1.Prologue
In our series on famous books to read by the time you’re 20, we’ve gone over award-winning literature from around the world, and books about the Japanese identity, Japanese culture, and Japanese thought.
In this article I’ve put together a list of twelve of the best-known works of American and British literature. These are the books that all American and British honors students (supposedly) read at some point during high school. Each work not only captures the era that they were written in but also reveals something about the national character and social structure of its country of origin. The theme of all great American novels is the American Dream, while British novels describe the ins and outs—and the sometimes suffocating nature—of class society in great detail.
With this in mind, I would like to think about the pleasure and appeal of English literature, which is often long, dense, convoluted, repetitive, arduous, and daunting to read. Finally, I would like to reconsider the lessons that English literature has to offer us in these trying times.
2.The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
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Set in America during the Great Depression, this classic of American literature depicts the illusion of the "Go west" mantra that originally drove so many toward California during the Gold Rush. It was also the major reason why John Steinbeck, known as "a giant of American letters," won the Nobel Prize in 1962.
When the Dust Bowl renders their farmland useless, the Joad family sells all of their possessions to buy a used car and leave Oklahoma. The first half of the novel follows their journey along Route 66, bound for California, where they’ve heard work is available. After an arduous journey, they arrive in California only to learn that they cannot escape the Great Depression, and the arrival of many other fellow tenant farmers has oversaturated the workforce.
At the time, Steinbeck was accused of being a socialist because of the book's sympathetic depiction of migrant workers and the poor. While the Joads are initially a very insular family that is only looking out for themselves, by the end of the book a kind of solidarity is beginning to emerge among the migrant workers.
Senator Bernie Sanders may have dropped out of the 2020 presidential race, but his rise reflects a swell of support among young Americans; this book offers insight into why so many of them were drawn to his message.
3.For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
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A masterpiece of war fiction, For Whom the Bell Tolls depicts a kind of male romantic fantasy in which an American university professor goes to Spain on sabattical and joins the anti-fascist Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War. The protagonist is tasked with blowing up a bridge of strategic importance. When his group learns that the enemy Nationalists know of their plan, he must decide whether to go through with the mission or not. Concluding that the mission cannot be stopped without a change in orders, he heads valiantly toward certain death.
The title, "For Whom the Bell Tolls," is taken from a meditation by John Donne, an English poet and cleric in the Church of England. The bell refers what’s known as a funeral toll or death knell, used to mark the death of a person at a funeral. Donne’s meditation is about how we are all connected, and that the death of a stranger is the same as losing a part of yourself. The central theme that Hemingway’s novel deals with is death.
While the Spanish Civil War was an internal struggle that on its surface had very little bearing on the lives of everyday Americans, some 2,800 American volunteers took up arms to support the Republicans’ cause of anti-fascism, freedom, equality, and democracy. Readers begin to feel that if Hemingway’s protagonist can carry out his mission of blowing up the bridge, he may be able to stop the spread of fascism, and thus prevent the outbreak of World War II. Ironically, bridges are traditionally a symbol of connection.
Hemingway's writing style is famous for being direct and stripped down, but this book is purposely written in a style that is difficult to read. Dialogue is presented as if it has been translated from Spanish to English, using old English expressions like “thou" for the Spanish “usted" and other awkward phrasing. Perhaps Hemingway was trying to demonstrate the difficulty of an approach to translation that is truly respectful of culture. Moreover, he seems to suggest that it is impossible for us to truly understand each other, regardless of shared beliefs, because there will always be a language barrier and cultural barrier that stands in between us.
4.Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
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Vladimir Nabokov was born in Russia as the eldest son of a wealthy family of Russian nobility. After the Russian Revolution, the family fled to Western Europe, and Nabokov spent time living in London, Berlin, and Paris before arriving in the U.S. in 1940. He became a naturalized American citizen in 1945. While living in Berlin and Paris, he began publishing novels in Russian to great acclaim, but became an internationally renowned author with his later English-language works. In the U.S., he taught Russian and European literature at Cornell University.
The protagonist of Lolita is a middle-aged college professor of literature who, like Nabokov himself, has fled from Europe to the U.S. He is immediately drawn to a young girl, Dolores, in whom he seems a resemblance to his long lost first love. In order to get closer to the girl, he marries her widowed mother. “Lolita" is the nickname the man gives to Dolores; the word has since come to refer to a sexually precocious young girl. It has become part of the lexicon in Japan, where people talk about a “Lolita complex" and “Lolita fashion". The word "Dolores" means "sorrow" in Spanish.
In Japan, the culture has long celebrated childish innocence, while childish things are often considered wicked in the West. One reason this book is considered a masterpiece is that although it is about the unforgivable and perverted love the central character has for a young girl, it somehow succeeds in drawing the reader in and making them empathize with him.
