F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, Sinclair Lewis’ Arrowsmith, Aldous Huxley’s Those Barren Leaves, Agatha Christie’s The Secret of Chimneys....
More here, at Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain:
The BBC’s Culture website suggested that 1925 might be “the greatest year for books ever,” and with good reason. It is not simply the vast array of famous titles. The stylistic innovations produced by books such as Gatsby, or [Kafka's] The Trial, or Mrs. Dalloway marked a change in both the tone and the substance of our literary culture, a broadening of the range of possibilities available to writers....From that BBC article:
The brutality of World War One, with some 16 million dead and 70 million mobilised to fight, had left its mark on the Lost Generation.... The solid external world of the realists and naturalists was giving way to the shifting perceptions of the modernist ‘I’...
[Gertrude] Stein responded to her immersion in the Parisian avant-garde by writing The Making of Americans, which was published in 1925, more than a decade after its completion. In over 900 pages of stream-of-consciousness, Stein tells of “the old people in a new world, the new people made out of the old,” and describes an American “space of time that is filled always filled with moving”....
In New York, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer and other writers of the Harlem Renaissance were given a definitive showcase that year in the anthology The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke....
The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, gives a portrait both tawdry and touching, as Gatsby remakes himself in a doomed attempt to win the love of the wealthy Daisy Buchanan.
The tarnished American Dream also was central that year to Theodore Dreiser’s naturalist masterpiece, An American Tragedy. Dreiser based the novel on a real criminal case, in which a young man murders his pregnant mistress in an attempt to marry into an upper class family, and [spoiler alert!] is executed by electric chair.....
John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer introduced the cinematic narrative form to the novel. New York, presented in fragments as if it were a movie montage on the page, is the novel’s collective protagonist, the inhuman industrialised city presented as a flow of images and characters passing at high speed. "Declaration of war… rumble of drums... Commencement of hostilities in a long parade through the empty rainlashed streets,” Dos Passos writes. “Extra, extra, extra. Santa Claus shoots daughter he has tried to attack. Slays Self With Shotgun."...
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Wow. That's a lot of great books and music (and film). Makes me want to read (and/or re-read) through the list of books. Interesting bit about Alan Cranston in the link to the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain. How does one get a job studying books and music, watching great films released into the public domain? Man, I missed on that one.
Is there a book that is often required reading anymore polarizing between those who love or hate it than “The Great Gatsby”?
So these works should be appearing at Gutenberg.org any day now.
Dreiser based the novel on a real criminal case, in which a young man murders his pregnant mistress in an attempt to marry into an upper class family, and [spoiler alert!] is executed by electric chair.....
Spoiler alerts! went out sometime in the last decade. They were annoying because they always came right before the "spoiler," but now that they are dead, thanks for their nostalgic return.
Whether Clyde Griffiths actually murdered Roberta Alden or it was an accident wasn't really resolved in the book if memory serves. I guess that he did let her die and so was guilty of that.
1922 was also considered a great year for literature: Ulysses, The Wasteland, Babbitt, Siddhartha and works by Proust, Woolf, Lawrence, Fitzgerald and Cather, with Kafka and Rilke still alive and writing.
And here's a case for 1929 as the greatest year in American literature:
Was 1929 the greatest year in American literature? I think so. 1850-1855 had a run that’s still unmatched: The Scarlet Letter (1850), Moby-Dick (1851), Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Walden (1854), and Leaves of Grass (1855). But we’re talking singular years, here. 1961 has a pretty good resume, too: Revolutionary Road, The Moviegoer, and Catch-22 were all up for the National Book Award that year (The Moviegoer won). But 1929’s got it beat.
Is there a book that is often required reading anymore polarizing between those who love or hate it than “The Great Gatsby”?
