by PBS
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer represented a literary departure for Twain. He initially became famous for his travelogues and lighthearted tales, including “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865). But as a longer piece of fiction, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer enabled Twain to touch on broader themes about the way society stifles one’s individuality as well as the hypocrisy of the adult world. He would bring these beliefs even more fully to the fore a few years later in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). But without Tom Sawyer, there could be no Huck Finn: in Tom Sawyer, Twain broke ground artistically, creating what has been called “the archetypal comic novel of American childhood.” Through this novel, readers were given a chance to see kids being kids; at a time when children were still expected to be seen and not heard, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer gave us children with personalities and drives, just like adults.
Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835 in Missouri, Mark Twain derived his pen name from a navigational term used to measure water’s depth, a nod to his days piloting a steamboat up and down the Mississippi River. Twain labored too as a printer’s apprentice and miner, educating himself in libraries. He married an heiress, fathered four kids, and lived next door to Harriet Beecher Stowe in Hartford, Connecticut. His house is a museum now, preserving roughly 16,000 objects, among them Twain’s spectacles and bed.
Like a hapless character he might have created, Twain had terrible troubles with money. Though he earned a great living from his writing, he lost huge sums by repeatedly making foolhardy investments in newfangled technologies and start-ups. He went bankrupt by age 59. To pay back his creditors, he launched an enormously popular around-the-world lecture tour, performing in more than 120 cities from Buffalo to Cape Town.
No one performed Twain better than Twain himself. He’d stand onstage, dressed formally in a black suit. He’d speak ever so slowly and tell hilarious stories about his years on the water and on the road. Plenty of Twainiacs have tried to imitate the original in the years since he died in 1910, but none has come close to evidencing the staying power of actor Hal Holbrook. His one-man show ran through over 2,000 performances in 63 years.
The New York Times lauded Twain in his obituary as the “greatest humorist this country has produced,” and he continues to be a touchstone for comedians and writers, among them Amy Schumer, Bret Easton Ellis, David Baldacci, and Bill Murray. He wrote quips on every topic for seemingly every occasion, but he took seriously his work of capturing American youth.
The first English edition cover of The Alchemist, published in 1993 by HarperSanFrancisco, a division of HarperCollins.
A photograph of author Paulo Coelho. Coelho was born in 1947 in Rio de Janeiro. The Alchemist, as it’s known in English, holds the record as the most translated book by a living author.
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THE ALCHEMIST
Paulo Coelho · 1988
Written in Portuguese and first published by a small press in Brazil in 1988, O Alquimista initially sold just a few hundred copies. It went out of print fairly quickly. Undeterred and adhering to the very tenets he espouses in his work, Paulo Coelho began shopping the book to other publishers, and one took a chance on the passionate writer. Today, The Alchemist, as it’s known in English, holds the record as the most translated book by a living author, published in some 80 languages from Xhosa to Vietnamese to Hebrew. It spent more than six years on the New York Times bestseller list. Devotees often call its author “maestro.” Readers and critics have offered many explanations for the appeal of Coelho’s novel, but perhaps none so best sums it up as the idea that Coelho “gives his readers a recipe for happiness.”
Paulo Coelho wrote his story of fantasy and adventure in just two weeks. A shepherd boy in Andalusia named Santiago asks a Romani fortune-teller about a recurring dream. She interprets the dream as prophesizing that Santiago will discover treasure at the Pyramids of Giza, so he sets off to Egypt. Santiago encounters Melchizedek, the king of Salem, who explains the concept of the “Personal Legend,” something that a person has always wanted to do. He meets and falls in love with Fatima, who promises to marry Santiago once he has completed his journey. Santiago then travels with an alchemist, who helps the boy discover his true self, and who helps him transform into a kind of windstorm called a simoom to escape opposing tribes. At last he begins digging at the pyramids, only to learn that the treasure he seeks is back home in Spain—and inside himself.
Technically, The Alchemist is a novel: it has characters, a plot, themes and motifs, and an imaginative narrative and style. However, it offers readers solace as well as a meaningful message about finding one’s path, in a way that veers toward the self-help allegory. Once you discover your true destiny, the book argues, you will find that the entire universe will help you achieve your goals. It’s an inspirational account of self-actualization that speaks to individual fulfillment and the oneness of creation. When you’re smiling, as the saying goes, the whole world smiles with you.
By the time Coelho became one of the world’s best-known authors, he was already a success of a different kind. In the 1960s, he wrote songs for Raul Seixas, sometimes called “the Father of Brazilian Rock,” while participating for about two years in a sect that did drugs and practiced black magic. In time he developed his personal version of Catholicism, which includes symbolism, mysticism, and pantheism. His most famous work draws on these religious beliefs and shares lessons learned over a lifetime of spiritual study to help readers embark on their journeys of transcendence and devotion.
Coelho was born in 1947 in Rio de Janeiro. Along with songwriting, he worked as a journalist, theater director, and actor. In 1986, he walked the nearly 500-mile-long road to Santiago de Compostela, an ancient route through Spain to the shrine of the apostle Saint James the Great; this devotional pilgrimage changed his life. He published a novel based on his experiences, The Pilgrimage, a year before The Alchemist. Coelho continues to write and uses social media to communicate directly with his readers.
