Turning Over an Old Page

Though later his life would be caricatured in one of Walt Disney’s most celebrated films, Captain John Smith holds a more practical position in American legend than simply that of the man Pocahontas saved; according Wikipedia’s encompassing entry on “American literature,” he was also the first American author. During the early 1600s, Smith, a prominent member of newly colonized Jamestown, penned several works on the then-nascent history of the land he had christened New England.

Some four centuries after Smith’s arrival to America, three other New Englanders embarked on a literary journey of their own. With the intent of exploring historical facts in a greater socio-politico-cultural context, Werner Sollors (Harvard Professor of African and African American Studies), Greil Marcus (well-known music critic and the first reviews editor of “Rolling Stone”), and Lindsay Waters (Executive Editor for the Humanities of the Harvard University Press (HU Press)) began composing a reference book that attempts to redefine the standard approach to writing about America’s literary history, from foundation to modern-day. Aided by an editorial board and an impressive list of contributors, their creation is a 200-essay compendium they named “A Literary History of America.” Touching upon subjects from “The Scarlet Letter” to the Star Spangled Banner, the Winchester rifle to cybernetics, the essays begin with a focused analysis of one incident or figure and then extend outwards to address other relevant issues.

In an age when Wikipedia can inform the uninformed of most trivial details of John Smith’s life—but not what those details meant to the future of American literature—“Literary History” may be the innovative counterpart to the archetypal encyclopedic work. The HU Press publication has lofty aspirations. It wants—and deserves—to be read; but at 3.4 pounds, 1,100 pages, and $49.99, the tome may have misjudged its ability to appeal to the masses.

BEHIND ‘LITERARY HISTORY’

“I started the project because I had the primitive desire to have a big book that could explain my world; not a picture, but something that could convey the whole thing to readers,” Waters says regarding the concept behind “Literary History,” which he conceived in 1982. It was only on September 29, 2005 that the project would officially be set in motion. Also the catalyst behind HU Press’ similarly titled French and German literary histories, Waters, with Sollors and Marcus, created an editorial board that formed, as Waters puts it, a “search party”—one imparted with the task of ‘finding America.’ The 15-member board traversed centuries of American history, settling on a long list of topics that eschewed abstractions such as the definition of realism. Instead, in the board’s point of view, the final subjects are fundamentally relevant to American readers; the underlying them is an emphasis on things that have been “made,” a concept that Waters finds integral to the American mindset and tradition.

“America is about making…it’s the popular mechanics side of America,” he says. “When they were making the George Washington Bridge between Manhattan and New Jersey, the New Jersey and New York governments who designed it had a plan to cover the iron ore with marble. Somehow the general population heard about this and they said, ‘Just leave the steel exposed.’ It’s a basic American feeling to want to see how something was made.”

The requirement that topics be somehow linked to the process of creation left much room for interpretation of what serves as “literary” history. Consequently, the book has received criticism from some reviewers, such as The Globe’s columnist Alex Beam, for its inclusion of pop culture entries on, for instance, Barack Obama’s election or Linda Lovelace, lead actress of the film “Deep Throat.”

“Some people could say the subjects of the different entries aren’t all literary subjects, but the exploration of them is literary,” says reviewer Laura Miller, book editor for Salon.com. “It’s really an exploration of American culture, and American literary culture isn’t separable from pop culture, or visual, material, political, racial culture.”

Miller uses one entry as a metaphor for the book’s endeavor to engage with readers by honestly portraying what has been important to American literary history over the past five centuries. The essay compares “Yankee Doodle” to “The Star Spangled Banner,” the former which she describes as representative of an American impulse and the latter as an attempt to aspire to the seriousness of European heritage. “Only focusing on Longfellow, Whitman, Fitzgerald, and the litany of familiar figures is to me ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ approach,” Miller says. “I feel that this book is more of a ‘Yankee Doodle’ approach, a book that people really care about and engage with, than it is an attempt to set up a kind of aspirational highbrow idea of culture. They write about culture people actually had rather than culture we think they should have had.”

BUT WHERE IS ‘THE READER’?

Yet while the topics of the essays in “Literary History” may seem pedestrian at times, the Table of Contents reads like a Hall of Fame inductee list for distinction in both scholarship and pop culture.

