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Ernest Hemingway Creates a Reading List for a Young Writer, 1934 in Books, Literature, Writing | May 24th, 2013 14 Comments
In the spring of 1934, a young man who wanted to be a writer hitchhiked to Florida to meet his idol, Ernest Hemingway.
Arnold Samuelson was an adventurous 22-year-old. He had been born in a sod house in North Dakota to Norwegian immigrant parents. He completed his coursework in journalism at the University of Minnesota, but refused to pay the $5 fee for a diploma. After college he wanted to see the country, so he packed his violin in a knapsack and thumbed rides out to California. He sold a few stories about his travels to the Sunday Minneapolis Tribune.
In April of ’34 Samuelson was back in Minnesota when he read a story by Hemingway in Cosmopolitan, called “One Trip Across.” The short story would later become part of Hemingway’s fourth novel, To Have and Have Not. Samuelson was so impressed with the story that he decided to travel 2,000 miles to meet Hemingway and ask him for advice. “It seemed a damn fool thing to do,” Samuelson would later write, “but a twenty-two-year-old tramp during the Great Depression didn’t have to have much reason for what he did.”
And so, at the time of year when most hobos were traveling north, Samuelson headed south. He hitched his way to Florida and then hopped a freight train from the mainland to Key West. Riding on top of a boxcar, Samuelson could not see the railroad tracks underneath him–only miles and miles of water as the train left the mainland. “It was headed south over the long bridges between the keys and finally right out over the ocean,” writes Samuelson. “It couldn’t happen now–the tracks have been torn out–but it happened then, almost as in a dream.”
When Samuelson arrived in Key West he discovered that times were especially hard there. Most of the cigar factories had shut down and the fishing was poor. That night he went to sleep on the turtling dock, using his knapsack as a pillow. The ocean breeze kept the mosquitos away. A few hours later a cop woke him up and invited him to sleep in the bull pen of the city jail. “I was under arrest every night and released every morning to see if I could find my way out of town,” writes Samuelson. After his first night in the mosquito-infested jail, he went looking for the town’s most famous resident.
When I knocked on the front door of Ernest Hemingway’s house in Key West, he came out and stood squarely in front of me, squinty with annoyance, waiting for me to speak. I had nothing to say. I couldn’t recall a word of my prepared speech. He was a big man, tall, narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered, and he stood with his feet spread apart, his arms hanging at his sides. He was crouched forward slightly with his weight on his toes, in the instinctive poise of a fighter ready to hit.
“What do you want?” said Hemingway. After an awkward moment, Samuelson explained that he had bummed his way from Minneapolis just to see him. “I read your story ‘One Trip Across’ in Cosmopolitan. I liked it so much I came down to have a talk with you.” Hemingway seemed to relax. “Why the hell didn’t you say you just wanted to chew the fat? I thought you wanted to visit.” Hemingway told Samuelson he was busy, but invited him to come back at one-thirty the next afternoon.
After another night in jail, Samuelson returned to the house and found Hemingway sitting in the shade on the north porch, wearing khaki pants and bedroom slippers. He had a glass of whiskey and a copy of the New York Times. The two men began talking. Sitting there on the porch, Samuelson could sense that Hemingway was keeping him at a safe distance: “You were at his home but not in it. Almost like talking to a man out on a street.” They began by talking about the Cosmopolitan story, and Samuelson mentioned his failed attempts at writing fiction. Hemingway offered some advice.
“The most important thing I’ve learned about writing is never write too much at a time,” Hemingway said, tapping my arm with his finger. “Never pump yourself dry. Leave a little for the next day. The main thing is to know when to stop. Don’t wait till you’ve written yourself out. When you’re still going good and you come to an interesting place and you know what’s going to happen next, that’s the time to stop. Then leave it alone and don’t think about it; let your subconscious mind do the work. The next morning, when you’ve had a good sleep and you’re feeling fresh, rewrite what you wrote the day before. When you come to the interesting place and you know what is going to happen next, go on from there and stop at another high point of interest. That way, when you get through, your stuff is full of interesting places and when you write a novel you never get stuck and you make it interesting as you go along.”
Hemingway advised Samuelson to avoid contemporary writers and compete only with the dead ones whose works have stood the test of time. “When you pass them up you know you’re going good.” He asked Samuelson what writers he liked. Samuelson said he enjoyed Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. “Ever read War and Peace?” Hemingway asked. Samuelson said he had not. “That’s a damned good book. You ought to read it. We’ll go up to my workshop and I’ll make out a list you ought to read.”