Others say that the young Lolita represents a young America, and the middle-aged protagonist represents old Europe. Young America is all about material things, consumerism, and popular culture, while old Europe is refined and conservative. The two cannot see eye to eye not only because of their age difference, but also because of the cultural gap between them.
5.Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
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This book is a love story between an upper class woman and a working class man in England. The protagonist, Constance, is married to Sir Clifford Chatterly, who has been paralyzed from the waist down due to an injury sustained in World War I. The injury prevents them from having a sexual relationship. Clifford encourages his wife to have a relationship with another man in order to produce him an heir—under the condition that he is of the upper class. Constance, however, ends up having an affair with the gamekeeper of the estate.
The book is known for its explicit representation of sexual acts. D. H. Lawrence, knowing he would have trouble getting it published, first released the work privately in 1928, and the following year his publisher released a revised edition with the depictions of sex removed. An uncensored version was published in 1960, but it was charged under obscenity laws both in the U.K. and the U.S.
A full, uncensored Japanese translation by Ito Sei was released in 1950, but strict censorship was being conducted by the Japanese government and GHQ, and Sei’s translation led to a famous obscenity trial that lasted from 1951 until 1957. Several notable literary figures testified for the defense, including conservative intellectual Fukuda Tsuneari, who we covered in BOOKS & MAGAZINES #011. Fukuda’s testimony was published in the literary magazine Bungakukai. He also later adapted and produced a radio play version of Lady Chatterly’s Lover.
In the end, the trial ended in a guilty verdict, and Ito and his publisher were fined for their actions. A translation that omitted the depictions of sex was published in 1964, and a full uncensored version was finally published in 1973. Ito’s original full translation was also later published.
6.The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
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F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have coined the term "Jazz Age" to refer to America during the Roaring Twenties, when the country experienced significant social and cultural changes. The First World War had ended, jazz was in vogue, and a pleasure-seeking culture was developing in urban centers across the country. It was the dawn of the era of mass consumption.
The Great Gatsby is the love story of a self-made man and an upper class woman. Military man Jay Gatsby comes back from World War I, penniless but intent on making something of himself, only to find that his beloved Daisy has decided to marry the wealthy Tom. Gatsby, obsessed with winning her back, amasses a huge fortune and begins throwing lavish parties hoping to reunite with Daisy at his New York mansion.
The main theme of the novel is the illusion of the American Dream—the idea that people can follow their dreams and achieve success regardless of their station at birth. When Gatsby is ultimately rejected by Daisy, he realizes that the dream he has tirelessly pursued was a mirage. It turns out America does have a class society, after all.
Well, maybe not exactly. While the U.S. does not have a class society in the same sense that the U.K. does, there is an insurmountable chasm between those from old money and those from new money. In that sense, you could say that President Donald Trump is a modern Tom, while former President Obama is a modern Gatsby.
7.On the Road by Jack Kerouac
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On the Road is considered the quintessential hipster bible of the Beat Generation, and a key inspiration in the development of the hippie movement of the 1960s.
On the Road is Kerouac’s semi-autobiographical masterpiece, inspired by his travels across postwar America. It is written in his signature, improvisational, jazz-inspired method of spontaneous prose—purportedly without edits.
If The Great Gatsby is about the emptiness of the American dream in post-World War I America, then On the Road is about the broken state of the American dream after World War II. The protagonists travel across the U.S. in search of an alternative American dream—something other than consumerism, commercialism, and self-gratification.
That search would directly inspire the hippie movement in the 1960s—not just writers and poets but also musicians like Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Neil Young, and innumerable others.
8.Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
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Aspiring writer Stingo moves to New York, where he meets and beautiful Sophie and her emotionally unstable lover Nathan. He learns that during the war, Sophie was interned at the Auschwitz concentration camp and is a Holocaust survivor. As the three grow closer, he learns Sophie’s darkest secret—that at Auschwitz, she was forced to choose which one of her two children would be gassed and which would be sent to a labor camp. Styron’s book was adapted into an award-winning film in 1982 starring Meryl Streep.
Sophie's Choice is considered the first American novel about the Holocaust. At the time, the word "Holocaust" was mainly used by scholars and specialists; the book helped spark renewed awareness about the atrocities conducted by the Nazis against Europe’s Jewish population. Director Steven Spielberg would release Schindler's List in 1993. Sophie’s Choice is also notable for the fact that its heroine is not Jewish but Polish Catholic.
The phrase “Sophie’s choice" would subsequently enter the English lexicon, used to refer to extremely difficult decisions where the outcomes are equally undesirable.
The term is cruelly apt for our times: with the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals are being overwhelmed, and doctors in certain hard-hit regions of the world are being forced to choose which patients get use of ventilators and ICUs. And governments around the world have to decide between prioritizing social distancing at the expense of economic profit or living with the consequences of prioritizing the economy over social distancing.
