The Great American Read--The Book of Books

by PBS

  This Present Darkness exposes the intrigue and evil at play in the small town of Ashton. Editor in chief Marshall Hogan gets curious when one of his star reporters is arrested on trumped-up charges. The town police chief dodges Marshall’s inquiries, further piquing Marshall’s nosiness and eventually leading to his arrest. Born-again pastor Hank Busche also begins to notice strange doings among his congregation. When Hank’s investigation goes too deep, he is falsely imprisoned on rape charges. He meets Marshall in jail, and the two share their experiences and join forces against the New Age threat trying to capture the souls of the town. While Marshall and Hank develop and execute their plan, the story moves more deeply into the supernatural, and we are introduced to angels and demons who are constantly battling for humanity. Even though we have a good sense of which side will win, the novel nevertheless reads like a traditional thriller.

  Peretti takes his title and his epigraph from the New Testament’s Epistle to the Ephesians: “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” To believers, the immutability of these words sweep over Peretti’s novel and into the present day. The novel bolsters those who might otherwise feel beaten down by a lack of faith or confrontations with nonbelievers—one of the many reasons it’s one of the bestselling works of Christian fiction of all time. A sequel, Piercing the Darkness, came out in 1989.

  When Peretti is credited with reinventing Christian fiction, as he often is, people point to this book as Exhibit One. This Present Darkness is a page-turner. It offers plenty of descriptive passages of evil, exorcisms, and wretches. Demons are deformed and horrible, angels graceful and gorgeous. The stakes feel significant as humans fight on Earth and the celestial creatures simultaneously do combat in their dominion. The book’s main characters go from ordinary to extraordinary, forced by circumstances to fight a terrible fight. The novel turns the comforting platitude that the antidote to darkness is prayer into a tale of supernatural heroism.

  Childhood hardship helped shape Peretti’s worldview. In the memoir The Wounded Spirit (2000), he writes movingly of growing up with a deformity as the result of a sickness in infancy. His experiences with tormentors not only prompted a crusade to stamp out bullying, but it also helped fuel a lifelong interest in monsters. Peretti was born in Canada in 1951, then moved to the United States. His novels, including several books for kids, have sold 12 million copies.

  Peretti points to a conversation he believes he had with God as a major motivation for his writing: “The Lord said, ‘Frank, I want you to be a builder. I want you to build the body of Christ. Build them up, give them what they need to live their lives. Give them what they need to face these other things that they’re confronting.’” For its fans, This Present Darkness more than fulfills this mission.

  The first edition cover of To Kill a Mockingbird, first published in 1960.

  Harper Lee in her hometown, Monroeville, Alabama. Lee was on track to become a lawyer, but quit law school and moved to New York to begin her writing career.

  A rare advanced reading copy of To Kill a Mockingbird.

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  TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

  Harper Lee · 1960

  Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) may be America’s best-loved book, and Atticus Finch may be America’s best-loved fictional hero. Although the novel tells hard truths about American society, Atticus offers an antidote to despair. If we were all a little more like him, the world would be a much better place.

  Five-year-old Jean Louise “Scout” Finch and her brother, Jem, live with their father, Atticus, a widower and small-town lawyer in fictional Maycomb County, Alabama, during the Great Depression. Scout and Jem befriend a neighborhood newcomer named Dill, and the three become obsessed with the creepy house on the corner and its agoraphobic inhabitant, Boo Radley. Atticus, meanwhile, has agreed to defend a black man accused of raping a white woman, risking ostracism and even violent retribution from many of his fellow citizens.

  To Kill a Mockingbird won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and has sold 40 million copies. The novel’s film adaptation came out in 1962 to immediate success. Gregory Peck won an Academy Award for his masterful portrayal of Atticus, and Lee grew so close to the actor and his family that a child was eventually named after her. Peck’s Atticus was named the #1 movie hero of all time by the American Film Institute in 2003.