His workshop was over the garage in back of the house. I followed him up an outside stairway into his workshop, a square room with a tile floor and shuttered windows on three sides and long shelves of books below the windows to the floor. In one corner was a big antique flat-topped desk and an antique chair with a high back. E.H. took the chair in the corner and we sat facing each other across the desk. He found a pen and began writing on a piece of paper and during the silence I was very ill at ease. I realized I was taking up his time, and I wished I could entertain him with my hobo experiences but thought they would be too dull and kept my mouth shut. I was there to take everything he would give and had nothing to return.
Hemingway wrote down a list of two short stories and 14 books and handed it to Samuelson (many of the texts you can find in our collection of Free eBooks):
“There is something I want to talk to you about. Let’s sit down,” he said thoughtfully. “After you left yesterday, I was thinking I’ll need somebody to sleep on board my boat. What are you planning on now?”
“I haven’t any plans.”
“I’ve got a boat being shipped from New York. I’ll have to go up to Miami Tuesday and run her down and then I’ll have to have someone on board. There wouldn’t be much work. If you want the job, you could keep her cleaned up in the mornings and still have time for your writing.”
“That would be swell,” replied Samuelson. And so began a year-long adventure as Hemingway’s assistant. For a dollar a day, Samuelson slept aboard the 38-foot cabin cruiser Pilar and kept it in good condition. Whenever Hemingway went fishing or took the boat to Cuba, Samuelson went along. He wrote about his experiences–including those quoted and paraphrased here–in a remarkable memoir, With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba. During the course of that year, Samuelson and Hemingway talked at length about writing. Hemingway published an account of their discussions in a 1934 Esquire article called “Monologue to the Maestro: A High Seas Letter.” (Click here to open it as a PDF.) Hemingway’s article with his advice to Samuelson was one source for our February 19 post, “Seven Tips From Ernest Hemingway on How to Write Fiction.”
When the work arrangement had been settled, Hemingway drove the young man back to the jail to pick up his knapsack and violin. Samuelson remembered his feeling of triumph at returning with the famous author to get his things. “The cops at the jail seemed to think nothing of it that I should move from their mosquito chamber to the home of Ernest Hemingway. They saw his Model A roadster outside waiting for me. They saw me come out of it. They saw Ernest at the wheel waiting and they never said a word.”
In the spring of 1934, a young man who wanted to be a writer hitchhiked to Florida to meet his idol, Ernest Hemingway.
Arnold Samuelson was an adventurous 22-year-old. He had been born in a sod house in North Dakota to Norwegian immigrant parents. He completed his coursework in journalism at the University of Minnesota, but refused to pay the $5 fee for a diploma. After college he wanted to see the country, so he packed his violin in a knapsack and thumbed rides out to California. He sold a few stories about his travels to the Sunday Minneapolis Tribune.
In April of ’34 Samuelson was back in Minnesota when he read a story by Hemingway in Cosmopolitan, called “One Trip Across.” The short story would later become part of Hemingway’s fourth novel, To Have and Have Not. Samuelson was so impressed with the story that he decided to travel 2,000 miles to meet Hemingway and ask him for advice. “It seemed a damn fool thing to do,” Samuelson would later write, “but a twenty-two-year-old tramp during the Great Depression didn’t have to have much reason for what he did.”
And so, at the time of year when most hobos were traveling north, Samuelson headed south. He hitched his way to Florida and then hopped a freight train from the mainland to Key West. Riding on top of a boxcar, Samuelson could not see the railroad tracks underneath him–only miles and miles of water as the train left the mainland. “It was headed south over the long bridges between the keys and finally right out over the ocean,” writes Samuelson. “It couldn’t happen now–the tracks have been torn out–but it happened then, almost as in a dream.”
When Samuelson arrived in Key West he discovered that times were especially hard there. Most of the cigar factories had shut down and the fishing was poor. That night he went to sleep on the turtling dock, using his knapsack as a pillow. The ocean breeze kept the mosquitos away. A few hours later a cop woke him up and invited him to sleep in the bull pen of the city jail. “I was under arrest every night and released every morning to see if I could find my way out of town,” writes Samuelson. After his first night in the mosquito-infested jail, he went looking for the town’s most famous resident.
