Book Read Free

The Great American Read--The Book of Books

Page 1

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 permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers

  Hachette Book Group

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  New York, NY 10104

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  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.

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  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.

 

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