To Kill a Mockingbird? I never got the Gatsby-hater thing. I loved the book (probably because I loved the movies based on it), but anything that is "required reading" will eventually have its haters. Same thing with Catcher in the Rye. It was too much the work of an earlier generation that teachers related to it so much more than students did, and it got to be known as the favorite reading of misfit assassins. I don't know if schools assigned On the Road, but it also still has fervent lovers and haters.
what was so controversial about the great gatsby, except possibly a proper film adaptation, there was one in the 20s that has mostly dissappeared except in still, there was the one in 1949 with alan ladd, the robert redford one in 1974, and the decaprio one in 2013, the last is probably closer to the spirit of the book, even though dicaprio is still the wrong cast,
as to the source of the story, max gerlach seems to be one, but later research suggests the hall-mills murder trial, which I've referenced,
Anything assigned in a non-elective course is going to be hated. My father hated "The Return of the Native." Most of the kids in my high school hated "Pride and Prejudice." Whatever is chosen to be inflicted will be hated. I think the solution is to teach reading with nonfiction books that convey information the kids should learn — history, science, etc. — with the best writing. Let fiction reading be a free-time activity and have some elective courses for the kids who want to study fiction-writing.
I think "Gatsby" is fun to read if you don't plow through the narrative. Just read one sentence and think about it for a long time.
All good news, but it serves to illustrate the utter insanity of U.S. copyright law. These should all of been out of copyright decades ago but Disney dollars and our incompetent congress have kept extending it. I'm surprised there wasn't an emergency session of congress to extend it once more. Maybe that will have to wait for three more years when Steamboat Willie (1928) potentially falls into the Public Domain.
It's silly to try to do a movie of "Gatsby." The whole point is the way the sentences are written. Movies don't have sentences.
its as much about the world, the environs that the pictures describe, I couldn't really get into the sun also rises, which was a contemporary work to gatsby, in high school.
Why all this fuss about the pubic domain?
...Never mind.
Ann Althouse said...It's silly to try to do a movie of "Gatsby." The whole point is the way the sentences are written. Movies don't have sentences.
That is why movie making is called "art".
I tend to think that there has never been a movie of a terrific book that was almost as good as the book. One of the worst examples is Bonfire of there Vanities.
I really hate autocorrect.
"marked a change in both the tone and the substance of our literary culture"
For the better?
Moby Dick vs. Great Gatsby.
Middlemarch vs. Mrs. Dalloway.
Brothers Karamazov vs. The Trial.
Anyway, keeping works under copyright so many years after the creator passed is absurd.
I think so many high school students dislike the classics they're assigned to read because they haven't lived enough of life to even understand what the books are often really about. As a result, the books, their plots and their characters' actions, may seem baffling at worst, or tedious at least. I remember being assigned NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND and THE STRANGER in one class. I couldn't finish the morbid NOTES, and while I was able to read THE STRANGER with little difficulty, so terse is its prose, its meaning eluded me. (Later, at different stages of my adulthood, I reread NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND twice: on first rereading it I found the character's bitterness quite funny, and on second rereading I found him more tragic.)
Dreiser was a bad writer who wrote some great novels. He was also fortunate in the screen adaptations of his work. Over time, a great movie will inspire more book sales than any book assignments...There are many great movie versions of good books, but not so many great movies of great books. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,A Place in the Sun, and GWTW.
The most overrated novel ever? TGG is only enduring because it is assigned in high school so much, I believe primarily because it's so short.
I have no problem with copyright listing forever and ever.
But I think ownership must be claimed. Let's go back to needing to submit any works to some public agency like library of congress or a private agency along the lines of ascap.
Some nominal fee for renewal. Say $20 every 20 years. Maybe 5 year grace period of not paid then automatic public domain.
I have no problem with mickey mouse however long Disney uses him.
I have a real problem with abandoned works where nobody knows who owns them so nobody can use them.
It should also be possible for an author to put a book into public domain if they want. Right now there isn't.
I could grant rights to Ann to make a deal comedy or of my Packaging Machinery Handbook. I cannot say "OK it's now public domain anyone can do what they want with it" I could not enforce my copyright but 40 years from now my great grandson could.
