The Great American Read--The Book of Books

by PBS

  10 FAMOUS KIDS

  1. ALASKA YOUNG: the complex, mysterious, wild, and unpredictable teen girl who captivates, challenges, and ultimately devastates the protagonist of Looking for Alaska, the “hurricane” to his “drizzle”

  2. ALICE: the titular character of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, whose elaborate, curious dream of an illogical, imaginary land reveals so much about all that is great, and all that is puzzling, about youth and adulthood

  3. ANNE SHIRLEY: the plucky, dreamy orphan with a great imagination, known as Anne of Green Gables, whose comical misadventures give way to marriage and maturity across several books

  4. HARRY POTTER: an orphan boy with a curious scar and terrific magical powers who faces his fate and saves the world from evil in the eponymous seven-book series, and probably the most famous literary child of the 21st century

  5. HOLDEN CAULFIELD: an antsy, anxious teen who spends a long weekend ferreting out phonies and roaming around New York City in The Catcher in the Rye, and whose singular voice launched a thousand imitators

  6. KATNISS EVERDEEN: the moody protagonist of the Hunger Games trilogy with fierce hunting and archery skills, as well as an admirable unwillingness to accept the terms of the dystopian society in which she lives

  7. THE LITTLE PRINCE: the sprightly little fellow whose probing questions inspire the stranded pilot—and readers—in the book of the same name, boasting a kicky coif and jaunty scarf drawn by the novel’s author

  8. PIP: a complicated young man named Philip Pirrip whose coming-of-age in Charles Dickens’s semiautobiographical Great Expectations forces him into dubious situations, challenging dilemmas, and moral quandaries

  9. SCOUT FINCH: a girl who witnesses—and learns to despise—intolerance and racism, loses her innocence, and develops a strong moral sense of ethics and justice in To Kill a Mockingbird, and perhaps the most famous literary child of the 20th century

  10. TOM SAWYER: a happy-go-lucky kid who gets into scrapes and escapades with his best mate, Huck Finn, and whose comedic adventures helped 19th-century readers redefine their conception of childhood

  “The Shower of Cards,” an illustration by John Tenniel for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, brings Alice to life.

  Tom Sawyer is one of the most enduring characters in American literature, pictured here on the title page illustration for the first American edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, published in 1876.

  10 FAMOUS WOMEN

  1. DAENERYS TARGARYEN: in an epic fantasy series full of fierce females, A Song of Ice and Fire’s Daenerys stands out for her passionate commitment to freedom and her devotion to her three dragon “children”

  2. ELIZABETH BENNET: the intelligent heroine of Pride and Prejudice, who learns to temper her sense of pride, overcomes her own prejudices, and falls in love with the one man who is absolutely, positively right for her

  3. JANE EYRE: the protagonist of the eponymous novel who overcomes one horrible circumstance after another while developing a laudable self-identity and the desire to choose a life that best suits her

  4. JANIE MAE CRAWFORD: an independent woman who defies familial and societal expectations, wears overalls, and defiantly asks for—and even demands—what she wants in Their Eyes Were Watching God

  5. MA JOAD: the steadfast matriarch, known as the “citadel of the family,” who helps the Joads soldier on and survive during the Great Depression as they migrate from Oklahoma to California, in The Grapes of Wrath

  6. JO MARCH: a thoughtful woman who, along with her sisters in Little Women, seems to embody various roles available to women in 19th-century America, with the literary Jo giving girls an alternative to the conventional roles of wife and mother

  7. NATASHA ROSTOVA: one of three central characters in War and Peace, sometimes called “Tolstoy’s ideal woman” for her sensitivity, grace, and emotional acuity, but who nevertheless falls into a disastrous affair

  8. OFFRED: a handmaid in a dystopian society who, along with other fertile women, is forced into sexual servitude, but who manages acts of resistance large and small, including telling the story that becomes The Handmaid’s Tale

