The Great American Read--The Book of Books

by PBS

  KURT VONNEGUT: Car Dealer

  During a low point in his writing career in the 1950s, Kurt Vonnegut ran a car dealership on Cape Cod. He had been working in the public-relations department at General Electric but moved to Massachusetts to focus on writing. When business was slow, he would write or doodle on his official Saab stationery. He would draw on his days selling cars in Breakfast of Champions (1973), which features a Pontiac dealer as a protagonist.

  Cover of the first edition dust jacket of Clan of the Cave Bear, published in 1980.

  Portrait of author Jean M. Auel, taken in the Science Library at the Natural History Museum in London. To understand the Paleolithic characters of her bestselling Earth’s Children series, Auel mastered a range of survival skills.

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  THE CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR

  Jean M. Auel · 1980

  Jean M. Auel made Paleolithic cavemen sexy. Her bestselling Earth’s Children series reimagines pre-historic times, roughly 35,000 years ago, when woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers walked the earth. While Auel’s Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal characters fight, copulate, and strive to survive, as you’d expect, they also seek justice, display empathy, and fall in passionate love. As it turns out, our early ancestors really were just like us.

  Auel was a 40-year-old mother of five when she began writing a short story about a prehistoric woman living among strangers. The more she researched and wrote, the more she realized that she wouldn’t be able to say everything she wanted to say in a few pages, or even a whole novel. Indeed, she knew before she’d finished the first draft of Clan of the Cave Bear that the story’s arc would stretch across six books. Clan came out in 1980—setting a new record for the highest advance paid for a debut novel—followed by The Valley of Horses (1982), The Mammoth Hunters (1985), The Plains of Passage (1990), The Shelters of Stone (2002), and The Land of Painted Caves (2011). Collectively, the Earth’s Children books have been translated into 35 languages and have sold 50 million copies.

  We first meet Ayla quietly playing near a stream. In a matter of seconds, a devastating earthquake destroys her family and her home, sending her alone into an unforgiving Ice Age world. She is discovered half-dead and badly wounded. Although the five-year-old is clearly an “Other,” the clan’s medicine woman, Iza, shields Ayla and, along with Iza’s shaman brother, adopts and teaches the girl.

  Unlike members of the Clan, Ayla has blue eyes and blonde hair. Her legs are not bowed; her brow is not overly pronounced. She uses speech, whereas the Clan members rely mostly on hand signals, and she is capable of inventing, learning, and expressing a range of emotions. When Ayla cries, Iza wonders if she might have an eye infection of some kind. Slowly it becomes clear to readers that Ayla is Cro-Magnon and the Clan is Neanderthal. Ayla’s differences cause many conflicts, even as she helps the Clan find a new place to live, and her resilience in the face of adversity, including forced sexual servitude, keeps her compelling as a character.

  Auel immersed herself in experiential research to ensure that her books were as accurate as possible. As a result, her characters can start a fire without matches, build a snow cave, and use animal brains to soften a hide. Readers the world over—including anthropologists and archaeologists—relish this attention to detail. But Auel didn’t just have to learn about how our ancestors might have used tools; she also had to teach herself to write. By her own admission, she checked out almost as many books about the craft of fiction as about prehistory. She was born in 1936, married her high-school sweetheart at age 18, took night classes in physics and math, and climbed the career ladder at an electronics plant in Portland, Oregon, earning an MBA in 1976. She quit the plant upon learning that it wouldn’t hire female managers, and focused on her strong female protagonist.

  That same feisty determination marks Auel’s lead character and helps explain the book’s continuing appeal. Despite the vast gulf in time and circumstance, readers cannot help but feel for Ayla, a girl striving to build the best life she can in an often brutal and vexing world. Erotic as it may sometimes be, Clan of the Cave Bear also emphasizes the need for girls to develop strength, regardless of the era.

  Cover of The Coldest Winter Ever, published in 1999.

  Portrait of activist and author Sister Souljah. Her four novels are considered models of “street literature.”

  Sister Souljah speaking to the media after presidential candidate Bill Clinton’s criticism of her controversial statements following the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

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  THE COLDEST WINTER EVER

  Sister Souljah · 1999

  At a young age, Sister Souljah had two significant revelations: first, she realized that the importance of Africa to world history, literature, and the creation of civilization was largely left out of school curricula in the United States. Second, she realized her voice was commanding enough to redress these and similar omissions.

  The Coldest Winter Ever, Sister Souljah’s debut novel from 1999, marks a turning point in what’s often referred to as “street literature,” or stories that take place in an urban environment, feature protagonists of color, and have emotional, sometimes sensationalistic plots. This literary genre initially rose to prominence in the 1960s during the Black Power movement, when prison memoirs began being published and circulated outside of the institutions. In recent years, street literature has been revitalized and popularized, thanks to the efforts and achievements of novelists like Sister Souljah, Zane, and Sapphire.

