Ron Gilmour

In the pantheon of Southern literature, the names of Twain and Faulkner stand matched for first place. Thanks to an enjoyable high school experience with As I Lay Dying and an excellent honors seminar on Faulkner as an undergrad, I have a pretty decent familiarity with that Southern luminary. Having less first-hand experience with Twain, I’ve tended to consider his works less “serious.” Faulkner, I thought, was the Michelangelo of The Last Judgment, while Twain was more akin to Norman Rockwell.
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One can hardly undertake a program of American literature without confronting Moby Dick, the quintessential Great American Novel. Perhaps due to its daunting size, or to a dimly remembered aversion to Billy Budd in high school, I have always put off this novel until another day, shamefully admitting with Laurie Anderson, “Moby Dick? Never read it.”
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Last summer, I read The Whole Five Feet by Christopher R. Beha, an account of that author’s journey through the Harvard Classics. I was struck by the fact that the first work in that series was Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, so it seemed a natural choice for my year of Americana.
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As previously noted, my reading plan for 2010 consists of a steady diet of classic Americana. Nevertheless, I could not resist the temptation presented by a new novel from Ian McEwan. While I don’t read a great deal of contemporary fiction, McEwan is one of the few living authors that I really get excited about. Atonement is my favorite. On Chesil Beach (2007) failed to thrill me, but I was nevertheless eager to sample his latest offering.
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“Of course I move among miracles. It was all phantasmagoric.”

This statement by protagonist Lambert Strether sums up the experience of reading The Ambassadors by Henry James. The book is a bundle of contradictions: simple in plot yet endlessly complex in execution, expansive yet strictly circumscribed, a comedy and tragedy at the same time.
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I had never heard of Sarah Orne Jewett until my friend Brian included her novella The Country of the Pointed Firs on his impromptu list of recommended American works. I don’t think that this work has attained anything close to canonical status, but nevertheless I found it the most enjoyable of my recent American readings.
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I’m afraid that my foray into American literature is not off to an auspicious start. I have been defeated by James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. It isn’t a terribly long book, and I expected to have the fortitude to read it, but I have to admit defeat. I can only read a few pages at a time before I invent an excuse to do something, anything, else.
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I’ve been thinking lately about how little I know about the literature of my own country. Of course I read Huckleberry Finn, Billy Budd, and a few others in high school, and I took a seminar on Faulkner in college, but in recent years I have focused almost exclusively on Brit lit. So I’ve decided to spend some time with American literature this year. With the help of a colleague who specialized in that area, I compiled a (no doubt over-ambitious) reading list.
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I’ve seen their “Libertas”-becrested spines scattered among the classics in used book stores, but had never paid much attention to them. They are the Harvard Classics, and I guess they’re something of a cultural institution, or at least were a few generations ago. They are the work of Harvard president Charles William Eliot (1834-1926). Eliot had remarked that “a five-foot shelf would hold books enough to give in the course of years a good substitute for a liberal education.” The publisher P.F. Collier & Son invited him to “make it so,” and thus were the Harvard Classics born.
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There was a lot of whining early on about how bad weather was going to make 2009 a bad year for Darjeelings. This may be true in a relative sense, but the teas that I’ve tried so far have been outstanding.
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