The book continues to resonate with fans young and old, famous and ordinary, bibliophiles and reluctant readers alike. When Devon Kennard, a linebacker for the New York Giants, decided to run a book club on his Instagram account, he selected The Alchemist and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). He sent signed memorabilia to people who asked especially insightful questions. Actor Will Smith has called the book “metaphysical, esoteric nonsense,” but considers it to be one of his favorite books, in part because it espouses the idea that “we are who we choose to be.”
Book covers from the Alex Cross mysteries: Along Came a Spider, Kiss the Girls, Pop Goes the Weasel, and Four Blind Mice, published by Hachette.
Author James Patterson at his home office in 2006. Born in Newburgh, New York, in 1947, Patterson graduated from Manhattan College and has had more than 50 New York Times bestsellers, a world record.
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ALEX CROSS MYSTERIES
James Patterson · 1993–present
This Publishers Weekly headline from a 2016 article sums up the phenomenon that is James Patterson: “It Takes 16 People Working Full Time to Publish All of James Patterson’s Books.” The man averages nine hardcovers per year, along with children’s books, YA, and middle-grade fiction. His publisher had to hire more people simply to keep up with editing, marketing, design, and publicity, as well as media and entertainment partnerships and the author’s philanthropy. Such prolificacy is even more astonishing given that Patterson has had more than 50 New York Times bestsellers, a world record. So he doesn’t just write fast, he writes well.
Patterson’s first novel, The Thomas Berryman Number, was rejected 31 times before being published in 1976; it went on to win the Edgar Award for Best First Novel. But Along Came a Spider (1993), the first to feature Alex Cross, an African American homicide detective in Washington, DC, was his breakout book. Since then, Cross has appeared in more than 20 other thrillers and crime novels. Sales of the series approach 90 million.
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n intelligent, rational hero, Alex Cross earned a PhD in psychology from Johns Hopkins, with a specialty in forensic and abnormal psychology. Over the course of the series, Cross leaves the DC Metropolitan Police Department (MPDC) to work as an agent for the FBI, then returns to private practice as a psychologist. In the most recent books, he serves as a consultant to MPDC’s Major Case Squad. He struggles to balance his commitment to solving crime with his family obligations, including his three children and various love interests, some of whom are killed as a result of their relationship with Cross. His first wife died in a drive-by shooting before the action of Along Came a Spider, but later he meets and marries a fellow detective, Bree Stone.
The Cross mysteries share several characteristics: They drop readers straight into the action, with virtually no backstory or lengthy descriptions. They force Cross to confront a villain, or multiple villains, in a fast-moving plot. As a profiler, Cross specializes in particularly twisted individuals, and the novels can be graphic in their depictions of violence. He hunts serial rapists, hired assassins, corrupt officers of the law, members of the mafia, human traffickers. With short sentences, short paragraphs, and short chapters, these books are the very definitions of page-turners, hence Patterson’s tremendous success—readers can’t stop reading.
Patterson moved into the children’s-book world after witnessing his son’s struggles with reading, and he now writes books designed to foster a lifelong passion for literature in kids and teens. He also funds scholarships, donates to educational institutions, and runs a website for parents, teachers, and caregivers to help connect young readers to books they’ll love.
Born in Newburgh, New York, in 1947, Patterson graduated from Manhattan College and entered the PhD program in literature at Vanderbilt University. Once he realized that he wouldn’t be able to teach college and write at the same time, he left graduate school for New York City, where he worked in advertising until the mid-1990s and rose to CEO. These days, Patterson runs a veritable empire, employing a team of cowriters who craft manuscripts from his detailed outlines and often go through multiple rounds of revisions. “I look at it the way Henry Ford would look at it,” he says when asked how he gets so much work done. Up-front and unabashed about his collaborators, Patterson continues to look for new talent with which to pair up, from a New York City doorman to a former US president—The President Is Missing (2018), a novel and character-driven series on Showtime about the disappearance of a US president, is a joint effort with co-author Bill Clinton. Nevertheless, Patterson writes 365 days a year. He told Vanity Fair that he wants his obituary to read, “He was slowing down at 101, and had only finished four novels that year.”
The first edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, published in 1865.
Lewis Carroll was born in 1832 in Daresbury, England, to a family of clerics in the Anglican church.
The dedication page of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, the original manuscript for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Carroll dedicated the book to Alice Liddell, the inspiration for the story.
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ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND
Lewis Carroll · 1865
Going down the rabbit hole with Alice has been a childhood rite of passage for more than 150 years. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) encapsulates youth, a time when imagination reigns and frolicking is a full-time job. For many kids, reading Lewis Carroll’s fantastical, nonsensical tale of grinning cats, mad hatters, and murderous queens marks the start of a lifelong love of literature. But adults can appreciate the absurdities and paradoxes at play on another level, as well.
