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Stepping Back
June 28, 2009

This week will take us halfway through the year 2009. It’s likely that those who make reading lists and resolutions may be looking with dismay at their progress. So many books, so little time. Yet of those books that we read or learned about or even just heard about how many will be known to readers a half-century from now, in 2059. To get a possible glimpse of that answer, I decided to look back a half-century, in other words, to 1959. What happened in the literary world then that we readers of today still recognize.

In the drama/theatre arena we find William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker, the acclaimed play that dramatized the relationship between Helen Keller and her teacher, Annie Sullivan. A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry was the first play ever written by an African-American woman that reached the Broadway stage. Her efforts won her the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, making her the first African American to win it as well as the youngest. Arthur Laurents’ play, Gypsy, based on the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee’s autobiography, offered a realistic look into the worlds of vaudeville and burlesque. And Tennessee Williams lit up stages with his Sweet Bird of Youth.

The year was also an excellent one for fiction. Among the stars that are still popular fare are William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, called by the author “necessarily brutal, obscene, and disgusting.” Richard Condon lit up the world of thrillers with The Manchurian Candidate, reflecting political realities during the McCarthy era. Evan S. Connell Jr. published his first novel, Mrs. Bridge, the quintessential postwar portrait of American suburban life. Advise and Consent by Allen Drury was the first novel by this veteran political journalist, and its realistic look at politics and politicians made it one of the most popular books of the year. Meanwhile, William Faulkner concluded his Snopes trilogy with The Mansion. James Michener’s Hawaii, the encyclopedic story of  the newest U.S. state was the first of what would become his signature doorstop novels. Philip Roth made his public debut with Goodbye, Columbus, a comic take on middle-class Jewish life that did not amuse many Jewish readers but that did earn Roth a National Book Award. Another author soon to be famous, John Updike, published The Poorhouse Fair, his first novel, set in an imagined world of the 1970s. The Sirens of Titan has been called more “science fiction” formulaic than many of his other works, but it is regarded by many as Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s finest novel. And 1959 was also the year that the first novel of a Mexican American was brought out by a major U.S. publisher. Pocho by José Antonio Villarreal is the story of a Mexican immigrant in America caught between the two cultures; it is considered one of the precursor works of Chicano literature.     

In nonfiction, Martha Gellhorn displayed her brilliant war reporting in pieces  covering conflicts in Spain, Finalnd, China and all over Europe during World War II in The Face of War. Margaret Leech won the Bancroft Prize and her second Pulitzer with In the Days of McKinley, a book that is noteworthy for its reassessment of the twenty-fifth president’s administration and character. Advertisement for Myself was Norman Mailer’s contribution to 1959 and to the style of what would become the New Journalism where the writer is at the center of his work. And a book that has never gone out of print and been one of the best and longest-selling ones of all time is The Elements of Style. The “little book” had actually been published by William Strunk Jr. in 1920, but it was E. B. White’s revision, published in 1959—White had been a student of Strunk’s at Cornell—that catapulted it into literary stardom.

Now, what books do you think 2009 will produce that readers in 2059 will remember?
    
Upcoming Book Festivals:
Unfortunately, there are no festivals coming up next weekend.

The Pub House:
PoliPoint Press is a politically and socially activist publisher that offers “progressive books on politics, culture, and sustainability.” They seek to contribute to important discussions by adding fresh perspectives to national political dialogue. And their books reflect that determination.

Among the new books is Breadline USA: The Hidden Scandal of American Hunger and How to Fix It from both personal and political angles. If you don’t know anyone who is going hungry you will after you read this, and you will also get a strong feeling for what statistics really represents. In The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right, David Neiwert describes the persistent ideas and rhetoric that have changed a politically conservative movement into one far more radical and potentially dangerous than mere traditionalism. Red Highways: A Liberal’s Journey into the Heartland is a different look at citizens with whom we share a country but not political viewpoints. Radio journalist Rose Aguilar spent six months traveling through the southern and mountain states seeking to know what people think, and the result is a political travelogue that examines what matters most in the heartland of America and what issues energize its citizens.

Of Interest:
Lewis Lapham, the brilliant longtime editor of Harper’s magazine, retired from the publication a few years ago, leaving behind a large legacy. He is much missed, not just by me, but by many fervent readers who felt the magazine reached its height under his leadership. While Harper’s has not lost its way—it is still an excellent publication—Lapham’s personal touch was missing. Until now.

Lapham’s Quarterly is not exactly a substitute since its focus and publishing schedule are different. Rather, it is a unique publication in which each issue focuses on a single theme aimed at helping readers find historical threads using commentary, criticism, photographs, paintings, charts, graphs, and maps, the theme (war, money, nature, education, etc.). Selections are drawn from archives as well as newly commissioned pieces because the editors assume “that valuable observations of the human character and predicament don’t become obsolete—that the story, say, of an ancient Syracusan prison camp reverberates millennia later in the gulag of Siberia” and “draws not only from traditional sources such as literary narrative and philosophical commentary, but also from history’s underutilized scrapbooks: letters, diaries, speeches, navigational charts, menus, photographs, bills of lading, writs of execution.” If you love history I strongly recommend this publication.

This Week . . .
Persephone Books has a new blog “of nostalgia.” It’s cute and requires very little reading. In fact, its main component is reproductions of paintings, illustrations, and photographs of, well, of nostalgic things. Short comments punctuate each post, making one feel that a visit here is a visit back in time.

Until next week, read well, read often and read on!

Lauren

 

 

 
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