  Named for the season in which she was born, protagonist Winter Santiaga lives a coddled life of relative luxury in the projects in Brooklyn, thanks to the criminal empire created by her drug-dealing father, Ricky. The family, which also includes Winter’s mother and three sisters, Lexus, Mercedes, and Porsche, moves to a mansion on Long Island, where an FBI raid leads to the imprisonment of Ricky around Winter’s 16th birthday. Winter eventually winds up in a group home, where she hustles and battles to hold on to the trappings of her lavish lifestyle.

  In a case of art reflecting life, Winter meets an older female activist named Sister Souljah. Despite this mentor’s encouragement and support, Winter continues to steal, betraying the trust of those closest to her. Through Winter, the author portrays the potentially corrosive effects of ill-gotten wealth. Winter’s spoiled upbringing prevents her from developing attachments or being loyal, which contributes to her comeuppance in the novel’s climax. She cares only about herself.

  Told in the first person, the bildungsroman features a raw, bold voice. Like Tom Sawyer and Holden Caulfield, Winter doesn’t suffer fools and uses the language of her world to offer her opinions on just about everything, from clothes to hair to African art. Of the fictional Sister Souljah, Winter says, “How is this bitch supposed to help the community when she don’t know how to rock her shit? I checked her arm, no Rolex, not even a Timex, nothing. No weight on her neck, nothing. Her hairdo was phat but that don’t mean nothing when you don’t know how to accessorize.”

  Born Lisa Williamson in the Bronx in 1964, Sister Souljah moved to Englewood, New Jersey, as a child, and graduated from Rutgers University. In college she became active in the antiapartheid movement, which led to a lifelong commitment to activism, including supporting disadvantaged youth, Afrocentrism, and women’s causes. She became a member of the hip-hop group Public Enemy in the 1990s.

  To date, Sister Souljah has published four novels related to the Santiaga family and its New York City universe: Midnight: A Gangster Love Story (2008), Midnight and the Meaning of Love (2011), A Deeper Love Inside: The Porsche Santiaga Story (2013), and A Moment of Silence: Midnight III (2015). She has also published one memoir, No Disrespect (1995). The Coldest Winter Ever, which has sold more than two million copies, has been optioned for a movie.

  Sister Souljah prides herself on speaking truth to power, especially to mainstream culture and its monolithic institutions. She rejects what she considers the “ghettoization” of her work, noting, “Shakespeare wrote about lov
e. I write about love. Shakespeare wrote about gang warfare, family feuds, and revenge. I write about all the same things.”

  Cover of the first edition of The Color Purple, published in 1982.

  Author Alice Walker at the Seattle International Film Festival world premiere of a documentary about her life, Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth, at the Egyptian Theater in 2013. Walker was born to sharecroppers in 1944 and was the first black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize.

  The theater marquee unveiling for The Color Purple, in its Broadway revival at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre on October 4, 2016.

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  THE COLOR PURPLE

  Alice Walker · 1982

  The youngest of eight children born to sharecroppers in rural Georgia in 1944, Alice Walker grew up to be the first black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The Color Purple (1982) offers a searing indictment of white racist culture and patriarchal black culture. It also poignantly celebrates the bonds between black women and testifies to the strength of the human spirit.

  The novel’s main character, Celie, an uneducated 14-year-old girl in 1930s rural Georgia, writes letters to God chronicling rape and abuse at the hands of her father, Alphonso. She gives birth to two children by Alphonso, who takes them away. A man known only as Mr. ______ wants to marry Celie’s beautiful sister, Nettie, but Alphonso gives him Celie instead. Mr. ______ agrees, and Celie enters into an unhappy marriage. Nettie flees Alphonso’s house for Celie’s but leaves when Mr. ______ advances on her. Celie assumes that her children and Nettie are dead. When Shug Avery, a nightclub singer and the mistress of Celie’s husband, gets sick, Mr. ______ allows her to move into his house, where she and Celie become friends and eventually lovers. Celie learns that her husband has been hiding letters from Nettie, who has become a missionary in Africa, traveling with a white couple and their adopted children. In time, Nettie discovers that these adopted children are Celie’s, and the novel ends happily.

  As a student at Spelman College and Sarah Lawrence College, Walker became increasingly active in the civil rights movement. In later years she became an outspoken feminist, environmentalist, and political activist. Today, in addition to continuing to publish books, she remains involved in antiwar and Palestinian causes. In 1973, she discovered the unmarked grave of Zora Neale Hurston, who died penniless and in obscurity after being hailed as one of the great writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Thanks in large part to Walker’s efforts, Hurston’s work experienced a resurgence of attention.

  One of the most noteworthy accomplishments of The Color Purple is the sympathy with which it treats its characters. Indeed, the novel demonstrates the insidiousness of violence, helping readers understand the difficulties of uncovering and eradicating the roots of sexism and racism. Victims, whether in the novel or among its readers, are encouraged to eschew guilt and shame, and to live their lives with dignity. Doing so takes courage. It’s an undertaking that not only cultivates joyfulness in the world but irrevocably breaks a pattern that causes so much hurt.

