The American Classics: A Personal Essay

How is a classic book to be defined? How much time must elapse before a work may be judged a “classic”? And among all the works of American literature, which deserve the designation? In this provocative new book Denis Donoghue essays to answer these questions. He presents his own short list of “relative” classics—works whose appeal may not be universal but which nonetheless have occupied an important place in our culture for more than a century. These books have survived the abuses of time—neglect, contempt, indifference, willful readings, excesses of praise, and hyperbole.
Donoghue bestows the term classic on just five American works: Melville’s Moby-Dick, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Thoreau’s Walden, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Examining each in a separate chapter, he discusses how the writings have been received and interpreted, and he offers his own contemporary readings, suggesting, for example, that in the post–9/11 era, Moby-Dick may be rewardingly read as a revenge tragedy. Donoghue extends an irresistible invitation to open the pages of these American classics again, demonstrating with wit and acuity how very much they have to say to us now.

An eminent liteary critic enumerates and explores five American classics

Publishers Weekly

In his strange new book, one of our leading literary critics anoints five books as American classics. These works, or more appropriately, these writers-Melville, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman and Twain-are forced to be representative of the ante- and post-bellum cultures that produced them and those that followed. Donoghue begins by tracing all of American thought to Emerson, which puts the critic in a bit of a bind, since he can't find anything positive to say about the man or his writing. This leads Donoghue to condemn all of American literature as driven by a need to escape the limitations of the culture in which it is rooted. Although each essay presents an interesting argument and Donoghue makes some acute literary observations, the book as a whole is hampered by the naming of Emerson as the progenitor of American letters. For Donoghue also decries that some recent American political thinkers claim Emerson as the father of American imperialism-which is the villain of Donoghue's account, embodied by George Bush and the military-industrial complex. Whatever contemporary critique is contained in the book is so intermittent, though, that it seems more of an intrusion than an integral part. Donoghue, Irish by birth, has put himself into the enviable but bizarre position of allowing himself to love America and its literature only insofar as he can condescend to it. Agent, Georges Borchardt. (May) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Denis Donoghue is University Professor and Henry James Professor of English and American Letters at New York University. He is the author of The Practice of Reading and Words Alone: The Poet T. S. Eliot, published by Yale University Press.