Aaron Sheehan-Dean on how Civil War observers “didn’t know when the end was coming”

Aaron Sheehan-Dean, author of Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia, recently edited The Civil War: The Final Year Told by Those Who Lived It, the final installment in the landmark four-volume series published by The Library of America. Sheehan-Dean is Fred C. Frey Professor of Southern Studies at Louisiana State University.

What does the experience of reading these contemporary, eyewitness accounts offer readers that standard narrative histories don't, particularly with regard to this final year of the war?

I think readers will be surprised by the continuing uncertainty about the course of the war. The popular Civil War narrative peaks at Gettysburg in July 1863. But the characters who populate this book didn’t know when the end was coming—Confederates remained optimistic and Unionists quite skeptical until very late in 1864. And even when the end did come, people didn’t know what to make of the war. The closing scenes allow us to see how Americans, North and South, tried to work out the war’s meaning, something that we’re continuing to do.

What does the volume tell us about the role of African Americans in the war?

In 1864, enslaved people in the South confronted the true risks of seeking freedom. White owners pursued every means to deter their flight, Union officials often proved unhelpful and unreliable, and even the environment seemed to conspire against them: Joseph Miller, an escaped slave from Unionist Kentucky, describes losing his entire family when they were expelled from Camp Nelson in the midst of freezing weather. But despite all of these dangers, southern African Americans fled slavery by the hundreds of thousands. And they did so partly because free men of color, fighting under the U.S. flag, led the way into the South destroying slavery as they went. Thomas Morris Chester’s dispatches covering the U.S. Colored Troops in the Army of the James eloquently argued that this military service earned black people full citizenship in the United States.

What do the pieces tell us about the diversity of experiences and outlooks in the North and the South?

They remind us of the huge scope and scale of this conflict. The South alone was larger than continental Europe, and although Napoleon crossed more borders in his campaigns I don’t think he encountered a broader range of people than Grant and Sherman did on their campaigns. So while we speak of this as an American conflict, the range of human experience in it was tremendous. That’s part of what makes it eternally fascinating. It would be hard to find two more conflicting views of the war than those between C. Chauncey Burr, an anti-war Democratic newspaper editor, and Wilbur Fisk, a Republican soldier from Vermont. Burr denounced Lincoln for leading “a war against a great principle—the principle of liberty and self-government” while for Fisk, “slavery and despotism have challenged war with us.”

Are there particular writers you grew closer to, or came particularly to admire, while working on the book?

It’s always a treat to find common diarists and letter writers who did not prepare their works for publication but who write with a brilliant pen. Catherine Edmondston, a plantation mistress in North Carolina, is one of those writers whose range of learning, wit, and clever invective should charm even the most skeptical readers. She tracked the armies’ movements carefully, but expended her sharpest barbs for those Confederate politicians whose failures doomed her nation. She thundered against the Richmond Enquirer’s advocacy of enlisting slaves as soldiers in January 1865: “it offers to sell the birthright of the South, not for a mess of pottage, but only for the hope of obtaining one.”

Most interesting discovery you made while assembling the book?

Given the discussion of “big data” these days, I am always surprised to find nineteenth-century Americans who make the most astute judgments based on nothing more than watching and listening. Charles Francis Adams Jr., whose father served as American minister to Great Britain (and whose grandfather and great-grandfather had each served as president), offered one of the sharpest assessments of Ulysses S. Grant ever recorded. Adams’s unit guarded Grant’s field headquarters in 1864 and he regarded Grant as physically undistinguished but uniquely capable at leading the northern armies. “He handles those around him so quietly & well,—he so evidently has the faculty of disposing of work & managing men,” Adams observed. “He is cool & quiet, almost stolid & as if stupid,—in danger & in crisis he is one against whom all around, whether few in number or a great army as here, would instinctively lean. He is a man of the most exquisite judgment & tact.” The pieces in this volume from Adams Jr. and his brother Henry, and father, all bristle with intelligence and wit.

Piece you think readers will find most surprising?

The story of Appomattox is so well known that we assume every northern soldier reacted with euphoria. That’s why Stephen Minot Weld’s letter to his sister always stops me cold. Weld came from a privileged Boston background and retained a skeptical view of his experiences, but his slow comprehension of Lee’s surrender reminds us of how completely the war had swallowed him. “I had a sort of impression that we should fight him all our lives,” Weld wrote. “He was like a ghost to children, something that haunted us so long that we could not realize that he and his army were really out of existence to us.”

