Bibilophiles! Need advice on buying 30K of American literature

Folks, what we have here is a golden opportunity. I have been charged with procuring approximately USD 30,000 worth of American literature. Fiction and non-fiction are the rough genres, going back to say, de Tocqueville and the Federalist Papers. It’s harder than you think. Any ideas?

I’m not going to italicize these, i’ll just make a list.

[ul]
[li]Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin[/li][li]David Walker’s Appeal[/li][li]Catch-22 by Joseph Heller[/li][li]A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith[/li][li]Every book by Tim O’Brien[/li][li]Every book by Toni Morrison[/li][li]Democracy by Joan Didion[/li][li]Every piece of literature by Alan Ginsburg[/li][li]Emerson’s Self Reliance[/li][li]To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)[/li][/ul]

That’s all I have for now. I’m sure I can think of a bunch more later, but I want to see what other Dopers add first.

If you’re going for a complete library, you’ll have to include Hemmingway. I’d also vote for some Spider-Man, but that probably doesn’t fit your boss’ definition of literature.

Hawthorne? Poe? Twain? Uncle Tom’s Cabin? I’m sure you can get dollar copies of these. Copy of the Constitution?

I assume that you’re going for one of those cultural center sorts of things. How about Spillane (the man who nearly outsold the Bible), Hammett and Chandler?

I have to admit that aside from the aforementioned, my knowledge of American literature sucks balls.

Civil Disobedience, Walking, Walden - Thoreau
The Scarlet Letter - Hawthorne
Uncle Tom’s Cabin - Stowe
Moby Dick - Melville
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - Douglass
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Jacobson
Portrait of a Lady - James
Huckleberryt Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and Pudd’nhead Wilson - Twain
The Red Badge of Courage - Crane
An American Tragedy - Dreiser
The Awakening - Chopin
The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence, and Ethan Frome - Wharton
Up from Slavery - Washington
My Antonia - Willa Cather
The Great Gatsby - Fitzgerald
In Our Time, The Sun Also Rises, and A Farewell to Arms Hemingway
Main Street or Babbitt - Lewis
The Sound and the Fury, and Absalom, Absalom - Faulkner
The Grapes of Wrath - Steinbeck
Native Son - Wright
The Iceman Cometh - O’Neill
A Streetcar Named Desire - Williams
The Crucible and Death of a Salesman - Miller
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - Albee
Invisible Man - Ellison
All The Kings Men - Warren
Henderson the Rain King -Bellow
Catcher in the Rye - Salinger
Armies of the Night - Mailer
Song of Solomon - Morrison
The Natural - Malmud
Go Tell It on the Mountain - Baldwin
John Updike - any of the rabbit novels
Little Women - Alcott
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Angelou
Fahrenheit 451, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury
War and Rememberance - Wouk
The Color Purple - Walker
Slaughterhouse Five - Vonnegut
Breakfast at Tiffany’s - Capote
2001: Space Odyssey - Clarke
The Last of the Mohicans - Cooper

Poetry by
T.S. Eliot
e.e. cummings
Walt Whitman
Emily Dickinson
Robert Frost

Darn… I forgot
Some James Michener, any or all of it
Some Stephen King
The Call of the Wild, The Sea Wolf and White Fang - Jack London
Lonesome Dove, Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show - Larry McMurtry

Definitely some Raymond Chandler. And Jim Thompson. Pop. 1280 would be my pick.
For Mark Twain, I’d go with the later stuff - The Mysterious Stranger (usually part of a short story collection) is the perfect example.
Also the “USA” trilogy by Dos Passos. Maybe Last Exit To Brooklyn by Selby and Naked Lunch by Burroughs for the more decadent, arty stuff.
ANd I’ll second Native Son. Essential. Although I think Invisible Man was boring as a turd.
I’m sure I’ll think of more when I wake up.

A good site for some one-stop shopping: http://www.loa.org/

Basic Documents in American History, ed. by Richard B. Morris
• Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, The Federalist Papers, ed. by Clinton Rossiter
• Washington Irving, The Sketch-Book
• Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter; short stories
• Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
• Edgar Allan Poe, The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Edition, ed. by Stuart and Susan Levine
• Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
• Henry David Thoreau, The Annotated Walden, ed. by Philip Van Doren Stern
• Herman Melville, Moby Dick and Bartleby the Scrivener
• Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
• Emily Dickinson, Collected Poems
• James Truslow Adams, The Founding of New England
• Mark Twain, The Annotated Huckleberry Finn, ed. by Michael Patrick Hearn
• Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, ed. by Ernest Samuels
• William James, The Principles of Psychology; Pragmatism; The Varieties of Religious Experience; The Meaning of Truth
• Henry James, The Ambassadors
• Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country; The Age of Innocence; The House of Mirth
• Frederick Jackson Turner, Frontier in American History
• Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons
• Robert Frost, Collected Poems
• Sinclair Lewis, Main Street and Babbitt
• Eugene O’Neill, Mourning Becomes Electra; The Iceman Cometh; Long Day’s Journey Into Night
• T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems
• William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury; As I Lay Dying
• Benjamin Spock, Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
• Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People
• Ernest Hemingway, Short Stories
• Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
• Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March; Herzog; Humboldt’s Gift
• James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
• Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963
• John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
• Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
• Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
• Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique
• Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
• John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever
• Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience
• Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America
• Norman Mailer, The Executioner’s Song
• Ray Bradbury, The Stories of Ray Bradbury

[QUOTE=wmulax93]

[li]Every book by Tim O’Brien.[/li][/QUOTE]
Hey, I’m not the only one who remembers that complete genius. :slight_smile: At a minimum, you need Going After Cacciato, The Things They Carried, and In the Lake of the Woods.