  Lee stayed out of the spotlight even as her novel grew in fame and popularity. She continued to live in her birthplace of Monroeville, Alabama, with her sister. Shortly before Lee’s death in 2016 at age 89, she published Go Set a Watchman (2015). Considered a sequel of sorts to To Kill a Mockingbird, the novel was actually written first and finished in 1957. It focuses on some of the same characters and concerns. Her editor, however, persuaded Lee to concentrate on the original draft’s flashbacks concerning a young Scout. For Christmas, Lee’s friends gave her a year’s worth of wages, which allowed her to quit her job taking reservations for an airline and focus on writing full-time. To Kill a Mockingbird was the result, a book that has given so much to so many. In a 2006 poll, British librarians named the novel the #1 book everyone should read, ahead of the Bible.

  Born Nelle Harper Lee in 1926, Lee initially seemed destined for a career in the law. Her father, a model for Atticus, practiced, as did a sister. But after a summer spent studying at Oxford, Lee quit law school and moved to New York to begin writing in earnest. She drew on her youth as inspiration in other ways as well: Dill is based on her childhood best friend, Truman Capote, with whom she stayed close into adulthood, even helping to research his masterpiece of true crime, In Cold Blood (1966). Lee may also have had in mind the fates of the Scottsboro Boys, nine African American teens who were falsely accused of raping two white women and harshly sentenced by all-white juries, despite exculpating evidence, in the 1930s.

  As a bildungsroman, the novel centers on Scout’s loss of innocence. She witnesses hatred, racism, and intolerance; she learns the importance of decency and probity, characteristics which sometimes require immense courage to display. In short, she starts to grow up. But the novel also addresses racial injustice and inequality, pointing out lessons society still needs to learn. Segregation, whether in law or just in fact, existed in many parts of the United States when the novel came out; the Greensboro Woolworth sit-in to protest segregation was ongoing the summer that Lee’s novel was published. In subsequent years, critics have pointed to Lee’s flat descriptions of black characters as evidence of the insidiousness of racial prejudice. Nevertheless, the book offers an appealing kind of moral code, a belief that doing right, no matter how hard or dangerous, is always worth it.

  Cover art for A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, published in 1943.

  Betty Smith, shortly after her debut novel was published. Smith grew up in Brooklyn, before moving to Michigan with her first husband. She attended classes while he went to law school.

  A crowd of young women gather around to read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, circa 1940.

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  A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN

  Betty Smith · 1943

  Lovers of Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943) might not recognize the Williamsburg of today, replete as it is with high-rises, hipsters, and gourmet coffee shops. The vast changes to this neighborhood, and to New York City as a whole, make the coming-of-age classic all the more treasured, as it preserves a vanished past. Smith’s novel informs our perceptions about urban life in early 20th-century America. While it depicts a bygone era, its themes of the loss of innocence, the rewards of hard work, and the importance of tenacity are timeless.

  The novel is divided into five books, each of which covers a different period in the life of key characters. Book 1 opens in 1912. Francie Nolan, the 11-year-old daughter of Irish and Austrian immigrants, reads widely and deeply in order to escape her impoverished home life. She has a younger
brother known as Neeley. Book 2 traces the meeting and marriage of Johnny and Katie, Francie’s parents, in 1900. Johnny dies from alcohol-related disease in Book 3, but the industrious Katie manages to keep the family afloat, even as she gives birth to her third child. She also kills a pedophile who attacks Francie shortly before the girl’s 14th birthday.

  Too poor to send both children to high school, Katie pays for her favorite, Neeley, to attend; Francie gets a job in a factory. In Book 4 she meets various people who encourage her educational pursuits, including a young man with whom she may eventually develop a romantic relationship. In the final book, Katie prepares to marry a rich politician, a wonderful change in circumstance that enables her to leave the tenement forever. Now almost 17, Francie says goodbye as well, as she makes plans to enter the University of Michigan.