John Henry
Musical comedy. Not deal comedy.
John Henry
Robert,
You have a point about why students dislike required books.
But for me the real reason so many teachers ruined authors for me was because they forced me to see the books through their lens. Not even theirs, maybe but the lens they had been taught was the right one.
I disliked Conrad, trollope, dickens and others in hs. I now carry complete works of Trollope and Conrad on tablet and phone. Old friends I can always dip into when I can't think of something else to read.
Dickens is like a mountain stream. I stand there knowing it's going to be cold. Then I get into it for a few minutes and find I enjoy it. I kind of dread the idea of reading chickens. When I do though, I always find I enjoy it.
I even liked bleak house enough to read it twice!
I'm the same with Hemingway.
John Henry
Four books/stories that were required reading in my school that I don't recall any hatred for, that nearly everyone seemed to appreciate:
1984
Brave New World
Flowers for Algernon
Animal Farm
The moral? Only anti-leftist science fiction should be required.
I've always wanted to teach a course in "Great Works of Literature That Were Made Into Great Movies."
Topping the list is "The Sand Pebbles" by Richard McKenna. The author died tragically young at age 51. A biography of McKenna, "The Sailor's Homer: The Life and Times of Richard McKenna, Author of The Sand Pebbles," written by Dennis Noble and published in 2015, certainly qualifies as one of the best literary biographies ever written, and makes for an excellent companion piece to the novel.
As for the movie -- what can one say? One runs out superlatives for it. Steve McQueen as Jake Holman is magnificent. The entire movie is magnificent -- thrilling, enthralling, tragic, an epic in the best and traditional sense. And utterly faithful to McKenna's vision.
The movie adaptation of Bonfire of the Vanities was so bad that my wife thought it was a comedy. And, in fact, when video rental stores were still around, I once saw it shelved in the comedy section.
Every evening on my ship, half a century ago, a movie would be screened on the mess decks. The Sand Pebbles was always a great favorite with us enlisted men. Films usually were told from the point of view of the Officer Class, but this one wasn't.
Different strokes for different folks.
I liked the book, bonfire of the vanities and have read it several times. Most recently a year or two ago as part of Ann's reading experiment here (another one please, an)
I also liked the movie. I can see how it might be called a comedy. But wasn't the book a comedy? A seriously dark comedy to be sure but funny as hell in many parts.
John Henry
I think "Gatsby" is fun to read if you don't plow through the narrative. Just read one sentence and think about it for a long time.
That'd be a great blog...
Tcrosse,
I remember movies in the navy shipboard. It was the social event of the day. Group participation was de reguer. Especially when when it was something like Barbarella with a young topless Jane fonda.
We showed them on the messdeck. The screen was hung in the middle. So if you got there early, you sat on the projector side and saw the movie normally.
Latecomers sat on the other side and watched it backwards. Didn't spoil the fun though
Then, it was time for mid-rats.
John Henry
I got into a Sinclair Lewis kick about 15 years ago, read through a number of his works in a short amount of time. He doesn't get as much attention as the others these days, but his prose is really powerful and he is a master at weaving cultural critique within his narrative without being preachy. He's just telling the story and the story confronts the time.
January 1, 2021 is the opening of P D James' dystopian novel, The Children of Men, the story of humans losing the ability to breed. The last human being to be born died on this day.
The problem with required HS reading is not the books. It is the teacher and his or her perspective.
I found TGG boring as a junior as the teacher had a canned explanation that he probably learned 30 years earlier. However, I recall being fascinated by Billy Budd, The Pearl, Moby Dick and other "great" American novels because I had a passionate and open minded teacher. It was the same with Shakespeare and Gabriel Garcia Marquez in college.
I found 1984 and Animal Farm boring in HS. Many years later I enjoyed then a lot more because I interpreted them from a different perspective.
Most years have some really memorable works: Take 1966 for example.
