I'm a pack rat and one collection that I carry with me from place to place is my grandfather's 1936 Encyclopedia Britannica. Once in a while I pull a volume off the shelf and read. This morning, I flipped to "American Literature" (contained in Volume 1, A to Anno). The entry includesd a nice plate with photos of the 20 authors editors deemed image-worthy. Keeping in mind that these authors had to be recent enough to have been photographed, I was intrigued by the editors' choices. Who might you have guessed? They are:
Washington Irving
James Fenimore Cooper
Edgar Allen Poe
Henry David Thoreau
John Greenleaf Whittier
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Ralph Waldo Emerson
James Russell Lowell
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Emily Dickinson
Walt Whitman
Herman Melville
Mark Twain
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Robert Frost
Willa Cather
Sinclair Lewis
Eugene O'Neill
Found Holmes' presence here intriguing.
Dan,
The Holmes is, of course, Holmes, Sr. I'm not surprised he was included. My understanding is that he was held in high regard in literary circles in the late 19th century.
Posted by: Bob Strassfeld | September 15, 2013 at 12:50 PM
Further to Bob Strasfeld's comment, I remember when I was in my first semester (must have been first week or two, actuall) of law school having a conversation with one of my classmates about how we didn't know that Oliver Wendell Holmes (whom we knew as a poet) was also a judge. Didn't take long to forget about the pre-law school Holmes. Though down the road I do want to talk a little bit about his 1859 novel, Elsie Venner, which has a subplot of division of property among heirs.
Posted by: Alfred Brophy | September 15, 2013 at 01:47 PM
Yankee From Olympus, a biography of O.W. Holmes,Jr. has good coverage on the father and grandfather--great biography for those interested in the life of the great jurist.
Posted by: Beau Baez | September 16, 2013 at 08:39 AM
It is refreshing that by 1936 the list did not include William Dean Howells. I fully expected him to be there. Good for our grandparents generation that they got over him!
Posted by: Bill Turnier | September 16, 2013 at 10:01 AM
Bill raises an interesting issue, which I hadn't focused on before. The omissions from the list are quite interesting. Henry James and Edith Wharton are not there, for instance. Some writers who might have made the list before fading in popularity, Hamlin Garland, Jack London, and Theodore Drieser are also missing. Finally, by 1936 one would expect Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald to be there, and, perhaps, some representative of proletarian literature (James Farrell, Henry Roth, John Dos Passos, though I'm not sure that Dos Passos quite fits in that group).
Posted by: Bob Strassfeld | September 16, 2013 at 10:51 AM
I might add to the roll of the missing various African American writers who had established strong reputations by the mid-1930s including Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles Chesnutt, along with authors associated with the Harlem Renaissance such as Claude McKay and Langston Hughes (Zora Neale Hurston probably arrived on the literary scene a bit too late for consideration).
Bob Strassfeld
Posted by: Bob Strassfeld | September 16, 2013 at 10:59 AM