  Like her protagonist, Smith grew up in Brooklyn, where she was born Elisabeth Wehner in 1896, the daughter of first-generation German Americans. After raising her daughters, she enrolled at the University of Michigan despite not having a high-school diploma, while her first husband attended law school there. Around this time she began writing plays; she won the Avery Hopwood Award in playwriting as an undergrad, went on to study drama at Yale, and earned many other dramatist awards, including Rockefeller and Dramatists Guild Fellowships. Although she published more novels before her death in 1972, none displays the staying power of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Its critical and commercial success enabled her to write for the New York Times, among other publications, and she proudly embraced her lifelong status as a champion of Brooklyn, even as she made her home in North Carolina.

  First-time director Elia Kazan made the movie version in 1945, further cementing the story’s image of Brooklyn in the public eye. His Academy Award–nominated film was followed by a musical adaptation in 1951.

  From her tenement window, Francie observes a so-called tree of heaven growing in the air shaft. It rises out of the cement, and despite a lack of water and sunlight, it thrives. Not even a fire can destroy it; not even an ax can kill it. The people of Francie’s neighborhood suffer crushing poverty, working menial jobs and barely staying afloat, but they too persist. In some cases, as with Francie, they do more than simply get by—they blossom. Francie’s Brooklyn has died out, but the city continues to maintain its trees of heaven. Imported from China in the 1780s, Frederick Law Olmsted planted the hardy Ailanthus altissima throughout Central Park in the 1850s, and its seeds spread throughout the five boroughs and beyond. Similarly, immigrants continue to represent a significant portion of New York’s population, putting down roots and dreaming their version of the American dream.

  Twilight (2005), the first book in the Twilight saga.

  Author Stephenie Meyer’s strong religious beliefs are woven into the fantasy love triangle between Bella, Edward, and Jacob.

  Twilight the movie was released in 2008, and made mega stars of actors Kristen Stewart (playing Bella) and Robert Pattinson (playing Edward Cullen).

  94

  TWILIGHT SERIES

  Stephenie Meyer · 2005–2008

  Over the course of the Twilight series, Bella Swan transforms from an inexperienced girl to a powerful woman capable of making choices that will fundamentally alter the trajectory of her life. The four novels have sold 120 million copies and have been translated into more than 35 languages. Readers far beyond the initially intended young-adult audience have been hypnotized by Stephenie Meyer’s paranormal romances.

  As Twilight (2005) begins, 17-year-old Bella moves from sunny Arizona to Forks, a rainy town in Washington State. She meets and falls in love with Edward Cullen, a 104-year-old vampire who attends her high school, can read people’s minds, and saves Bella’s life on multiple occasions. After uncovering Edward’s secret, Bella wants to become a vampire to ensure that she and Edward can stay together forever. But Edward’s deep distaste for his own immortality complicates their relationship.

  New Moon (2006) seeks to answer the question What if your true love abandons you? Edward has left Forks in an effort to protect Bella. She’s heartbroken. Believing her to have committed suicide, Edward instigates a conflict with the Volturi, a sort of vampire royalty who police other vampires. In Eclipse (2007), Bella struggles with her complex feelings for both Edward and Jacob, a werewolf, even as the trio prepares to fight an army of newly formed vampires that’s been terrorizing Seattle. The last book in the series from Bella’s point of view is Breaking Dawn (2008). Newly married to Edward, Bella discovers she’s pregnant with a half-human, half-vampire child. During her life-threatening labor, Edward transforms her into a vampire. In her new state, she’s capable of contending with the Volturi, which forces a truce between the factions.

  The idea for Twilight came to Meyer in a dream. Within a few months she’d written a first draft for fun, with no intention of seeking publication. However, her sister convinced Meyer to send the novel to agents, where it was discovered in the slush pile. Born in Hartford in 1973, Meyer graduated from Brigham Young University with a degree in English, and married her childhood sweetheart at age 20. They have three sons.

