reading broadens our perspective. In a world fraught with conflict, where terrible news is always a click away, we can fall into a novel and find solace and hope. Writing the entries that constitute The Great American Read reminded me of the importance of reading to the development of civil society—in every sense of the word, from politeness at the post office to supporting a meaningful discussion of ideas and issues. Some books propose values or promote behaviors that I find less than praiseworthy, but I believe in not only the writer’s right to espouse said views but also the absolute necessity of engaging with outlooks with which we don’t agree. Personal and intellectual growth comes from reading widely and deeply, as well as from developing a willingness to push past the comfortable into the utterly strange.
Other books discussed in the pages that follow live within me, as much a part of myself as my very DNA. A quotation from Wuthering Heights formed the centerpiece of my wedding vows. One Hundred Years of Solitude changed the way I think about time. I can still remember how horrified I was by the climax of Nineteen Eighty-Four when I was a child, frantically petting my schnauzer to comfort myself, and how my friends and I, like so many teens before us, quoted lines from Salinger, Baldwin, and Vonnegut. A huge chunk of my graduating class used the conclusion of The Great Gatsby as their send-off quote in our high-school yearbook.
Some worthy titles did not make the cut. Depending on your sensibilities, you may rage against the lack of Middlemarch, The Sound and the Fury, or Madame Bovary, or search in vain for Interview with the Vampire, The Golden Compass, or Kindred. I unsuccessfully attempted to insert entries for Mrs. Dalloway, Never Let Me Go, and The Constant Gardener, but my editors caught on pretty quickly to this good-hearted mutiny. We bibliophiles have our beloved titles, no doubt, the books we think everyone else should adore as much as we do, and our go-to responses when asked to name which tomes we’d bring to a desert island. But still another pleasure of reading is the giddiness that stems from knowing that there are so many other books waiting to be devoured and explored.
Readers talk about cherished characters being as well-known as old friends. Such a statement would seem trite if it didn’t feel so unassailably true. Yet we age even as they stay the same, and our relationship to Tom Sawyer or Jo March differs depending on whether we encounter them when we are children or as adults. Therein lies another one of reading’s profound joys—how much a book appears to alter upon each rereading. Our books change with us.
It’s our hope that the 100 books that make up The Great American Read encourage you to revisit old favorites and find new ones, to engage with challenging texts and hone your powers of empathy, to help raise readers and reach reluctant ones, to swap stories and share books with friends and family.
I wish you happy reading!
THE BOOKS
Here of the first edition of Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen. It begins with “It is a truth universally acknowledged…,” one of the most famous first lines in literature.
Once Upon a Time
THE BEST FIRST LINES IN LITERATURE
YOU CAN’T JUDGE A BOOK by its cover, but you can absolutely judge it by its first line.
A great first line grabs you by the shirt and doesn’t let go. In some cases, a first line sets up the whole novel, and offers us exactly what we need to know in terms of tone, location, and the plot to come.
In other instances, the first line shows us the vast new world of emotions, characters, and actions we’re about to explore.
Either way, the most extraordinary first lines compel us to keep reading.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
—Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
—Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody’s always going on about—he wasn’t no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock.
—Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
I am an invisible man.
—Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to re
member that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
—Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.
—Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
—Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
Call me Ishmael.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.
—Toni Morrison, Beloved
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
A first edition copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, published in 1876.
Portrait of Mark Twain, born in 1835 in Missouri. With Tom Sawyer, he created what has been called “the archetypal comedic novel of American childhood.”
Pages from one of Twain’s later Tom Sawyer manuscripts, entitled “Tom Sawyer, Detective.” The pages are collected in the Mark Twain Project at the University of California, Berkeley.
1
THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER
Mark Twain · 1876
Mark Twain drew on his Missouri boyhood to write The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). Encapsulating the innocence and free-spiritedness of youth, it possesses an uncanny ability to make us nostalgic for early days that may in no way resemble our own. Tom skips school to go swimming, flirts with pretty girls, falls in love with Becky Thatcher, hangs around with Huckleberry Finn, gets into scrapes, and incurs the wrath of Aunt Polly. He’s like a Norman Rockwell painting come to life, with an ever-present devilish grin and happy-go-lucky personality.
It’s all fun and games until someone gets murdered. One night in a graveyard, Tom and Huck witness Injun Joe killing the town doctor. Terrible as they feel when the wrong man gets arrested and tried for the crime, they fear Injun Joe more. The truth comes out during the trial, setting off a chain of events that climaxes in a nearby cave. Tom saves the girl and gets the gold. At the end of this amusing novel, Tom convinces Huck to stick around in civilized society, at least for a while, by promising that they’ll soon have a gang-initiation ceremony involving blood and a coffin.