Do you have a favorite piece in the collection?

I often quote Spottswood Rice when speaking with students about slavery and emancipation. Rice escaped from bondage and set out to reclaim his children. His steadfastness and confidence reveals how radically the war upended the southern social order. He warned the children’s owner, “when I get ready to come after mary I will have bout a powrer and autherity to bring hear away and to exacute vengencens on them that holds my Child . . . I have no fears about getting mary out of your hands  this whole Government give chear to me and you cannot help your self.”

Setting Samuel Menashe’s poetry to music

Composer Ben Yarmolinsky is a professor of music at the Bronx Community College of the City University of New York and a founding member and director of Friends and Enemies of New Music, an organization that has been presenting concerts of contemporary music in New York since 1989. Recently he released the CD, Paradise: Songs on Poems of Samuel Menashe, and he explains how he came to set Samuel’s poetry to music.

I knew Samuel Menashe for the last seven years of his life. We were introduced in the spring of 2004, at the cocktail party following the annual awards ceremony of the American Academy of Arts & Letters. Samuel did not receive an award from the Academy on that day—nor on any other day.

In the years 2005 through 2010, I set many of Samuel’s poems to music, usually for solo voice accompanied by guitar or piano. Eventually, I accumulated almost forty Menashe songs. Samuel attended every performance of these songs, and was generous in his praise of them. He wrote: “Yarmolinsky takes note of my poems. His settings make each word a note.” One of my most prized souvenirs of our friendship is a printed card of his poem “Hallelujah” underneath which he wrote “For Ben Yarmolinsky who set my poems to music, lifted me to his level. De la musique avant toute chose.”

In December of 2013, I released a CD of my settings of 37 of Samuel’s poems. Here is one of the songs from the CD, sung by baritone Randall Scarlata:



Night Music
(pizzicato)

Why am I so fond
Of the double bass
Of bull frogs
(Or do I hear the prongs
Of a tuning fork,
Not a bull fiddle)
Responding—
In perfect accord—
To one another
Across this pond
How does each frog know
He is not his brother
Which frog to follow
Who was his mother
(Or is it a jew’s harp
I hear in the dark?)

This poem presents a wonderful opportunity for text painting. In my arrangement the left hand “ribbet” motive of the piano is imitated closely by the bass notes of the cello, and echoed by the strings and percussion, so that the listener has the sense of many frogs “responding in perfect accord to one another.” I like to think of my songs as a kind of response to Samuel’s harping.

• Paradise: Songs on Poems by Samuel Menashe is available as a CD or music download from cdbaby.com, iTunes, Amazon, cdUniverse.com, or directly from the composer, at benyarmolinsky.com.
• The e-book edition of Samuel Menashe: New and Selected Poems is on sale for the month of April, for as low as $3.82 for Kindle, Kobo, Google Books, Nook, and iBooks (via iTunes).
• Watch “Samuel: The Concise Poet,” a three-minute episode of WNYC’s Know Your Neighbor featuring Samuel Menashe and his dilapidated West Village walk-up apartment.

Lyrics copyright © Literary Classics of the U.S., Inc. Music copyright © Ben Yarmolinsky.
All rights reserved.

James Shapiro on how American attitudes toward Shakespeare keep changing

Photograph by Mary Cregan

James Shapiro, best-selling author of Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? and 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, recently edited Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Now, published this week by The Library of America. Shapiro is Larry Miller Professor of English at Columbia University.

Why this book? And why now?

An extraordinary range of Americans—including poets, presidents, actors, and novelists—have written compellingly about Shakespeare over the past two hundred years: short stories, essays, musicals, sci-fi, burlesques, parodies, and, as this anthology shows, much else besides. Yet surprisingly little of this rich material has been collected before. Taken together, this writing tells a powerful story of the past two hundred years in our national culture. As attention increasingly turns to “Global Shakespeare,” it’s important to reflect on what has been a distinctly American engagement with Shakespeare.

What was the strangest or most surprising thing that you learned in the course of your research for this book?

Easily the strangest thing I researched in the course of putting together this anthology was the amateur production of Othello in 1846 in Corpus Christi, Texas, staged by American troops on the eve of war with Mexico. A young officer named Ulysses S. Grant was cast to play the role of Desdemona. I’m still wrestling with what it meant for a future Civil War general and president of the United States to see this play about racial division through the eyes of its tragic heroine.