When I knocked on the front door of Ernest Hemingway’s house in Key West, he came out and stood squarely in front of me, squinty with annoyance, waiting for me to speak. I had nothing to say. I couldn’t recall a word of my prepared speech. He was a big man, tall, narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered, and he stood with his feet spread apart, his arms hanging at his sides. He was crouched forward slightly with his weight on his toes, in the instinctive poise of a fighter ready to hit.
“What do you want?” said Hemingway. After an awkward moment, Samuelson explained that he had bummed his way from Minneapolis just to see him. “I read your story ‘One Trip Across’ in Cosmopolitan. I liked it so much I came down to have a talk with you.” Hemingway seemed to relax. “Why the hell didn’t you say you just wanted to chew the fat? I thought you wanted to visit.” Hemingway told Samuelson he was busy, but invited him to come back at one-thirty the next afternoon.
After another night in jail, Samuelson returned to the house and found Hemingway sitting in the shade on the north porch, wearing khaki pants and bedroom slippers. He had a glass of whiskey and a copy of the New York Times. The two men began talking. Sitting there on the porch, Samuelson could sense that Hemingway was keeping him at a safe distance: “You were at his home but not in it. Almost like talking to a man out on a street.” They began by talking about the Cosmopolitan story, and Samuelson mentioned his failed attempts at writing fiction. Hemingway offered some advice.
“The most important thing I’ve learned about writing is never write too much at a time,” Hemingway said, tapping my arm with his finger. “Never pump yourself dry. Leave a little for the next day. The main thing is to know when to stop. Don’t wait till you’ve written yourself out. When you’re still going good and you come to an interesting place and you know what’s going to happen next, that’s the time to stop. Then leave it alone and don’t think about it; let your subconscious mind do the work. The next morning, when you’ve had a good sleep and you’re feeling fresh, rewrite what you wrote the day before. When you come to the interesting place and you know what is going to happen next, go on from there and stop at another high point of interest. That way, when you get through, your stuff is full of interesting places and when you write a novel you never get stuck and you make it interesting as you go along.”
Hemingway advised Samuelson to avoid contemporary writers and compete only with the dead ones whose works have stood the test of time. “When you pass them up you know you’re going good.” He asked Samuelson what writers he liked. Samuelson said he enjoyed Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. “Ever read War and Peace?” Hemingway asked. Samuelson said he had not. “That’s a damned good book. You ought to read it. We’ll go up to my workshop and I’ll make out a list you ought to read.”
His workshop was over the garage in back of the house. I followed him up an outside stairway into his workshop, a square room with a tile floor and shuttered windows on three sides and long shelves of books below the windows to the floor. In one corner was a big antique flat-topped desk and an antique chair with a high back. E.H. took the chair in the corner and we sat facing each other across the desk. He found a pen and began writing on a piece of paper and during the silence I was very ill at ease. I realized I was taking up his time, and I wished I could entertain him with my hobo experiences but thought they would be too dull and kept my mouth shut. I was there to take everything he would give and had nothing to return.
Hemingway wrote down a list of two short stories and 14 books and handed it to Samuelson (many of the texts you can find in our collection of Free eBooks):
- “The Blue Hotel” by Stephen Crane
- “The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
- Dubliners by James Joyce
- The Red and the Black by Stendhal
- Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
- Hail and Farewell by George Moore
- The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- The Oxford Book of English Verse
- The Enormous Room by E.E. Cummings
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
- Far Away and Long Ago by W.H. Hudson
- The American by Henry James
“There is something I want to talk to you about. Let’s sit down,” he said thoughtfully. “After you left yesterday, I was thinking I’ll need somebody to sleep on board my boat. What are you planning on now?”
“I haven’t any plans.”
“I’ve got a boat being shipped from New York. I’ll have to go up to Miami Tuesday and run her down and then I’ll have to have someone on board. There wouldn’t be much work. If you want the job, you could keep her cleaned up in the mornings and still have time for your writing.”
“That would be swell,” replied Samuelson. And so began a year-long adventure as Hemingway’s assistant. For a dollar a day, Samuelson slept aboard the 38-foot cabin cruiser Pilar and kept it in good condition. Whenever Hemingway went fishing or took the boat to Cuba, Samuelson went along. He wrote about his experiences–including those quoted and paraphrased here–in a remarkable memoir, With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba. During the course of that year, Samuelson and Hemingway talked at length about writing. Hemingway published an account of their discussions in a 1934 Esquire article called “Monologue to the Maestro: A High Seas Letter.” (Click here to open it as a PDF.) Hemingway’s article with his advice to Samuelson was one source for our February 19 post, “Seven Tips From Ernest Hemingway on How to Write Fiction.”
