by PBS
In her eulogy for Baldwin upon his death in 1987, Toni Morrison said, “You gave us ourselves to think about, to cherish.” Throughout his career, Baldwin sought to record the most difficult truths about racial inequality as he witnessed and felt them, while trying to help readers find their way back to one another, perhaps learning to even embrace those who espouse hate. This attitude pours off the pages of Another Country. He never stopped believing in the country that forged him; he concluded the aforementioned letter, published in the Progressive in the same year as Another Country, with an unsentimental appeal to patriotism: “We can make America what America must become.”
The Signet edition cover of Atlas Shrugged, published in 1996.
A portrait of Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1905.
Handwritten notes by Rand about a sequence describing the train accident in Atlas Shrugged, on display at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, California.
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ATLAS SHRUGGED
Ayn Rand · 1957
As a work of fiction, Atlas Shrugged (1957) is a sci-fi fantasy about a collectivist society in a dystopian United States gone wrong. As a work of ideas, Ayn Rand’s fourth novel argues for the importance of the individual over the group, the need for unregulated economics, and the benefits of selfishness.
Rand’s hatred of collectivism began early: her father’s pharmacy was appropriated by Lenin’s Bolsheviks after the 1917 October Revolution, an act that sent the family into poverty, despair, and exile to Crimea. Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in 1905. She started writing at a young age, and read deeply in the classics as well as the Russian and Western literary canon. Rand immigrated to the United States in 1926, landing in Hollywood with dreams of becoming a screenwriter; she served as an extra on a Cecil B. DeMille film and worked in the costume department for RKO Studios.
In some ways, plot and character in Atlas Shrugged are secondary to the novel’s exposition of Objectivism, the ideology Rand created. John Galt’s impassioned monologue in the novel summarizes its central tenets—its 50-odd pages proved so difficult that it took Rand two years just to write that section. According to Objectivists, individuals should pursue “rational self-interest,” or their individual happiness. Laissez-faire capitalism offers the best economic opportunity for people to do so. Government intervention impedes the individual, so governments should be as hands-off as possible. For these and other reasons, the philosophy has been embraced by American libertarians and conservatives over the past several decades.
Atlas Shrugged opens with a society in disarray. When Dagny Taggart’s railroad fails, she founds her own line. She and her lover discover a special motor, and she sets off to locate the inventor. Meanwhile, industrialists keep vanishing, offering Dagny another mystery to solve. The government moves to acquire all patents and further restrict the economy, creating more chaos and trouble. After a plane crash, Dagny learns that the missing industrialists have gathered under the leadership of John Galt—brilliant, handsome, and essentially the Platonic ideal of masculinity, he’s also the inventor of the engine. Together, Galt and the industrialists are on a “strike of the mind.” Things worsen until the economy collapses, forcing a showdown and a rebuilding.
The character of Dagny allows Rand to attack the so-called mind-body problem. In many works of philosophy and literature, the mind and the body are conceived of as separate entities, with the mind elevated and lofty, the body vulgar and gross. Even as Rand praises the power of the mind—showing what happens when creative brains go on strike and disappear—she nevertheless portrays Dagny as taking pleasure in her body’s physicality and sexuality. She is smart, rational, and independent, with her two halves in alignment.
Rand stopped writing fiction after Atlas Shrugged to concentrate full-time on her nonfiction philosophical work. She lectured widely, accruing guru-like status and multitudes of impassioned followers. She died in 1982. A floral arrangement in the shape of a six-foot-tall dollar sign was placed next to the casket during her funeral.
As a young man, Ted Turner took over his family’s advertising business and plastered “Who is John Galt?” on billboards across the south in 1967. There’s something about Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead (1943) that particularly speaks to teenagers, and Rand is a staple of classrooms and dorm rooms alike. Remarking on her own youthful fascination with the book, journalist Lesley Stahl said, “Like the backseats of lovers’ lane cars, Ayn Rand is for the young.” But some adults may feel they need a Rand-esque reminder to question commonly held beliefs and to not passively accept the existing social order; others read it to try to understand how Objectivists justify the glorification of unfettered greed.
The first edition cover of Beloved, published in 1987.
Toni Morrison, photographed in her New York apartment at the age of 77.
A handwritten draft of Beloved. The author’s papers are housed in the Princeton University Library, and contain about 50 feet of manuscript, draft, and proof pages laid end to end.
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BELOVED
Toni Morrison · 1987
In Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), the ghosts do more than inspire nightmares—they show up on the porch, murderous with rage, begging for love. Told through a series of flashbacks and stream-of-consciousness set pieces, the novel is a harrowing, horrifying account of America’s past.