There are two other contemporary fiction writers you need to have in any decent collection. By Louise Erdrich, you need Love Medicine, Tracks, and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. And the greatest work of 20th Century American literature, bar none, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

What a great assignment!

In addition to the obvious greats of the past, these are the contemporary authors I think are going to matter in the future:

Thomas Wolfe
Richard Ford
Jon Krakauer
Walker Percy
P.J. O’Rourke
Don Delillo

[aside] Hey, welcome back![/aside]

For Fiction:

A few years back, the folks over at Random House published a list of the 100 Best Novels of the Twentieth Century.

Of course, there was much dissention about the list. Some folks over at Radcliffe responded with a rival list, and Random House held a poll for the readers to come up with their own list. There are some definite stinkers on all the lists–the “readers” poll seemed to be skewed by a bunch of scientologists. And it encompasses all English Language works, not just American. But if an American book is mentioned on at least two of the lists, I’d say it’s probably worth having.

And a suggestion for me: Don’t forget to include “Young Adult” novels. They are very important in American Literature.

For Non-fiction:

This is a lot harder, I think. It really depends what the purpose of the collection is. Is it supposed to be a repository of “Great American Books,” or is it supposed to be a reflection of American culture. Or both? Because a book like “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” may not be considered a “great book,” but it’s damned important to a lot of people.

Thanks for all the great ideas. If these suggestions haven’t been incorporated yet, I’ll make it so.

For the non-fiction, to answer Green Bean’s question, what we’re trying to create here is a rotating collection of lending books that capture Americana. Warts-and-all stuff is fine, but the emphasis is on what it means to be, and the various faces of, American. Or “North American” or “from the U.S.” or whatever phrase we’re supposed to use now.

The Library of America has a great collection, very high quality bindings, books that’ll last a long, long, time, and most of the best of American literature. I’m sure one of their Friendly Representatives would be happy to help you spend 30,000 on a well-rounded collection.

They are definitely the way I would go if I had this much money and that goal. In fact, I have been a subscriber of theirs for years and so already have several thousand dollars worth of books.

Just wanted to toss in Tom Wolfe (aka “not Thomas”), Jack Kerouac, Evan Hunter, and mystery writers Ed McBain (Hunter’s alter ego) and Andrew Vachss.

I’m afraid my suggestions will be more ‘good books to read’ rather than ‘important books to read.’ Each book on my list is one I come back to time and again to reread. This isn’t to say that they don’t have their import, but I wouldn’t include Emerson or Thoreau, because while they’re important books, I haven’t reread either, and feel no need to do so.

I’m also tempted to include a few of my favorite Canadian authors. For all that Canada and the US are two seperate cultures and countries, I think that Canada has as much in common with the US as it does witht the UK.

Final note, my list is a series of supplements to those suggestions already listed, not a bunch of replacements.

Non-Fiction - Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire.
Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember, and Day of Infamy
Edward L. Beach’s Around the World Submerged (Capt’s Beach’s fiction is also worth a look, especially Run Silent, Run Deep.)
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (an exception about rereading, but should be on the list, I think.)

Somewhere in the Middle (and Canadian to boot) - Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf, as well as his autobiographical works - A Whale for the Killing, The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, and The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float

Fiction - Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels
John Crowley’s Little, Big
Tim Powers’ Last Call
Madeleine L’engle’s Wrinkle in Time (The latter books as well, though not as good)
S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders
Daniel V. Gallery’s Now, Hear This (His non-fiction is also worth considering.)
Harry Turtledove’s The Guns of the South
Robert Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit, Will Travel; Double Star; and Starship Troopers.
H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories. I’m more partial to his shorter works like “Pickman’s Model” than “Call of Cthulhu”.
Lois McMaster Bujold’s Cordelia’s Honor
L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (another canuck on the list, I know.)

Graphic Novels - Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, and Batman: The Killing Joke

Mark Twain:
[ul]
[li] A Tramp Abroad[/li][li]Innocents Abroad[/li][li]Life On The Mississippi[/li][li]Roughing It[/li][li] A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court[/li][li]Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn[/li][li]Adventures Of Tom Sawyer[/li][li]Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven[/li][li]The Gilded Age very timely, this one…[/li][/ul]

Both H.P. Lovecraft and Poe should be represented.

Take Back Your Government byr Robert A. Heinlein is non-fiction; a do-it-yourself manual for getting involved in politics & political reform.

The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy
and
Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union
by Bell Irvin Wiley

Non-fiction. A very important pair of books on US history from the ground up.

I’d suggest picking up several anthologies on American lit and poetry for the library, and then researching each author in there. American political speeches, lit/film/poetry/theater criticism. American music and theater is worth including, or at least writings about it (jazz is what makes American civil). Native literature (including Alaska and Hawaii) would be good. Hmmmm…I’m sure lists like this exist out there.

By the way, where are you? What/whom are you buying this for?

Anthology sets and the Library of America are both great ideas, as are all the individual suggestions, some of which I never would have thought of. Thanks again, folks and keep 'em coming.

drhess I’m in Sri Lanka, and we’re buying this to serve as a rotating/floating lending library to educate people about Americana. Your tax dollars at work, in what I feel is a worthy way.

Authors that haven’t been mentioned to add (mostly 20th century poetry)

William Carlos Williams
Charles Bukowski (personally, I’m not a huge fan of his, though I do like him, but I’ve a feeling his literature will stand the test of time. Moreso than Kerouac.)
Adrienne Rich
Charles Simic
Langston Hughes
Gwendolyn Brooks