When the work arrangement had been settled, Hemingway drove the young man back to the jail to pick up his knapsack and violin. Samuelson remembered his feeling of triumph at returning with the famous author to get his things. “The cops at the jail seemed to think nothing of it that I should move from their mosquito chamber to the home of Ernest Hemingway. They saw his Model A roadster outside waiting for me. They saw me come out of it. They saw Ernest at the wheel waiting and they never said a word.”
Carl Sagan’s Undergrad Reading List: 40 Essential Texts for a Well-Rounded Thinker in Books, Physics | July 11th, 2012 11 Comments
Earlier this year, we brought you Neil de Grasse Tyson’s List of 8 (Free) Books Every Intelligent Person Should Read. The list generated a lot of buzz and debate. Indeed you, the readers, contributed 133 comments to the post, a record for us. Given your enthusiasm, you might want to check this out – a newly-discovered reading list from the man who mentored Tyson as a youth and laid the foundation for Tyson’s current role as public scientist/intellectual. Yes, we’re talking about Carl Sagan.
Last month, The Library of Congress acquired a collection of Carl Sagan’s papers, which included Sagan’s 1954 reading list from his undergrad days at The University of Chicago. There are some heady scientific texts here, to be sure. But also some great works from the Western philosophical and literary tradition. We’re talking Plato’s Republic, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, The Bible, Gide’s The Immoralist, and Huxley’s Young Archimedes. It’s just the kind of texts you’d expect a true humanist like Sagan — let alone a UChicago grad — to be fully immersed in.
If you want to participate in the same intellectual tradition, we suggest visiting our previous post, The Harvard Classics: A Free, Digital Collection, which puts 51 volumes of essential works right at your fingertips.
Earlier this year, we brought you Neil de Grasse Tyson’s List of 8 (Free) Books Every Intelligent Person Should Read. The list generated a lot of buzz and debate. Indeed you, the readers, contributed 133 comments to the post, a record for us. Given your enthusiasm, you might want to check this out – a newly-discovered reading list from the man who mentored Tyson as a youth and laid the foundation for Tyson’s current role as public scientist/intellectual. Yes, we’re talking about Carl Sagan.
Last month, The Library of Congress acquired a collection of Carl Sagan’s papers, which included Sagan’s 1954 reading list from his undergrad days at The University of Chicago. There are some heady scientific texts here, to be sure. But also some great works from the Western philosophical and literary tradition. We’re talking Plato’s Republic, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, The Bible, Gide’s The Immoralist, and Huxley’s Young Archimedes. It’s just the kind of texts you’d expect a true humanist like Sagan — let alone a UChicago grad — to be fully immersed in.
If you want to participate in the same intellectual tradition, we suggest visiting our previous post, The Harvard Classics: A Free, Digital Collection, which puts 51 volumes of essential works right at your fingertips.
The 100 Best Novels: A Literary Critic Creates a List in 1898 in History, Literature | November 14th, 2013
Book lists, despite what younger readers born into Buzzfeed’s ruthless listsicle monopoly may think, have always been popular. Some, like David Bowie’s Top 100 Books, give us a sense of the artist’s development. Others, like Joseph Brodsky’s List of 84 Books for Basic Conversation, provide a Nobel prize-winning benchmark for knowledge. Even though the books are within the reach of most readers, systematically digesting such lists often tries one’s patience. Despite the lack of will or interest in working through someone else’s literary education, however, glancing through such personal anthologies provides us with a glimpse into the maker’s life—be it their private tastes, or their social mores.