What is your favorite piece in collection?

My absolute favorite (among many) in the collection is Jane Addams’s 1895 essay, “A Modern Lear.” It’s brilliant, passionate, one of the finest things written about the play, and, in choosing to view Shakespeare’s tragedy through the lens of the bloody Pullman Strike, a hundred years ahead of its time. The powerful (and Lear-like) industrialist George Pullman made sure that it wasn’t published at the time, and it didn’t appear in print until 1912. I’m proud that The Library of America has anthologized it and hope that it reaches the wide audience it deserves.

Which plays have been favorites for American readers and theatergoers? Which have been neglected—and why?

Americans have had their own mini-canon of plays taught and staged over the past two hundred years. The great tragedies—Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and especially Othello (not surprisingly, given our long preoccupation with race) top the list. Comedies such as Much Ado about Nothing and A Midsummer Night’s Dream have held their own. But the history plays, with the exception of Richard III, have fared less well; these plays about national identity seem to matter far more to the English, whose past they recount, than to us.

President Bill Clinton, who wrote the foreword to the collection, joins a long line of presidents fascinated with Shakespeare. What is it about presidents and Shakespeare?

Shakespeare had a particular gift for creating plays that put individuals under incredible pressure—in his tragedies, to the breaking point. It’s no surprise to me that those among us who experience the most intense pressure day in, day out—the presidents of the United States—have been drawn to his plays, from George Washington and Abraham Lincoln up to the present day. I am deeply grateful to President Clinton, a particularly astute reader of the plays, for sharing his thoughts about Shakespeare.

What American production do you most wish you could have seen?

I’m torn on this one. I really wish that I could have seen Orson Welles’s anti-fascist production of Julius Caesar at the Mercury Theatre in New York in 1937. But if I could choose only one it would have to be watching Paul Robeson play Othello on Broadway in 1943.

What is your favorite Shakespeare-inspired musical?

It’s strange that the English never managed to create a great Shakespeare musical; Americans did, including The Boys from Syracuse and Kiss Me, Kate. But my favorite, and surely the best, is that exhilarating rewrite of Romeo and Juliet: West Side Story (1957).

Have American attitudes or ideas about Shakespeare changed over the years?

Attitudes toward Shakespeare evolve because America itself keeps on changing—and literary and theatrical responses to Shakespeare are particularly sensitive to these cultural shifts. In anthologizing over two hundred years of that history—by sharing some first-rate writing—I hope to offer an alternative history of America, one that casts light not only on our long struggles with issues like race and immigration, but also on what it means to be an American.

The Grapes of Wrath at Seventy-Five: 1939–2014

On April 14, 1939, The Viking Press published John Steinbeck’s most famous and enduring work, The Grapes of Wrath. This month, to commemorate the novel’s seventy-fifth anniversary, Penguin has just published On Reading The Grapes of Wrath by Susan Shillinglaw. A professor of English at San Jose State University and Scholar in Residence at the National Steinbeck Center, Shillinglaw has been director of the Steinbeck Research Center at San Jose State for eighteen years. Her previous publications include Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage (U of Nevada Press, 2013).

In the following guest post, Professor Shillinglaw examines how Steinbeck’s investigative journalism laid the foundation for writing The Grapes of Wrath and how the novel still resonates today.

Seventy-five years after it was first published, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath remains as relevant—its cry for equity as sharp and insistent—as ever. The bruising honesty of the novel owes much to its journalistic roots. From August 1936 to February 1938, off and on for eighteen months, John Steinbeck conducted on-the-ground research, driving an old bakery truck from his Northern California home to the Central Valley, to Fresno and Button Willow and Bakersfield and Weedpatch. He bore witness to migrant woe, initially as an investigative reporter for the liberal San Francisco News.

In the summer of 1936, as Steinbeck was completing Of Mice and Men, the editor asked him to write a series of articles on migrant housing in California. A few months earlier, a federal government camp program had been launched to provide decent housing for migratory field workers. The plan was to build a dozen or more model migrant camps up and down the state. Two were open in 1936, one in Marysville near Sacramento and another in Arvin, near Bakersfield. Both enclaves faced strong opposition by local growers: if field workers came together in these government-run, safe and clean little communities, who knew what might happen. Strikes? Labor organizing? Protests?