Beloved begins in 1873, when Paul D arrives at the Cincinnati home of Sethe, who lives with her eighteen-year-old daughter, Denver. Sethe hasn’t seen Paul D since he helped her escape from Sweet Home, a plantation in Kentucky where, as slaves, they were subjected to vicious cruelty and degradations. As Sethe and Paul D attempt to overcome their shared traumas and form a family, an enigmatic young woman named Beloved appears, soaking wet, seemingly out of nowhere. Sethe takes her in and keeps her in the household, even as Beloved becomes increasingly destructive, because Sethe believes her to be the reincarnation of her dead daughter.
Eighteen years earlier, Sethe slit the throat of her two-year-old daughter, tried to murder her sons, and attempted to smash the infant Denver against a wall. Sweet Home’s overseer and slave catchers had discovered the family living in freedom, and Sethe saw death as preferable to her and her children being forced back into slavery. Thanks to the efforts of abolitionists, she escaped prison, a return to slavery, and a death sentence, but not the contempt of her neighbors. Bartering with sexual favors, she could only afford to have “Beloved” carved on her daughter’s headstone. Overwhelmed by these revelations, Paul D flees, sending Sethe and Beloved into a spiral of guilt and obsession that requires the intervention of the black community.
The book presents a world in which the unthinkably brutal realities of slavery have cracked open the boundaries between the natural and the supernatural. Morrison’s lyrical prose heightens the novel’s physical and psychological violence, making for a simultaneously beautiful and challenging reading experience. Its evocation of the emotional, moral, and spiritual wreckage of slavery stands as a stark reminder of the horrors that lie at the heart of American history.
Morrison dedicated her novel to “Sixty Million and more,” a rough estimate of those who died as part of the slave trade. Sethe was based to some extent on Margaret Garner, a real-life woman who committed an unspeakable crime to prevent her family from being forced back into slavery in pre–Civil War Ohio. Garner was arrested for murdering her child, but the judge had trouble deciding whether to try her as a person or as property under the Fugitive Slave Law. She and her other children were re-enslaved and sent back to the South.
A single mother with two sons, Morrison would get up in the wee hours to write before going to work as an editor at Random House. She was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in 1931 in an Ohio steel town, the setting of her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970). As she would later explain, she wrote the book she wanted to read—about an African American girl growing up in a prejudiced society w
ho longs to have blue eyes—and she proudly embraces the label “black writer.” The enormous commercial and critical success of Beloved (her fifth novel) changed her life.
When Beloved failed to win the National Book Award, more than 45 black writers and critics sent a letter of protest to the New York Times. The novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, and Morrison received the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first African American woman to be so honored, as well as the 2012 Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama. She continues to give voice to stories that cry out to be heard.
The classic cover of Bless Me, Ultima. The manuscript was originally published in 1972.
Author Rudolfo Anaya, pictured in 2005. He wrote novels while teaching in his home state of New Mexico.
A cover of the novel updated for the movie release of Bless Me, Ultima, in 2013.
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BLESS ME, ULTIMA
Rudolfo Anaya · 1972
Broadly speaking, Chicano literature centers on the experience of Mexican Americans, beginning in the years after the US annexation of large swaths of Mexico in the mid-19th century and continuing through today. Several significant works arrived on the scene in the 1960s and 1970s, an era of increased awareness of and interest in previously marginalized groups. Bless Me, Ultima (1972) was written during this period, and quickly became a Chicano—and American—classic.
Six-year-old Antonio Juan Márez lives with his mother, a devout Catholic from a farming family, and his father, a vaquero (cowboy) who cherishes his independence on the llano (plains) in rural New Mexico during the 1940s. His parents welcome an old curandera (healer) named Ultima and her pet owl into their home, and Ultima and Tony, as the young boy is known, grow very close. Ultima teaches Tony about medicinal plants and broadens his experience of the natural world. A flashback reveals that she midwifed at his birth and, as a result, believes that she alone knows his future.
Using magical realism, Anaya depicts Tony’s coming-of-age as he is pulled in multiple directions: toward the Catholicism of his mother and the supernatural practices of Ultima, toward his friends at school who speak English and his friends who speak Spanish, toward his mother’s hope that he’ll join the priesthood and his father’s desire for Tony to ride on the plains. Some of Tony’s concerns are universal, such as endeavoring to escape from the weight of parental expectations, while others speak to a specifically Mexican American experience, such as reconciling Ultima’s style of indigenous healing with religion imposed through colonialism.
As Tony explains, when Ultima arrives, “The magical time of childhood stood still, and the pulse of the living earth pressed its mystery into my living blood.” Several events hasten Tony’s maturity while deepening his sense of the unknown. He witnesses the fatal shooting of a deranged former soldier, an episode that leaves him unsure about the nature of sin. His older brothers return home from fighting in World War II, changed by what they experienced. They leave soon after, which constitutes another kind of loss for Tony. He hopes that his upcoming first communion will help address some of his concerns about retribution and penance, but when he fails to find the solace he seeks in the church, he has a vision of a golden carp, a pagan divinity. In time, Tony starts to discover that he can create an identity and belief system that blends elements from many cultures and religions. Tony thus stands as a symbol of multiculturalism, with its emphasis on “and” rather than “or.”