In late October, The Times Literary Supplement’s Michael Caines unearthed another Top 100 list; this one, however, has the distinction of hailing from 1898. At the turn of the 20th century, a journalist and author of numerous books on the Brontë sisters named Clement K. Shorter tried his hand at compiling the 100 Best Novels for a journal called The Bookman. The ground rules were simple: the list could feature only one novel per novelist, and living authors were excluded. Today, Shorter’s compendium looks somewhat hit-or-miss. There are some indisputable classics (many of which can be found in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books collections) and some other texts that have faded into oblivion. Still—one can’t help but experience a certain historical frisson at a 19th century listsicle. Here it goes:
1. Don Quixote - 1604 – Miguel de Cervantes
2. The Holy War - 1682 – John Bunyan
3. Gil Blas - 1715 – Alain René le Sage
4. Robinson Crusoe - 1719 – Daniel Defoe
5. Gulliver’s Travels - 1726 – Jonathan Swift
6. Roderick Random - 1748 – Tobias Smollett
7. Clarissa - 1749 – Samuel Richardson
8. Tom Jones - 1749 – Henry Fielding
9. Candide - 1756 – Françoise de Voltaire
10. Rasselas - 1759 – Samuel Johnson
11. The Castle of Otranto - 1764 – Horace Walpole
12. The Vicar of Wakefield - 1766 – Oliver Goldsmith
13. The Old English Baron - 1777 – Clara Reeve
14. Evelina - 1778 – Fanny Burney
15. Vathek - 1787 – William Beckford
16. The Mysteries of Udolpho - 1794 – Ann Radcliffe
17. Caleb Williams - 1794 – William Godwin
18. The Wild Irish Girl - 1806 – Lady Morgan
19. Corinne - 1810 – Madame de Stael
20. The Scottish Chiefs - 1810 – Jane Porter
21. The Absentee - 1812 – Maria Edgeworth
22. Pride and Prejudice - 1813 – Jane Austen
23. Headlong Hall - 1816 – Thomas Love Peacock
24. Frankenstein - 1818 – Mary Shelley
25. Marriage - 1818 – Susan Ferrier
26. The Ayrshire Legatees - 1820 – John Galt
27. Valerius - 1821 – John Gibson Lockhart
28. Wilhelm Meister - 1821 – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
29. Kenilworth - 1821 – Sir Walter Scott
30. Bracebridge Hall - 1822 – Washington Irving
31. The Epicurean - 1822 – Thomas Moore
32. The Adventures of Hajji Baba - 1824 – James Morier (“usually reckoned his best”)
33. The Betrothed - 1825 – Alessandro Manzoni
34. Lichtenstein - 1826 – Wilhelm Hauff
35. The Last of the Mohicans - 1826 – Fenimore Cooper
36. The Collegians - 1828 – Gerald Griffin
37. The Autobiography of Mansie Wauch - 1828 – David M. Moir
38. Richelieu - 1829 – G. P. R. James (the “first and best” novel by the “doyen of historical novelists”)
39. Tom Cringle’s Log - 1833 – Michael Scott
40. Mr. Midshipman Easy - 1834 – Frederick Marryat
41. Le Père Goriot - 1835 – Honoré de Balzac
42. Rory O’More - 1836 – Samuel Lover (another first novel, inspired by one of the author’s own ballads)
43. Jack Brag - 1837 – Theodore Hook
44. Fardorougha the Miser - 1839 – William Carleton (“a grim study of avarice and Catholic family life. Critics consider it the author’s finest achievement”)
45. Valentine Vox - 1840 – Henry Cockton (yet another first novel)
46. Old St. Paul’s - 1841 – Harrison Ainsworth
47. Ten Thousand a Year - 1841 – Samuel Warren (“immensely successful”)
48. Susan Hopley - 1841 – Catherine Crowe (“the story of a resourceful servant who solves a mysterious crime”)
49. Charles O’Malley - 1841 – Charles Lever
50. The Last of the Barons - 1843 – Bulwer Lytton
51. Consuelo - 1844 – George Sand
52. Amy Herbert - 1844 – Elizabeth Sewell
53. Adventures of Mr. Ledbury - 1844 – Elizabeth Sewell
54. Sybil - 1845 – Lord Beaconsfield (a. k. a. Benjamin Disraeli)
55. The Three Musketeers - 1845 – Alexandre Dumas
56. The Wandering Jew - 1845 – Eugène Sue
57. Emilia Wyndham - 1846 – Anne Marsh
58. The Romance of War - 1846 – James Grant (“the narrative of the 92nd Highlanders’ contribution from the Peninsular campaign to Waterloo”)
59. Vanity Fair - 1847 – W. M. Thackeray
60. Jane Eyre - 1847 – Charlotte Brontë
61. Wuthering Heights - 1847 – Emily Brontë
62. The Vale of Cedars - 1848 – Grace Aguilar
63. David Copperfield - 1849 – Charles Dickens
64. The Maiden and Married Life of Mary Powell - 1850 – Anne Manning (“written in a pastiche seventeenth-century style and printed with the old-fashioned typography and page layout for which there was a vogue at the period . . .”)
