The New Classics

Hello, and welcome to my new topic, Classic American Literature. This is a long-retired topic that I am happy to adopt. I look forward to sharing some of my favorite American classics with you, and also hearing about your favorites.

But before we get started, a question has occured to me as I have worked through getting this topic started again. What is a classic?

The first thought that usually comes to mind when you think of classic literature is probably the stuff they made you read in school. And that's a good place to start. This topic, when it was first born, started with Mark Twain, who wrote many classics that a lot of American students were made to read.

I obviously went to strange schools. The only Twain I've ever read is "The Prince and the Pauper." A great story, yes, but you'd think at some point we'd have gotten to "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" of "Huckleberry Finn." Nope.

The other thing I've never been able to get over is that I went to school in the south and never had to read a word of William Faulkner. I don't know how that school has remained open.

When I got out of school, even after taking several English literature courses, I felt like my education in the classics, whatever those were, was lacking. My definition of classic came to be "books that everyone in the western world has read but me."

So I tried to figure out a way to do something about it. I wanted to read good books, but I didn't want to read haphazardly. I wanted an almost school-like experience as I read things I probably should have read in school.

My solution, to start with anyway, was to read all the books that have won Pulitzer Prizes for ficton. I started with the first ones and have worked my way to 1979, only skipping a couple.

Why the skips? My local library didn't have several of these books. When I requested them, six were not available through the library's sources. I found four of these on the Web, but two of them don't seem to be available anywhere, at least for a reasonable price.

How is it possible that some of the books that have been named among the best this nation has ever produced are no longer available in print? Surely these should be considered classics, and surely classics should be kept alive and passed on to new generations.

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