  A member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Meyer holds religious views that inform many of her novels’ main themes and interactions. In fact, some readers see the books as an allegory about the founding of Mormonism. Her characters struggle to overcome temptation; for example, Edward desires Bella’s blood, but at the same time he wants to maintain her purity. Bella is inextricably drawn to Edward even though he commits some atrocious acts, an embodiment of the fate-versus-free-will debate.

  Meyer has continued to revisit the Twilight world after the completion of the series in 2008. She published a novella about the life of a new vampire, The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner (2010), as well as a 10th-anniversary “dual edition” of Twilight that included Life and Death (2015), a retelling of the first novel that switches the genders of the protagonists. She has also published books for adults, including The Host (2008).

  The first Twilight movie came out in 2008, followed by another four based on the books. All were hits at the box office. Meyer served as an executive producer on later films, leading her to form her own film-production company. The books also inspired another blockbuster book series: Fifty Shades of Grey (2011) by E. L. James, which began as Twilight fan fiction.

  While the Twilight novels have been criticized on both literary and political grounds, Meyer imaginatively dramatizes the intensity of emotion so characteristic of late adolescence, a time when first love feels like the greatest love and the stakes of every decision seem unbearably large.

  A 2007 hardcover edition of War and Peace, published by Knopf. | The title page of the first US edition. In one poll of writers, War and Peace ranked third among all books written.

  Leo Tolstoy, pictured circa 1910, wrote early works of fiction. After a spiritual awakening at age 50, he focused on nonfiction.

  The title page of an 1887 edition of the book, “translated into French by a Russian Lady.”

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  WAR AND PEACE

  Leo Tolstoy · 1869

  Few novels are as massive in scope and spirit as the Russian classic War and Peace (1869). As the abstraction of the title suggests, the book is not merely about a particular war and particular peace, but about war and peace as states of life and forces in the progression of history. It’s also about the revelatory power of true love, the confrontation between grand ambition and harsh reality, and the desperate search for significance. There are epic battle scenes, happy marriages, joyful births, tragic deaths, and lengthy historical and philosophical discussions. Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece stands as a major accomplishment in the history of literature.

  The novel opens at a fancy ball, a beginning Tolstoy rewrote 15 times to ensure the perfect mise-en-scène. Here, readers meet some of the novel’s primary aristocratic characters, including the lovely and charming Natasha Rostova; the chunky, affable Pierre Bezukhov, illegitimate son of a count; and And
rei Bolkonsky, a practical, rational, and patriotic aristocrat. It’s 1805, and residents of Saint Petersburg are just beginning to hear about Napoleon’s conquering of the west. By the time the novel ends, seven years later, the Russians have defeated the French in a rout that turns the tide of the Napoleonic Wars—and readers have encountered almost 600 characters in all, some wholly fictional, some actual figures from history. War and Peace works like a camera swooping into a close-up on a small moment, then pulling back to reveal a broad swath of action.

  On the surface, War and Peace is a novel about the French invasion of Russia and its effect on the aristocracy. Going a little deeper, the novel explores how to make one’s life meaningful. History, after all, is the story of those who make it as well as those who live through it. For example, as Andrei lies wounded at the Battle of Austerlitz, a momentous and crucial confrontation, he stares into the sky and grasps that he possesses the ability to help himself be happy, a small victory for an individual amid the carnage.

  In 1828, Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born into a storied, landowning Russian family. Many of his early works focus on a wealthy youth’s political awakening with regard to serfdom. After Anna Karenina (1877), he shifted into nonfiction, largely as a result of a spiritual awakening he experienced at age 50. Tolstoy developed his own radical Christian belief system and became increasingly anarchist, arguing that to live in a truly Christian society would necessitate an overthrow of the government. His theories concerning nonviolence influenced later leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela. In 1910, at age 82, Tolstoy left his family and prosperity behind to embark on a pilgrimage; he died a few weeks later at a train station.