65. The Scarlet Letter - 1850 – Nathaniel Hawthorne
66. Frank Fairleigh - 1850 – Francis Smedley (“Smedley specialised in fiction that is hearty and active, with a strong line in boisterous college escapades and adventurous esquestrian exploits”)
67. Uncle Tom’s Cabin - 1851 – H. B. Stowe
68. The Wide Wide World - 1851 – Susan Warner (Elizabeth Wetherell)
69. Nathalie - 1851 – Julia Kavanagh
70. Ruth - 1853 – Elizabeth Gaskell
71. The Lamplighter - 1854 – Maria Susanna Cummins
72. Dr. Antonio - 1855 – Giovanni Ruffini
73. Westward Ho! - 1855 – Charles Kingsley
74. Debit and Credit (Soll und Haben) – 1855 – Gustav Freytag
75. Tom Brown’s School-Days - 1856 – Thomas Hughes
76. Barchester Towers - 1857 – Anthony Trollope
77. John Halifax, Gentleman - 1857 – Dinah Mulock (a. k. a. Dinah Craik; “the best-known Victorian fable of Smilesian self-improvement”)
78. Ekkehard - 1857 – Viktor von Scheffel
79. Elsie Venner - 1859 – O. W. Holmes
80. The Woman in White - 1860 – Wilkie Collins
81. The Cloister and the Hearth - 1861 – Charles Reade
82. Ravenshoe - 1861 – Henry Kingsley (“There is much confusion in the plot to do with changelings and frustrated inheritance” in this successful novel by Charles Kingsley’s younger brother, the “black sheep” of a “highly respectable” family)
83. Fathers and Sons - 1861 – Ivan Turgenieff
84. Silas Marner - 1861 – George Eliot
85. Les Misérables - 1862 – Victor Hugo
86. Salammbô - 1862 – Gustave Flaubert
87. Salem Chapel - 1862 – Margaret Oliphant
88. The Channings - 1862 – Ellen Wood (a. k. a. Mrs Henry Wood)
89. Lost and Saved - 1863 – The Hon. Mrs. Norton
90. The Schönberg-Cotta Family - 1863 – Elizabeth Charles
91. Uncle Silas - 1864 – Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
92. Barbara’s History - 1864 – Amelia B. Edwards (“Confusingly for bibliographers, she was related to Matilda Betham-Edwards and possibly to Annie Edward(e)s . . .”)
93. Sweet Anne Page - 1868 – Mortimer Collins
94. Crime and Punishment - 1868 – Feodor Dostoieffsky
95. Fromont Junior - 1874 – Alphonse Daudet
96. Marmorne - 1877 – P. G. Hamerton (“written under the pseudonym Adolphus Segrave”)
97. Black but Comely - 1879 – G. J. Whyte-Melville
98. The Master of Ballantrae - 1889 – R. L. Stevenson
99. Reuben Sachs - 1889 – Amy Levy
100. News from Nowhere - 1891 – William Morris
In addition to the canon, Shorter—unable to heed his own cautious counsel and throwing the door open to the winds of literary passion—included 8 books by living novelists whom he called “writers whose reputations are too well established for their juniors to feel towards them any sentiments other than those of reverence and regard:”
An Egyptian Princess - 1864 – Georg Ebers
Rhoda Fleming - 1865 – George Meredith
Lorna Doone - 1869 – R. D. Blackmore
Anna Karenina - 1875 – Count Leo Tolstoi
The Return of the Native - 1878 – Thomas Hardy
Daisy Miller - 1878 – Henry James
Mark Rutherford - 1881 – W. Hale White
Le Rêve - 1889 – Emile Zola
Book lists, despite what younger readers born into Buzzfeed’s ruthless listsicle monopoly may think, have always been popular. Some, like David Bowie’s Top 100 Books, give us a sense of the artist’s development. Others, like Joseph Brodsky’s List of 84 Books for Basic Conversation, provide a Nobel prize-winning benchmark for knowledge. Even though the books are within the reach of most readers, systematically digesting such lists often tries one’s patience. Despite the lack of will or interest in working through someone else’s literary education, however, glancing through such personal anthologies provides us with a glimpse into the maker’s life—be it their private tastes, or their social mores.