Speak, Memory
by Vladimir Nabokov
Hell's Angels
by Hunter S. Thompson
Dune
by Frank Herbert
Getting Even
by Woody Allen
The Last Picture Show
by Larry McMurtry
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
by Tom Stoppard
In Cold Blood
by Truman Capote
Flowers for Algernon
by Daniel Keyes
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
by Robert A. Heinlein
Francisco D,
I found 1984 and Animal Farm boring in HS.
Me too.
Did you read "On the Beach" too?
I think most high schoolers in the 60s read all 3. I suspect mainly for the political message/indoctrination.
I never knew Orwell wrote anything else until about 25 years later when I was in a library looking for something to read and ran across "Road to Wigan Pier"
I read it out of curiosity and found that Orwell was a very prolific writer. a dozen or so other books, fiction and non as well as piles of journalism. I have, or had, all his books including about 2500 pages of collected journalism, essays and other stuff. Most of it better than 1984 and Animal Farm.
Even Orwell didn't think much of AF. He had a contract with another book owing and he dashed it off just to submit something.
Ditto Nevil Shute. Did anyone realize that he wrote anything other than On the Beach? Like 24 other novels and an autobiography? Many of them much better than OTB.
I didn't, even though I loved the Bryan Brown/Helen Morse miniseries of A Town Like Alice. Then I read an article about it and started looking out his other books. Many used to be hard to find.
OTB is good but it is hardly his best. A Town Like Alice, Kindling/Ruined City and Trustee from the Toolroom are tied for my favorite Shutes. Alice and Trustee for all time favorite books.
Did anyone know that he was one Hell of an accomplished engineer and entrepreneur who wrote as a hobby in his spare time. (After WWII he wrote full time)
I fell so in love with Shute that I founded the Nevil Shute Society, now Nevil Shute Foundation. www.shute.org
I wish I had never taken any literature classes in HS. They ruined so many authors for me.
Maybe, just tell kids to read books. Give them a list of a couple hundred and leave them alone to read some minimum number.
John Henry
My Favorite Sinclair Lewis is Free Air about a cross country motor trip in 1915.
Babbitt is great too.
As is It Can't happen here.
John Henry
One of Jack London's favorite books, and his most commercially successful, was "Burning Daylight"
Everybody has heard of "Call of the Wild" and perhaps a couple of others. How many have heard of or read this one?
I got on a Jack London jag back in the 80s & 90s and thought I had read everything he published. I had never heard of it until perhaps 10 years ago when I ran across an (excellent) audio version on Librivox.org.
I agree with Jack. Far and away his best book.
If you have kids or grandkids in the 8-16 year old range, I would also recommend his "Tales of the Fish Patrol"
The young London worked with the fish patrol, which was San Francisco bay's version of fish wardens in the 1890s. This book is a series of short stories based on his experience. Fictionalized.
Just the kind of book I would have devoured at 10-12 along with complete sets of Golden Boys, Deerfoot, Motorcycle Chums, Boy Allies and other books from my father's boyhood collection.
John Henry
No, high school is where you should teach fiction/literature, in a formal setting. It's college where it should be dispensed with. By the time a person enters college, he or she should be widely read in the great books of the Western canon, including tOnhe great works of fiction. In college this should be an elective. That would go a long way to cutting two years off the college experience, and cutting costs as well.
Only, don't make me read Henry James again. Please. Send me to the Gulag, send me to work in a coal mine, drive nails through my palms. Just, no more Henry James. I understand the value in reading him. But please ... never again.
High school is the time for exposure to the Western Canon, and exposure can only occur in the formal setting of the classroom. It means force-feeding. Sorry, kids, but that's the way it has to be, otherwise you'll remain ignoramuses (hence bad citizens) all your life. Sometimes, often, in life you have to do things you don't want to do. There is certainly the risk of ruining literature for some teenagers (a small majority), but that is a risk well worth the taking, and for the greater good.
I read The Great Gatsby in high school and loved it.