Steinbeck’s assignment was to sway public opinion, soften hearts and minds steeled against the government camp program; illuminate the deplorable conditions in squatters’ camps; and break down “Okie” prejudice. “The migrants are hated for the following reasons,” he wrote in his first article of what became “The Harvest Gypsies” series: “that they are ignorant and dirty people, that they are carriers of disease, that they increase the necessity for police and the tax bill for schooling in a community, and that if they are allowed to organize they can, simply by refusing to work, wipe out the season’s crops. They are never received into a community nor into the life of a community. Wanderers in fact, they are never allowed to feel at home in the communities that demand their services.”

Change a few words and that might describe twenty-first-century resistance to illegal immigrants or the angry push-back on passage of the DREAM Act. Steinbeck’s assignment for the San Francisco News was to move readers to an empathetic recognition that those folks are our folks.

Some of Steinbeck’s research for “The Harvest Gypsies” series is embedded in The Grapes of Wrath in the Weedpatch camp chapters (22 and into 26), which describe an oasis of dignity for migrant families. Camp director Jim Rawley nudges the Joads to renewed self-respect, and his kindness was drawn closely on that of Tom Collins, the director of the Arvin camp that Steinbeck visited in the late summer of 1936. Steinbeck read Tom’s detailed camp reports, running some 30 pages per week and carefully recording the number of campers, their jobs, their sicknesses and songs and troubles. Steinbeck traveled with Tom and interviewed migrants with him. He and Tom brought food to the destitute and helped with the sick. “To Tom who lived it,” the dedication to The Grapes of Wrath reads, in part.

Rereading the novel in 2014 sparks countless moments of recognition all over again, context shifted, impact fresh. The Grapes of Wrath continues to speak so powerfully in our era because Steinbeck dug in so deeply and with such passionate conviction into his own.

In some ways the book feels more timely than ever this year, as we in California emerge from a very discontented winter. As I write a green skin stretches over the state, pale shoots that belie what we know: that aquifers are depleted; that this winter’s rainfall was late and brief; that the parched Central Valley soil might not, as in past decades, produce 50% of the nation’s fruits and vegetables—or 99% of the country’s artichokes, dates, olives, walnuts and (water-thirsty) almonds. “The spring is beautiful in California,” Steinbeck writes in Chapter 25 of The Grapes of Wrath. “Valleys in which the fruit blossoms are fragrant pink and white waters in a shallow sea. . . . And on the level vegetable lands are the mile-long rows of pale green lettuce and the spindly little cauliflowers, the gray-green unearthly artichoke plants.”

All that is still visible in Monterey County, Steinbeck country, even in a drought year. Other California stories, however, aren’t pink or gray-green or lovely.

Steinbeck’s terrain was unlovely stories—of what happens when the green promise does not deliver or the fecund earth does not produce—be it in Oklahoma or in California. The soil dries and poor people get tractored off—or laid off, the threat this harvest season, when many fewer workers will be needed. Houses are repossessed and families move on, to more fragile homes. Or, as in Chapter 25, California growers burn surplus crops to keep prices high “and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath.”

John Steinbeck startles readers to attention, then and now. Another drought. Banks foreclosing—yet again. Angry workers demanding fair wages—$10.10 an hour as a living wage. Decent housing and safe working conditions for fieldworkers still making news, today’s stories about women who are sexually vulnerable in the fields. His saga of land use and workers’ anguish is as poignant, maybe more so, in this year of “exceptional” drought in much of California; in this decade where the voices of the “98%”—the wide swath of Americans that interested John Steinbeck throughout his career—are muted. Power versus powerlessness was his narrative arc. And it’s ours as well.

“Communication between two humans even under the best of circumstances is staggeringly difficult. When I am able to get through to establish a contact I have a sense of joy. That is the real base of all the arts—they are kind of frantic signals like mirror flashes between mountains. . . .”
—John Steinbeck

Of related interest:

• The corrected and unexpurgated version of The Grapes of Wrath, along with the complete “Harvest Gypsies” essays, can be found in The Library of America’s John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath and Other Writings 1936–1941
• Previously on Readers’s Almanac: Elmore Leonard on how John Steinbeck “set me free”

Ezra Greenspan on William Wells Brown: “The most rivetingly inventive, entertaining black writer of his era”

The author of the forthcoming biography William Wells Brown: An African American Life, Ezra Greenspan edited William Wells Brown: Clotel & Other Writings, which has just been published by The Library of America. Greenspan holds the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Chair in Humanities and is professor of English at Southern Methodist University.