  9. REBECCA DE WINTER: despite lending the novel her name, the first Mrs. de Winter never actually appears, but figuring out what happens to her drives the second Mrs. de Winter—and the plot of this psychological thriller

  10. SCARLETT O’HARA: quite possibly the most famous female character in American history, Scarlett O’Hara transforms from spoiled brat to a resilient, powerful force in Gone with the Wind, losing her man but saving her homestead

  10 FAMOUS MEN

  1. CAPTAIN AHAB: this egotistical maniac no doubt needs no introduction, but his obsession with the white whale known as Moby Dick in the novel of the same name gets pretty much everyone killed, except for the intrepid Ishmael, who tells the tale

  2. MICHAEL CORLEONE: the youngest son of Vito, raised to “go straight,” this young man takes over his crime family, becoming as hard and ruthless as his father ever was in The Godfather, and transforming into a villainous antihero

  3. FITZWILLIAM DARCY: the yin to Elizabeth Bennet’s yang in Pride and Prejudice, a wealthy gentleman who learns to temper his own sense of pride, overcomes his own prejudices, and falls in love with the one woman who is absolutely, positively right for him

  4. DON QUIXOTE: a skinny middle-aged gentleman who becomes convinced that the chivalric romances he consumes and adores are real, leading him and his earthy squire, Sancho Panza, on a series of (mis)adventures

  5. DORIAN GRAY: a handsome Englishman who enters into a terrible Faustian bargain, falls into depravity and debauchery, and watches as a portrait of his once-gorgeous visage gets as decrepit as his soul

  6. ALBUS DUMBLEDORE: the wise, wonderful headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, who mentors and guides Harry Potter and his friends as they grow up, learn to master their magical powers, and battle Lord Voldemort

  7. JAY GATSBY: a tragicomic hero, a host of excellent parties, and a mysterious man with a nefarious obsession, whose longing for his first love, Daisy Buchanan, in The Great Gatsby came to epitomize the American Jazz Age

  8. HEATHCLIFF: one-half of Wuthering Heights’ great love story, as well as a man with no past who enacts cruel revenge and torture to ensure that everyone he encounters becomes as miserable and deprived as he is

  9. JACK RYAN: Tom Clancy’s morally upright hero, whose unflinching sense of right and wrong protects his family, the US government, and the country itself from terrible dangers in many novels like The Hunt for Red October

  10. TYRION LANNISTER: unafraid to defy his family and unwilling to kowtow, lover of wine and women, and clever speaker of truth to power, this nobleman plays the “game of thrones” better than anyone in A Song of Ice and Fire

  Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, hero and heroine of the book, are introduced, as shown in the illustration by C. E. Brock for the 1895 edition of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.

  Don Quixote, holding a sword and a shield, descends into Montesinos Cave in this engraving by R. Chiswell, circa 1700.

  The hardcover dust jacket for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, published in 2007.

  Portrait of author Junot Díaz in New York City.

  A page from one of the notebooks Díaz kept while writing The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, part of a photo series about what inspires the writer, taken for the New York Times.

  13

  THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO

  Junot Díaz · 2007

  A well-regarded writer after the 1996 publication of his short-story collection Drown, Junot Díaz achieved stardom with The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), a wide-ranging saga about an immigrant family. The novel won major prizes, crested bestseller lists, and earned him legions of fans.

  Díaz was born in 1968 in the Dominican Republic, arriving in the United States at age six. He grew up in New Jersey, near a large landfill, wi
th a strict disciplinarian father, then worked his way through Rutgers, pumping gas and laboring at a steel plant. It was at Cornell, where he earned an MFA, that Díaz first began writing in the semiautobiographical voice of Yunior de Las Casas, who appears in other stories and narrates big chunks of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

  Yunior takes Oscar de León, a lonely, chunky “ghetto nerd,” under his wing after Oscar spirals into a depression and twice attempts suicide. Oscar speaks Elvish, Spanish, English, street slang, and Dungeons & Dragons. He dreams of becoming the next J. R. R. Tolkien—and the first Dominican one—but fears that his interests in role-playing, comics, and sci-fi mean he’ll never have a girlfriend and thus will die an unkissed virgin. He also blames his bad luck with girls on the fukú, a curse that followed the de León family from the Dominican Republic to their new home in the United States. In addition to Oscar and Yunior, the novel tracks Lola, Oscar’s rebellious sister and Yunior’s former girlfriend, as well as Oscar’s extended family.