The story opens with young Alice casting about for something, anything, to do as her big sister reads. She notices a white rabbit rush past, consulting his pocket watch and muttering about being late. A curious child who delights in good manners, she decides to follow—and enters an illogical world that challenges her profound love of order and her sense of self.
Everywhere she turns, Alice’s notions about the way things work are upended. She holds a baby only to witness its transformation into a pig. She cries so much, she almost drowns in her own tears. She meets a cat who can appear and disappear; tastes a drink that makes her small, then eats a cake that makes her big; and plays croquet with flapping flamingos and squirming hedgehogs. She attends a tea party in which she’s pelted with unanswerable riddles and later learns about “the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.” Eventually sentenced to a beheading, Alice wakes up and discovers she’s been dreaming.
Although Lewis Carroll denied that there was a real-life analogue to his beloved protagonist, he never denied the story’s origins: Rowing to a picnic one summery day with a group of neighbor children, his young companions begged to be entertained. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, as he was known in real life, obliged with a twisty yarn about an inquisitive girl named Alice.
Dodgson was born in 1832 in Daresbury, England, to a family of clerics in the Anglican church. He followed in his father’s footsteps to Oxford University’s Christ Church, but focused instead on mathematics. After graduating, he was offered a teaching position at the college, where he remained for the next 26 years. By all accounts an awkward, shy man, Dodgson found comfort in his numerous friendships with children, forging bonds with them he was unable to create with grown-ups. He loved to take their photographs—at the time a painstaking process that demanded stillness of its subjects, so he would regale his sitters with elaborate fictions. When he met the Liddell family in 1856, Dodgson spent time with all four kids but grew particularly close to the three daughters. It was the middle girl, Alice, who requested a story on the boat that day.
So taken was she with the tale, Alice Liddell asked Dodgson to write it down. He obliged, and the manuscript made its way to a publisher in 1865. Critics were initially more impressed with the novel’s illustrations by John Tenniel than its text. Nevertheless, Carroll convinced his publisher to let him write a sequel; Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There appeared in 1871.
Both books became wildly popular. They continue to inspire adaptations, among them cartoons, television shows, musicals, anime, graphic novels, and a 1967 song about hallucinogens by Jefferson Airplane. Writers as diverse as Vladimir Nabokov and Franz Kafka also owe a debt to Carroll. Beneath the whimsy and the wit, the message of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland can seem a bit bleak: Try as we might, we can’t command a chaotic world. Logic is fallible, authority arbitrary. Rules change. Nevertheless, waiting on every page are opportunities for us to rediscover magic and dreams we thought lost.
Hardcover edition of Americanah, published in 2013 by Penguin Random House.
Portrait of author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who grew up in Nsukka, Nigeria, in a house once inhabited by another great African writer, Chinua Achebe. Her third and most well-known novel, Americanah, explores perceptions of race in the United States, Britain, and Nigeria.
Adichie studied at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, pictured here, before continuing her studies in the United States. Her father was a professor there, and her mother was the first female registrar.
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AMERICANAH
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 2013
In one of the most watched TED talks of all time, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie cautions against the “danger of the single story.” Using examples from her childhood in Nigeria and her education in the United States, she demonstrates the insidiousness of the idea that entire cultures, or even single individuals, can be summed up in one narrative—that all of Africa is poor and troubled, for example, or that Adichie wouldn’t know English because she grew up in Nigeria. Single stories lead to stereotypes. Instead, she argues, we must recognize a multiplicity of stories about one another, about other countries, and about the world; doing so promotes diversity and understanding.
The Igbo daughter of a professor of statistics and the first female registrar at the University of Nigeria, Adichie was b
orn in 1977 in Enugu and grew up in Nsukka, in a house once inhabited by another great African writer, Chinua Achebe. She earned a scholarship to attend college in the United States at age 19, eventually receiving undergraduate and graduate degrees in literature, creative writing, and African studies from Eastern Connecticut, Johns Hopkins, and Yale, respectively. In 2010, she was named to the New Yorker’s prestigious “20 Under 40” list, which recognizes young writers of promise.
Adichie’s third and most well-known novel, Americanah (2013) explores perceptions of race in the United States, Britain, and Nigeria. Ifemelu and Obinze develop a relationship as students in Lagos. Looking to escape Nigeria’s military dictatorship, Ifemelu leaves for the United States. Obinze, unable to secure a US visa, goes to London but is eventually deported. Back in Nigeria, he grows wealthy through real-estate deals and marries a beautiful but conventional woman. Ifemelu, meanwhile, has become a prominent blogger about race in America, and has two long-term relationships with American men, both of which end poorly. Eventually, Ifemelu returns to Nigeria, and she and Obinze try to navigate the gulf of time and experience that has emerged between them.
Nigerians use the term Americanah to describe those who’ve fallen under the spell of American culture or who pretend to be Americanized. Arriving in the United States, Adichie realized the extent to which race is a construct, a lesson her characters learn too as they navigate being black outside of their homeland. Still, for all its serious treatment of serious themes, the novel is shot through with moments of humor, and at its core, it’s a story about the mad, glorious thrill of first love.