Why read William Wells Brown, and why now?

Why Brown? Because he pioneered virtually every genre of African American writing. Want to know black culture in his revolutionary time and as it has come down to us today? Read William Wells Brown. Because he was the most rivetingly inventive, entertaining black writer of his era. And because he was, as a mid-twentieth-century critic noted, a person unable to be uninteresting.

Why Brown now? Because he was arguably the parent of our postmodern cultural concerns/preoccupations a century before they were born. Fragmentation, alternating perspectives, sampling, multimedia, generic confusion were his signature practices—all the more interesting for us because they came about in a different cultural era and in response to different historical exigencies.

Clotel concerns a subject—Thomas Jefferson’s black descendants—that has drawn an unusual amount of interest. Why is this subject so fascinating?

An undergraduate student commented to me earlier today that one needs to be careful in Texas about challenging core beliefs about myths of American origins and exceptionalism. I don’t think Texas is exceptional in that regard. Clotel puts on a show that fascinates, in part, because it savages such beliefs. It goes after the father of American fathers and exposes the fundamental hypocrisy between his creed (“all men are created equal”) and practice. The fictions of blood, family, and national union that Jefferson (and Brown’s white father) created and embodied still survive in our culture and polity, though with greater contestation than in Brown’s time. Are we one people? On what basis do we define our peoplehood? And what has skin color got to do with it? Clotel asked hard questions that we are still asking today.

Discoveries made while preparing the collection? While writing the biography?

Many, many—out of which a few. Ralph Ellison had profound reasons for calling people of color “invisible.” One that I discovered in the course of researching Brown is that, politics and ideology aside, it is very hard to make people visible who left behind no archive of papers, letters, diaries, and the like. To this day, I have not seen a single letter between Brown and any member of his family—this, and he is the most prolific African American writer of his era. Writing full-scale biographies of minorities is excruciatingly difficult work.

A second: the kind of singular personhood that I had thought I would find in Brown’s writings did not exist. He danced around the expected correlation between his life, authorship, and autobiographical subject. I don’t mean to say that Brown fabricated his life, say, in the Narrative of William W. Brown, but he was a crafty fellow and many people have read him too literally and simply. My lesson: check the facts as carefully as possible before accepting his testimony.

How would you compare Brown to his famous contemporary Frederick Douglass? How did Brown himself view the comparison?

FD v. WWB—One, the greatest nineteenth-century African American public figure; the other, the greatest nineteenth-century African American cultural figure.

Men with strikingly similar backgrounds (white father, black mother; border state background; extraordinary powers of observation, expression, persuasion; unswerving sense of duty to the collective).

Equally, men with strikingly different temperaments and powers: Douglass a charismatic figure who sucked the oxygen out of a room, intellectually powerful, inclined to the dramatic, a natural leader; Brown culturally sophisticated, personally polished, inclined to indirection and irony.

Brown would have sided with Dogberry: comparisons were “odorous.” He was constantly compared to Douglass and hated it.

What qualities as a writer and a man allowed Brown to pioneer so many different genres of African American writing?

For one thing, lack of formal education. He did not have to unlearn deeply engrained lessons about literary forms. I would guess, rather, that he could see the forms (and their arbitrariness) all the more clearly for viewing them from the outside in. For another, endless curiosity, flexibility of temperament, and heedlessness about the possibility of failure.

What drew you to Brown as the subject for a biography?

The books. So many remarkable books, I thought, without at first connecting them back to their source. Then, once I started to think biographically, the person. When the life and the work start to converge in intriguing fashion, literary biography gets born.

Forthcoming from The Library of America (Fall 2014)

The staff of The Library of America is putting the finishing touches on the upcoming American Musicals collection, and all remaining Spring–Summer 2014 titles are currently at press.