In late October, The Times Literary Supplement’s Michael Caines unearthed another Top 100 list; this one, however, has the distinction of hailing from 1898. At the turn of the 20th century, a journalist and author of numerous books on the Brontë sisters named Clement K. Shorter tried his hand at compiling the 100 Best Novels for a journal called The Bookman. The ground rules were simple: the list could feature only one novel per novelist, and living authors were excluded. Today, Shorter’s compendium looks somewhat hit-or-miss. There are some indisputable classics (many of which can be found in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books collections) and some other texts that have faded into oblivion. Still—one can’t help but experience a certain historical frisson at a 19th century listsicle. Here it goes:
1. Don Quixote - 1604 – Miguel de Cervantes
2. The Holy War - 1682 – John Bunyan
3. Gil Blas - 1715 – Alain René le Sage
4. Robinson Crusoe - 1719 – Daniel Defoe
5. Gulliver’s Travels - 1726 – Jonathan Swift
6. Roderick Random - 1748 – Tobias Smollett
7. Clarissa - 1749 – Samuel Richardson
8. Tom Jones - 1749 – Henry Fielding
9. Candide - 1756 – Françoise de Voltaire
10. Rasselas - 1759 – Samuel Johnson
11. The Castle of Otranto - 1764 – Horace Walpole
12. The Vicar of Wakefield - 1766 – Oliver Goldsmith
13. The Old English Baron - 1777 – Clara Reeve
14. Evelina - 1778 – Fanny Burney
15. Vathek - 1787 – William Beckford
16. The Mysteries of Udolpho - 1794 – Ann Radcliffe
17. Caleb Williams - 1794 – William Godwin
18. The Wild Irish Girl - 1806 – Lady Morgan
19. Corinne - 1810 – Madame de Stael
20. The Scottish Chiefs - 1810 – Jane Porter
21. The Absentee - 1812 – Maria Edgeworth
22. Pride and Prejudice - 1813 – Jane Austen
23. Headlong Hall - 1816 – Thomas Love Peacock
24. Frankenstein - 1818 – Mary Shelley
25. Marriage - 1818 – Susan Ferrier
26. The Ayrshire Legatees - 1820 – John Galt
27. Valerius - 1821 – John Gibson Lockhart
28. Wilhelm Meister - 1821 – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
29. Kenilworth - 1821 – Sir Walter Scott
30. Bracebridge Hall - 1822 – Washington Irving
31. The Epicurean - 1822 – Thomas Moore
32. The Adventures of Hajji Baba - 1824 – James Morier (“usually reckoned his best”)
33. The Betrothed - 1825 – Alessandro Manzoni
34. Lichtenstein - 1826 – Wilhelm Hauff
35. The Last of the Mohicans - 1826 – Fenimore Cooper
36. The Collegians - 1828 – Gerald Griffin
37. The Autobiography of Mansie Wauch - 1828 – David M. Moir
38. Richelieu - 1829 – G. P. R. James (the “first and best” novel by the “doyen of historical novelists”)
39. Tom Cringle’s Log - 1833 – Michael Scott
40. Mr. Midshipman Easy - 1834 – Frederick Marryat
41. Le Père Goriot - 1835 – Honoré de Balzac
42. Rory O’More - 1836 – Samuel Lover (another first novel, inspired by one of the author’s own ballads)
43. Jack Brag - 1837 – Theodore Hook
44. Fardorougha the Miser - 1839 – William Carleton (“a grim study of avarice and Catholic family life. Critics consider it the author’s finest achievement”)
45. Valentine Vox - 1840 – Henry Cockton (yet another first novel)
46. Old St. Paul’s - 1841 – Harrison Ainsworth
47. Ten Thousand a Year - 1841 – Samuel Warren (“immensely successful”)
48. Susan Hopley - 1841 – Catherine Crowe (“the story of a resourceful servant who solves a mysterious crime”)
49. Charles O’Malley - 1841 – Charles Lever
50. The Last of the Barons - 1843 – Bulwer Lytton
51. Consuelo - 1844 – George Sand
52. Amy Herbert - 1844 – Elizabeth Sewell
53. Adventures of Mr. Ledbury - 1844 – Elizabeth Sewell
54. Sybil - 1845 – Lord Beaconsfield (a. k. a. Benjamin Disraeli)
55. The Three Musketeers - 1845 – Alexandre Dumas
56. The Wandering Jew - 1845 – Eugène Sue
57. Emilia Wyndham - 1846 – Anne Marsh
58. The Romance of War - 1846 – James Grant (“the narrative of the 92nd Highlanders’ contribution from the Peninsular campaign to Waterloo”)
59. Vanity Fair - 1847 – W. M. Thackeray
60. Jane Eyre - 1847 – Charlotte Brontë
61. Wuthering Heights - 1847 – Emily Brontë
62. The Vale of Cedars - 1848 – Grace Aguilar
63. David Copperfield - 1849 – Charles Dickens
64. The Maiden and Married Life of Mary Powell - 1850 – Anne Manning (“written in a pastiche seventeenth-century style and printed with the old-fashioned typography and page layout for which there was a vogue at the period . . .”)