  As a child, Díaz would walk for miles just to check out library books. He incorporated this voraciousness for the written word into The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which collages high and low culture, blends Spanish and English, and mixes elements of literary fiction with science fiction and fantasy. He opens the novel with two epigraphs—one from a Fantastic Four comic, one from a poem by Nobel Prize–winner Derek Walcott. Footnotes offer factual asides and explanations, especially with regard to Dominican history, but they also give Díaz a chance to play with readers’ expectations. Like Oscar (and Díaz), Yunior knows pretty much everything there is to know about fantasy, and he peppers his sections with references to characters and story-lines. For example, of the brutal, bloody reign of dictator Rafael Trujillo, Yunior notes, “Homeboy dominated Santo Domingo like it was his very own private Mordor.”

  Among the prizes won by Díaz for his debut novel were the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in Fiction, and the Pulitzer Prize (he was only the second Latino to win that prize). Time magazine called it the best work of fiction published in 2007. In 2012, Diaz received a MacArthur Fellowship (also known as a “genius grant”), the same year he published another short-story collection, This Is How You Lose Her.

  Dangerous as it may be to too closely align creators and their creations, Díaz, his protagonist, and his novel share some similarities. They speak openly about the difficulties encountered by immigrants to the United States, and they speak plainly about being nerdy outcasts. They decided, consciously or not, to go their own way, rather than follow the more traditional, hypermasculine path encouraged in Dominican society. They hold themselves up as hybrids, more than the sum of their immigrant backgrounds or struggles to assimilate. They aspire to superhero status, only to make terrible mistakes and crash back to earth. It’s through art—whether novel-writing, comic-reading, or role-playing—that they can start to confront and even combat their flaws.

  Cover of the first edition of The Call of the Wild, published in 1903.

  Author Jack London, photographed in 1896. London was an intrepid traveler and adventurer, and he joined the gold rush in the late 1890s.

  The Saint Bernard–collie mix on whom Buck, London’s hero in The Call of the Wild, is based sits with his master Marshall Bond in a cabin in Dawson City, Yukon.

  14

  THE CALL OF THE WILD

  Jack London · 1903

  Suffering through a long Alaskan winter in 1897, Jack London hunkered down with John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859); both would come to bear on The Call of the Wild (1903), the book that turned the impoverished adventurer from California into a household name.

  John Griffith Chaney was born in San Francisco in 1876 to the wayward daughter of an aristocratic family and a traveling astrologer who abandoned his lover upon learning of her pregnancy. His mother married a Civil War veteran when Jack was an infant, and he was given that man’s surname. At age nine, London left school to start earning money for his family, often through difficult, menial jobs. He toiled on the line at a cannery, stole oysters in San Francisco Bay, and worked in a laundry. He rode the rails as a tramp and went on sealing trips to the Far East. He longed to be a writer, and wrote whenever he could. In his first five years trying to get published, London received almost 700 rejections. He stabbed the notices onto a spindle, amassing a four-foot column of nos.

  Like so many others, London decided to seek his fortune in the north, as part of the Klondike gold rush of the late 1890s. Although he returned home to California with nothing but scurvy to show for his efforts, he carried a wealth of knowledge that would come out in the array of works he published before his untimely death at age 40 in 1916. On his travels, he saw masters mistreating their animals as well as their fellow man, witnessed nature’s tremendous power, and befriended a Saint Bernard–collie mix, on whom Buck, the canine protagonist of The Call of the Wild, is based.