Nonetheless, Waters, Sollors, and the remainder of the editorial board who sought out the rest of the contributors, stress that accessibility is one of “Literary History’s” primary objectives. As part of their mission to revise the means of representing literary history, they wanted to captivate the attention of readers commonly alienated by the formal, esoteric jargon of other scholarly works of this kind.

“I wrote for the same reader I always write for—the educated general reader,” says Ruth R. Wisse, Professor of Yiddish and Comparative Literature, who contributed an entry on Saul Bellow. “So if you’re using a literary term which is not immediately comprehensible, then it is your duty to explain it. Clarity is the one thing you aim for most.”

Contributors and reviewers referenced the general reader most frequently as the expected consumer of “Literary History,” but even they expressed concern that such an audience simply does not exist anymore.

“We were using the phrase ‘educated general reader’ [to describe our audience], but no one is quite sure who that reader is anymore,” says Kirsten Gruesz, Professor of Literature at University of California, Santa Cruz, an editorial board member and contributor of entries on Richard Dana, Jr. and “Mexico in America.” “It’s people who aren’t academics, who don’t necessarily see themselves as big-time readers, but who still maintain intellectual interests and want to know how to think about the world in the 21st century,” she speculates.

Miller is more skeptical. “The authors are people who are trying to write for a more general audience, but that audience spans the illiterate to the incredibly erudite. I don’t think the book is only for scholars…But it’s hard for me to judge what an average ignorant person finds hard to understand,” she says. “Some Americans are so ignorant it’s hard to say what the general reader is. The average American these days doesn’t even read.”

And though the book is often touted as what will be this year’s most popular holiday present, it is, admittedly, an expensive gift for the average American—even an intelligent one. Another reviewer, Scott Kaufman, Professor of English at University of California, Irvine, urges other academics to pursue the approachable prose that is, for the most part, proffered by “Literary History.” Yet he, among others, has described its relatively hefty price as “prohibitive,” calling into question its ability to be accessible if it is not affordable. While HU Press’ Sales Director, Susan Donnelly, says the work has been selling well, some believe the major market for the anthology is an institutional, rather than an individual, one.

“I’m sure that the sales of the book will especially be to libraries of various sorts, and most of all to college and university libraries, because that’s basically the biggest single customer base for big doorstop reference works of this kind,” says Lawrence Buell, Professor of American Literature, who contributed an entry on Margaret Fuller and the Transcendentalist Movement. Citing the price as an investment the individual customer would not perhaps make, he explains, “I’m not trying to sound critical of what the book’s attempting here, by any means. There’s definitely a market in the world for good reference works, but it’s typically an institutional market rather than an individual market.”

DIGITIZE

While it remains uncertain whether the intelligent general reader still exists, Americans do seem to be reading—just, perhaps, via new media. In March 2009, Amazon launched the Kindle DX, its latest version of an electronic platform for digital media and e-books. The company reported that for those books available on the Kindle, sales were already at 35% of the same editions in print. And the Google Book Search Project, which has made over 10 million out-of-copyright titles available online, was able to do so at an estimated cost of $5 million, according to “The New York Times.”

In contrast, HU Press’ last fiscal year, which ended in July 2009, was a “perfect storm,” says Donnelly. Sales fell ten percent, according to a report by “The Crimson.” “Last year there was a financial crisis that the entire globe was situated within…And there is a lot of disorder in the world of publishing so we didn’t have such a great year last year,” she says, noting that the price of books in general is rising.

Though HU Press’ fiscal projections for this annual term are optimistic, the question of the viability and accessibility of printed media still lingers, especially when publishers’ outputs are in the form of expensive hardcover copies. “Hardback books are really expensive these days, especially with university and scholarly presses having a hard time meeting their margin,” Gruesz says. “I’ve personally been buying fewer scholarly books for my collection because even the paperback editions are $30-plus, so it’s a bigger question about the price of books in general.”

According to Donnelly, though the theory behind digitizing titles is solid, it is not necessarily realistic for any publishing company at this time.