65. The Scarlet Letter - 1850 – Nathaniel Hawthorne
66. Frank Fairleigh - 1850 – Francis Smedley (“Smedley specialised in fiction that is hearty and active, with a strong line in boisterous college escapades and adventurous esquestrian exploits”)
67. Uncle Tom’s Cabin - 1851 – H. B. Stowe
68. The Wide Wide World - 1851 – Susan Warner (Elizabeth Wetherell)
69. Nathalie - 1851 – Julia Kavanagh
70. Ruth - 1853 – Elizabeth Gaskell
71. The Lamplighter - 1854 – Maria Susanna Cummins
72. Dr. Antonio - 1855 – Giovanni Ruffini
73. Westward Ho! - 1855 – Charles Kingsley
74. Debit and Credit (Soll und Haben) – 1855 – Gustav Freytag
75. Tom Brown’s School-Days - 1856 – Thomas Hughes
76. Barchester Towers - 1857 – Anthony Trollope
77. John Halifax, Gentleman - 1857 – Dinah Mulock (a. k. a. Dinah Craik; “the best-known Victorian fable of Smilesian self-improvement”)
78. Ekkehard - 1857 – Viktor von Scheffel
79. Elsie Venner - 1859 – O. W. Holmes
80. The Woman in White - 1860 – Wilkie Collins
81. The Cloister and the Hearth - 1861 – Charles Reade
82. Ravenshoe - 1861 – Henry Kingsley (“There is much confusion in the plot to do with changelings and frustrated inheritance” in this successful novel by Charles Kingsley’s younger brother, the “black sheep” of a “highly respectable” family)
83. Fathers and Sons - 1861 – Ivan Turgenieff
84. Silas Marner - 1861 – George Eliot
85. Les Misérables - 1862 – Victor Hugo
86. Salammbô - 1862 – Gustave Flaubert
87. Salem Chapel - 1862 – Margaret Oliphant
88. The Channings - 1862 – Ellen Wood (a. k. a. Mrs Henry Wood)
89. Lost and Saved - 1863 – The Hon. Mrs. Norton
90. The Schönberg-Cotta Family - 1863 – Elizabeth Charles
91. Uncle Silas - 1864 – Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
92. Barbara’s History - 1864 – Amelia B. Edwards (“Confusingly for bibliographers, she was related to Matilda Betham-Edwards and possibly to Annie Edward(e)s . . .”)
93. Sweet Anne Page - 1868 – Mortimer Collins
94. Crime and Punishment - 1868 – Feodor Dostoieffsky
95. Fromont Junior - 1874 – Alphonse Daudet
96. Marmorne - 1877 – P. G. Hamerton (“written under the pseudonym Adolphus Segrave”)
97. Black but Comely - 1879 – G. J. Whyte-Melville
98. The Master of Ballantrae - 1889 – R. L. Stevenson
99. Reuben Sachs - 1889 – Amy Levy
100. News from Nowhere - 1891 – William Morris
In addition to the canon, Shorter—unable to heed his own cautious counsel and throwing the door open to the winds of literary passion—included 8 books by living novelists whom he called “writers whose reputations are too well established for their juniors to feel towards them any sentiments other than those of reverence and regard:”
An Egyptian Princess - 1864 – Georg Ebers
Rhoda Fleming - 1865 – George Meredith
Lorna Doone - 1869 – R. D. Blackmore
Anna Karenina - 1875 – Count Leo Tolstoi
The Return of the Native - 1878 – Thomas Hardy
Daisy Miller - 1878 – Henry James
Mark Rutherford - 1881 – W. Hale White
Le Rêve - 1889 – Emile Zola