  Buck lives on a ranch in California. Part sheepdog, part Saint Bernard, he is kidnapped and sold to dog traders who beat Buck into obedience and send him north to the Klondike region of Canada. He is shocked and horrified by what he sees, including dogs killing and mauling other dogs. Now owned by two mail carriers, Buck works as a sled dog and does whatever he needs to do in order to survive. He starts to turn ferocious and wild, adhering to “the law of club and fang.” In time he becomes the property of John Thornton, for whom he develops an intense affection after Thornton saves Buck’s life. But eventually the pull back to nature, away from civilization, proves too strong, and Buck transforms into the leader of a pack of wolves.

  The Call of the Wild was a massive success. With the publication of White Fang three years later, London became the highest-paid writer in the United States. These books represent a reaction to the rapid industrialization of the 19th century and an exhortation to return to nature. Once there, only those who are strong, physically fit, and mentally tough will survive, although being in touch with one’s animalistic or atavistic instincts will help too. Buck represents the soul who cannot be tamed by civilization, an archetype central to American culture.

  In recent years, London has become famous beyond his writing and his adventures: his Sonoma County farm, known as Beauty Ranch, stands as a model of sustainable agriculture. Borrowing methods for conservation and restoration he learned while living in Japan and Korea as a correspondent during the Russo-Japanese War, he disavowed pesticides, used green manure, and bred livestock that were suited to the climate. His love of farming dovetails with the love of wilderness he extolled in The Call of the Wild—nature has the power to kill, to wound, to destroy, but also to redeem and sustain us.

  Cover of the first edition of Catch-22, published in 1961. The book’s title coined the now-common idiom “catch-22.”

  Portrait of author Joseph Heller, photographed by Inge Morath in 1965. Heller was born in Coney Island, New York, and wrote from his experience as a bombardier during World War II.

  A photo from the war diary of the 488th Bomb Squadron dated June 1944 shows Lt. Joseph Heller with this crew.

  15

  CATCH-22

  Joseph Heller · 1961

  A funny novel about war sounds like an oxymoron, or at least it did until Catch-22 rolled onto the scene in 1961 and changed everything. With a penetrating eye and sarcastic wit, Joseph Heller radically altered how we write and talk about war.

  The novel grew out of Heller’s experiences as a bombardier during World War II, yet it’s closely associated with later conflicts. Especially popular among young people in the 1960s, Catch-22 seemed to embody that era’s mistrust of authority, preconceived notions, and conformity. Indeed, as Heller later explained, the novel sought to figure out how a person is supposed to stay sane in an insane world.

  Heller always claimed that the novel’s first line appeared almost fully formed in his mind one day: “It was love at first sight. The first time he saw the c
haplain, Someone fell madly in love with him.” He didn’t yet have the name for that “someone,” but he very quickly had the plot, many of its characters, and the inimitable voice. That someone turned out to be Yossarian, and the novel centers on his experiences with an American Army Air Forces squadron on an island off the coast of Italy, near the end of World War II.

  Angry that so many people are trying to murder him, Captain John Yossarian constantly tries to get out of flying bomb runs, as do his fellow soldiers. His superiors keep raising the number of runs the men must fly before being discharged, so no one ever leaves—unless they get killed. Many of his closest friends are driven insane by their wartime experiences, but Yossarian works to hold on to his humanity and his lucidity. The knowledge that everyone must die, somehow, someday, offers no comfort. The extent of Yossarian’s trauma, stemming from the gory death of a fellow airman, is gradually revealed over the course of the book. It’s a sad, horrific counterpoint to the absurdist, silly scenarios that constitute so much of the novel.

  Bureaucracy rules Yossarian’s world. The people in power refuse to listen to reason, in part because they’re physically absent. The squad’s major, for instance, only allows visitors to his office when he’s elsewhere. The war seems to be guided by unseen forces, not by the people actually in the field. These observations were especially relevant to readers during the Vietnam War, and they continue to inform criticism of how war is waged into the 21st century, when drone strikes and other remote technologies have further stretched the chain of responsibility for violence.