Anaya grew up in New Mexico, where he was born in 1937, as the son of a vaquero and his wife, a farmer’s daughter. He started Bless Me, Ultima while teaching public school in Albuquerque in the early 1960s. Initially the manuscript failed to find a home with publishers, who struggled with its blend of English and Spanish as well as its profanity, the latter a commonly cited reason for the banning of the book in schools. Anaya has since published many other novels for children and adults and has edited several anthologies featuring Latino writers.
Scholars point to Bless Me, Ultima as the first Chicano novel to enter the American literary canon. It’s certainly one of the bestselling. Anaya and his important book cleared the way for other notable works that explore Mexican American identity, like The House on Mango Street (1984), by Sandra Cisneros, and Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (2012), by Benjamin Alire Sáenz. And in expanding the canon, we celebrate a more inclusive and representative idea of what it means to be American.
The cover of the anniversary edition of The Book Thief, originally published in 2005.
Portrait of author Markus Zusak at the 2009 Hay Festival in Hay-on-Wye, Wales.
Main character Liesel, pictured in a still from the 2013 movie release of The Book Thief.
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THE BOOK THIEF
Markus Zusak · 2005
In the aftermath of World War II, philosopher Theodor Adorno famously remarked that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” And yet, in the decades since, people have continued to write and create, to turn to imagination to make sense of experiences, even the seemingly unimaginable experiences of the Holocaust. In The Book Thief (2005), Markus Zusak not only continues this tradition, but shows how literature can be one of our brightest lights in times of moral darkness.
Death narrates The Book Thief, a young-adult novel about Nazi Germany. By the end, readers feel sympathy for this character, who reveals himself to be far from the typical evil or creepy Grim Reaper–esque portrayals. In fact, as we come to discover, Death tries to be fair and gentle in his dealings. He reminds readers that mortality comes for everyone. What troubles him are not those who die but those who survive, “the leftover humans,” damaged but alive.
Ten-year-old Liesel Meminger already knows quite a bit about death, growing up in Germany in the 1930s. Mourning the recent loss of her little brother, Werner, Liesel now lives with foster parents in southern Germany, where her mother felt she would be safer (her Communist father has already been taken away). She steals her first book, The Grave Digger’s Handbook: A Twelve-Step Guide to Grave-Digging Success, from the men who bury Werner. When her foster father, Hans Hubermann, discovers that she doesn’t know how to read, he begins to teach her. She steals another book during a town-wide book-burning celebration of Hitler’s birthday. As the war moves closer, a young Jewish man named Max, the son of a man who saved Hans’s life during World War I, arrives and is hidden in the Hubermanns’ basement. Max paints over a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf to create his own handwritten tome—a book within the book that proves a stunning experiment with form. Liesel continues stealing books, which she shares with Max, and she too begins to write her own.
Like Adorno, political philosopher Hannah Arendt wondered about the effects of the Holocaust on those who witnessed and participated in its events. In a series of articles for the New Yorker in 1963, she coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to underscore the role of ordinary people in the tragedy. Many people were simply obeying their bosses and doing their jobs, rather than acting out of sociopathy, murderousness, or rabid anti-Semitism. Some of these ideas are explored in Zusak’s book. Although this novel is about the Holocaust, it isn’t about concentration camps, prisoners, or perpetrators; it’s about regular people caught up in a culture gone mad, and about those who were left behind once the tragedy was over.
Born in Australia in 1975, Zusak grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust, as the child of parents who emigrated from Germany and Austria in the 1950s. He began publishing books in 1999, and has released five novels to date for young-adult readers. The Book Thief was initially published for adult readers in Australia, but was promoted as a young-adult novel in the United States. His awards include the Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Award in 2003 and the Best Young Australian Novelist of the Year Award from the Sydney Morning Herald in 2006. Zusak’s books have been translated into over 40 languages, and The Book Thief (his fifth novel) remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 500 weeks. Geoffrey Rush and Emily Watson starred in the
2013 film adaptation.
Sensitive to his subject matter and solicitous of his impressionable readers, Zusak rewrote his novel over 200 times. He has repeatedly stated in interviews that The Book Thief “means everything” to him, and the novel amply demonstrates both his passionate commitment to his story and the centrality of books to our lives. Books save Liesel, books cement her relationships with other people, and books give her a lifeline in a drowning world. We need to keep writing and reading, Zusak tells us, so that we can keep living.
All Personality
THE MOST COMPELLING CHARACTERS
GREAT CHARACTERS leap off the page and straight into our lives. They become our friends, our role models, maybe even our fantasy boyfriends or girlfriends. As in a fairy tale, they appear more real to us than many of our actual acquaintances. We wonder what happens to them when we close the covers of the book, but we can take comfort in the fact that we can revisit them anytime we wish.