“We can’t operate at a loss. We need a financial model that allows us to cover our costs. The Press doesn’t have one yet that is online only. If someone else has one that is online only, I don’t know what that is,” she says, pointing to the considerable expenses of publishing a book such as “Literary History,” with its multitude of contributors.

Despite the lofty expenses associated with a project such as “Literary History,” the rewards—scholarly, not monetary—that HU Press reaps warrant the investment. “The reason Harvard University has a press,” Donnelly says, “is to do things that are worthwhile projects in terms of the world of ideas or scholarship…We want to spend our money—what money we have—doing that kind of thing rather than try to publish something that will sell lots of copies and make lots of money. We want to do something positive for the world of ideas.”

According to Donnelly and Waters, there are plans to adapt the work into e-book format, though none have emerged for an online version. However, for Waters and Sollors, the decision to create “Literary History” as a book, first and foremost, was a natural one. According to Kaufman, the obvious reason behind such a move is that the well-respected academics and published authors in the group of contributors are part of a culture that holds printed editions in higher esteem than Internet versions.

Contributors have echoed this sentiment. “The book has a particular life form that remains very important, that hasn’t been completely substituted by the more fleeting Wikipedia-like existence of Internet resources,” says Sollors, who also speculated that print and online editions need not be mutually exclusive. “But let the book live as a book for a bit,” he says.

Yet the editors and the contributors do recognize the benefits of digitization, although they reason that the book needs to be in print for a few years before HU Press can recoup its costs and even begin to consider an online edition.

“My sense is that eventually they should [digitize] if only to make it accessible for the very substantial fraction of the world reading public, including a fair amount of America, that won’t have ready access to the print version,” Buell says, referring particularly to universities in the People’s Republic of China as one example of a potential market which will likely not be able to capitalize on the information in the work because of minimal acquisition budgets. “There would be a case where some virtualization strategy would be well-advised, and maybe [“Literary History”] could be sold for rights that would keep the Harvard Press from going under and would benefit hundreds of thousands,” he explains.

Wisse agrees, suggesting that while she would not herself have thought to put the book online, digitization has tremendous virtues.

“If you’re really serious about this kind of project and its accessibility and popularizing both the ideas and the content,” she says, “a more natural form nowadays would probably be online publication,” she says.

SKIPPING AHEAD

In this technologically-driven era, Internet users instinctively turn to the web—whether it is Wikipedia, or even simply Google—for the answers to any fact-based question. And Wikipedia, with its straightforward language and related links, is nothing if not accessible. Fundamentally, “Literary History” attempts to recreate the accessibility of this online reference source, even while it seeks to redefine what an encyclopedic work means to readers.

And yet to eschew the simplicity of Wikipedia is also to risk losing a reader in the midst of haphazard associations and esoteric mentions of related events and figures. “Literary History” has admirable intentions; it has striven to narrate a portion of America’s literary history by concentrating on the rigorous analysis of facts, while still keeping readers engaged.

According to Kaufman, however, a reference book written largely by individuals established in the academy has an inherent flaw, regardless of that work’s accessibility. “To a certain extent it kind of demonstrates the academic mindset, in that the only other people who have read the book contributed to it,” Kaufman says. “This happens all the time in academia. It’s just that they chose a different kind of academic, so some of the contributors are out as public intellectuals and public figures.”

For Wisse, as well, the work is a valuable resource, and one which will provide a basis of lively discussion over the content and criticism presented in the anthology. However, she admits, “I don’t often approach these things with high hopes.” Referring again to the tendency authors, including herself, have to fixedly retain their certain style of prose, she says, “I think that one can compare the essays that people wrote with their general writing and see a correlation…If they published in academic publications in a certain style, they probably carried that over.”

“When a general reader like yourself can’t understand something the fault is generally not in you but in the poor thinking [of the author],” she explains.

But for the founder of this project at least, “Literary History” is the original, thought-provoking, and explicable reference work he had hoped to create so many years ago at the project’s conception.

“We are trying to raise the level of discourse, not in an academic way but in a democratic way,” Waters says. “I hope [the book] doesn’t seem exclusive or elitist because I don’t think it is. But the fact that people can write—if that’s the sin, we’re willing to be condemned.”

—Staff writer Denise J. Xu can be reached at dxu@fas.harvard.edu.