But you have to be in the right mood to really enjoy any piece of literature, and "read three chapters by Friday" isn't it. In our class, we read the entire book before starting the discussion, which helped tremendously.
As far as themes go, high schoolers might not have enough life experience to appreciate being in love with an idealized vision of someone that is so much better than the actual thing.
Most of the kids in my high school hated "Pride and Prejudice."
Man, you just can't win. Pride and Prejudice has got to be one of the most beloved novels there is. There are crazy obsessive fans everywhere you look ... except high school literature classes.
Awesome, just in time to get cancelled.
Disney must have erred when it bought the DMCA: wasn't copyright supposed to be extended to, well, a millennium?
Has anyone ever read the collected works of Trollope or Henry James and lived to tell about it? Trollope used to knock out one five hundred page novel and, then, without pause, go on to the next five hundred page novel. It's a wonder the amount of work you can get done if you're sexually repressed. There's something to be said for sublimation and strict morality.
I've read everything by F. Scott Fitzgerald including the Pat Hobby stories. Even when he's cranking out the shoddy, there are these sudden ripples of silk.
Also, he didn't write that much. Ditto with Jane Austen. I've read all her books.,but that's no great achievement. I've read dozens of books by Wodehouse, but made only a small dent in his total output.
I read phineas to the prime minister, and barchester,
That random line from Gatsby blogging Althouse did a while ago was awesome.
Francisco D: I found 1984 and Animal Farm boring in HS.
Darkisland :Me too.Did you read "On the Beach" too?
I think most high schoolers in the 60s read all 3. I suspect mainly for the political message/indoctrination.
I read these 3 books in high school in the 1960s, but none of the 3 books had been assigned reading. My assigned reading for a political message was Solzhenitsyn's A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The message definitely stuck. (I read it a year before reading 1984.) I didn't find 1984 or Animal Farm boring- perhaps because I read them on my own, and perhaps because from the Politics class where I read Day in the Life, I had prior awareness of totalitarian systems.
Regarding having different reactions to books compared to reading them in high school, I am reminded of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. I read it on my own in high school, and liked it. I reread it several years ago, and found it tedious propaganda. One could profit from reading The Jungle if one wanted knowledge of conditions in the Chicago stockyards circa 1900, but as literature it was dreck: peopled with one-dimensional stock figures.
I wish I had never taken any literature classes in HS. They ruined so many authors for me.
I liked English classes through 8th grade. By contrast, I hated English classes in high school and college.English classes taught composition- a necessary task. English classes taught composition by assigning essays on literary criticism. I didn't like being forced into being a Junior Literary Critic. I felt as if I were making conjectures about things I knew little about. Result: I hated English classes, and the dislike of writing Junior Literary Critic essays in English expanded into a dislike of any assigned writing, such as term papers.
Gatsby. Barf. The most overrated work of alleged literature of all time.
https://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1978/01/12
I can't even recall the classic/crap lit I was assigned in school . . . there was Copperfield in 9th? grade--I must have BS'd through it; in the 12th? I wrote an analysis of Conrad's The Secret Sharer that the teacher read out as quality work, which of course was embarrassing as hell and took a long time to live down.
I was reading five or ten real books, grown-up books (Churchill, Catton, Fleming, Caiden, Ike, David Chandler, Howarth, Forester, others) every semester for every volume of wholesome maudlin drivel they wanted me to read for class.
Honestly, I can't recall more than that. I may have read things like Animal Farm years before the system wanted me to . . . in fact I must have remembered my way through a lot of assignments on that basis.
But because I was well-read and aced the standardized tests, by the time I got to the U down the street I was snatched up by the new Honors Program, which allowed one to skip the Norton Anthology classes and go direct to the modern novel. There, we put works like Portrait of the Artist, Siddhartha, The Plague, and who knows what through the Race/Class/Genderizer.
Narr
I like Roughcoat's invocation of the Western Canon, but it's way too late for that.
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