  In Steven Spielberg’s 1985 hit movie based on the book, Whoopi Goldberg won much acclaim for her portrayal of Celie, and Oprah Winfrey, making her acting debut, was widely praised in her role as Sofia, Celie’s daughter-in-law. At the time Winfrey hosted a local talk show in Chicago, which she would brand and take national the following year. It was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, and the New Republic called The Color Purple “perhaps the culture touchstone for black women in America, a kind of lingua franca of familiarity and friendship.” The book was also turned into a popular Broadway musical, running from 2005 to 2008, with an even more popular revival in 2015–2017.

  Walker credits a childhood accident that left her blind in one eye with teaching her to really see and to observe, and sight plays a key role in her novel. In a remarkable passage meant to encourage Celie to develop resilience, Shug reminds her to stop and look: “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.”

  Dust jacket from the first edition of A Confederacy of Dunces, posthumously published in 1980.

  Author John Kennedy Toole taught English to Spanish-speaking draftees at Fort Buchanan, Puerto Rico, circa 1961–1963. He started writing A Confederacy of Dunces during his deployment.

  A letter from Toole to Simon & Schuster editor Robert Gottlieb, housed with the author’s papers at Tulane University.

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  A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES

  John Kennedy Toole · 1980

  Everyone deserves a parent as loving and relentless as Thelma Ducoing Toole. After her son killed himself in 1969, she dedicated herself to making his dream of being a published novelist a reality. She sent his manuscript from publisher to publisher, the pages growing increasingly tattered along the way. Eventually, Thelma cornered novelist Walker Percy in his office at Loyola University in New Orleans. He began reading out of politeness, then out of enjoyment, and finally out of sheer disbelief: as he later wrote, “surely it was not possible that it was so good.” He also helped get it published—A Confederacy of Dunces came out in 1980. The sprawling, funny novel became a bestseller and—amazingly, for a debut comedy—earned its author a posthumous Pulitzer Prize the following year.

  Set in New Orleans, A Confederacy of Dunces stars Ignatius Jacques Reilly, an obese oddball who lives largely on hot dogs, wears a hat with earflaps regardless of the weather, hates contemporary culture, and adores medieval philosophy. He falls in love with Myrna Minkoff, a young Jewish college student, and much of the book consists of the strange correspondence between them after Myrna returns home to New York. The novel also focuses on the relationship between Ignatius and his overbearing, alcoholic mother, Irene Reilly.

  Like Ignatius’s favorite tome, The Consolation of Philosophy by sixth-century Roman philosopher Boethius, Confederacy is a mash-up of literary forms; it mixes prose, light verse, journal entries, and letters. The novel’s structure reflects its action, which is less a single propulsive story than a jumble of amusing and revealing episodes. Despite his scholarly pretentions, Ignatius must work—often reluctantly—a series of mundane jobs in order to support himself and his mom, and these lead him into all kinds of fascinating encounters, adventures, and misadventures in and around the French Quarter. Many readers consider the novel to be a near-perfect rendering of the multicultural vibrancy that is New Orleans, down to the city’s distinctive dialects.

  John Kennedy Toole knew of what he wrote. Born in 1937, he grew up in New Orleans and entered Tulane on full scholarship at age 16. After graduating, he began studying for a PhD in English literature at Columbia, in New York City, but would return home to New Orleans periodically to teach, eventually settling there permanently. His students relished his sense of humor and admired his brilliance, and impeccably decked out in a suit and tie (in contrast to his protagonist), he was a very popular teacher.

  Drafted into the army in 1961, Toole began writing this novel during his military service in Puerto Rico. Notwithstanding his efforts, including an intense multiyear correspondence with Robert Gottlieb of Simon & Schuster, he could not get A Confederacy of Dunces published. Increasingly isolated and depressed, Toole committed suicide in Biloxi at age 31, leaving his manuscript atop an armoire in his mother’s house.

  The work, with its huge cast of characters and satirical bent, might be compared to similarly hefty novels by Charles Dickens, who also envisioned novelists as holding up a mirror to society. Like Dickens, Toole had the knack for capturing a personality with just a weird tic or two: Mr. Clyde, for instance, sells hot dogs on the street and threatens people who irritate him with a rusty fork. From her vibrating exercise machine, Mrs. Levy tries to psychoanalyze her family and friends, simultaneously improving others and herself. Irene Reilly has magenta hair and a fondness for muscatel. Like Dickens and every beloved writer, Toole’s memory lives on in all who have fallen for the book’s comedic charms.

  Cover of the first US edition of Count of Monte Cristo, pu
blished in 1846.

  Portrait of author Alexandre Dumas, taken in 1846. The son of a French aristocrat and a slave, Dumas worked his way up through the military and became the highest-ranking black official of his time.

  Illustration from The Count of Monte Cristo. The caption reads, “My name is Edmond Dantès.”

  Chateau d’If fortress prison, located in the Bay of Marseille, where the character Edmond Dantès was imprisoned in the novel.

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  THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO

  Alexandre Dumas · 1844–1846

  When we talk about the beauty of the Sistine Chapel, we praise Michelangelo and only Michelangelo. But the truth is that Michelangelo employed a team of assistants to carry out his vision. When we talk about The Count of Monte Cristo (1844–1846), we commend Alexandre Dumas for the classic tale of adventure, and only Dumas. But like Michelangelo, Dumas too had a veritable literary assembly line behind the scenes.