Even though spring hasn’t yet arrived (and a look out the window tells us it is nowhere in sight), we’re already thinking thoughts of autumn. Below are the titles we have planned for the remainder of 2014.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA SERIES

Elmore Leonard
Four Novels of the 1970s
Gregg Sutter, editor
Fifty-Two Pickup • Swag • Unknown Man No. 89 • The Switch
September 2014
Library of America #255 / ISBN 978-1-59853-305-7

Louisa May Alcott
Work, Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom, Stories & Other Writings
Susan Cheever, editor
September 2014
Library of America #256 / ISBN 978-1-59853-306-4

H. L. Mencken
The Days Trilogy, Expanded Edition
Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, editor
Happy Days • Newspaper Days • Heathen Days • “Days Revisited: Unpublished Commentary” (200 pages of never-before-published material embargoed for twenty-five years after Mencken’s death)
October 2014
Library of America #257 / ISBN 978-1-59853-308-8

Virgil Thomson
Music Chronicles 1940–1954
Tim Page, editor
The Musical Scene • The Art of Judging Music • Music Right and Left • Music Reviewed: 1940–1954 • uncollected writings
October 2014
Library of America #258 / ISBN 978-1-59853-309-5

Art in America 1945–1970
Writings from the Age of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism
Jed Perl, editor
Selections by John Ashbery, James Baldwin, Edwin Denby, Willem de Kooning, Clement Greenberg, Peggy Guggenheim, Hilton Kramer, Dwight Macdonald, Frank O’Hara, Fairfield Porter, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Susan Sontag, Tennessee Williams, and many others • Lavishly illustrated with scores of black-and-white images and two 16-page color inserts
October 2014
Library of America #259 / ISBN 978-1-59853-310-1

SPECIAL PUBLICATION

Football
Great Writing about the National Sport
John Schulian, editor
Selections by Grantland Rice, W. C. Heinz, Frederick Exley, Jimmy Breslin, George Plimpton, Jennifer Allen, Hunter S. Thompson, Richard Price, Charles P. Pierce, Roy Blount, and many others
August 2014
ISBN 978-1-59853-307-1

BOXED SET

The Civil War Told by Those Who Lived It
Brooks D. Simpson, Stephen W. Sears, and Aaron Sheehan-Dean, editors
All four volumes of the critically acclaimed series chronicling our nation's greatest conflict, now in a collector's boxed set • With full-color poster enlargements of the maps in each volume
September 2014
ISBN 978-1-59853-350-7

PAPERBACK CLASSIC

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
Introduction by John Stauffer
September 2014
ISBN 978-1-59853-351-4

The Library of America’s Best-Selling Titles (2014 update)

As we did last year, below we present a list of the Library of America series “backlist titles” (i.e., volumes published prior to 2012) selling the most copies in 2013.

There are some noteworthy movements in this year’s list. Perhaps not surprisingly, the debut volume of the LOA edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s collected fiction tops the list in its first year of eligibility. An end-of-the-year Ben Stiller remake of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty more than tripled sales of the LOA James Thurber edition. Likewise, a screen adaptation of On the Road motivated readers to snap up the Kerouac volume containing the novel; its sales increased by over 30% in 2013. An encore broadcast in August of the American Masters program James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket fueled a similar increase in sales of the collection of Baldwin’s essays.

Just as impressive was the 50% increase in sales for the Ulysses S. Grant volume, probably helped along by commemorations of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. Somewhat mysterious are the unexpected 30% increases in sales for such stalwart evergreens as John Muir and John Dos Passos's U.S.A.—not that we’re complaining. At #15, sales of the Dos Passos volume were virtually identical to those of Shirley Jackson and Walt Whitman, which also enjoyed modest lifts.

Following each entry are the year the volume was originally published and last year's ranking:

1. Kurt Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1963–1973 [2011, —]
2. The Philip K. Dick Collection [three volumes, 2007–2009; ranked #1 last year]
3. Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works [1988; #3]
4. Jack Kerouac: Road Novels 1957–1960 [2007; #7]
5. Raymond Carver: Collected Stories [2009; #4]
6. H. P. Lovecraft: Tales [2005; #5] *
7. Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs & Selected Letters [1990; #14] *
8. Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America [2004; #6] *
9. American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau [2008; #2]
10. Dashiell Hammett: Complete Novels [1999; #8]
11. John Muir: Nature Writings [1997; #13] *
12. James Thurber: Writings and Drawings [1996; —] *
13. James Baldwin: Collected Essays [1998; —]
14. The Collected Plays of Tennessee Williams [two volumes, 2000; #11]
15. John Dos Passos: U.S.A. [1988; —]
    (tie) Shirley Jackson: Novels & Stories [2010; —]
    (tie) Walt Whitman: Poetry & Prose [1982; —]

* Titles indicated by a red asterisk were available this past year as e-books, which contribute a relatively small—but rapidly growing—source of sales for LOA backlist titles. For a complete list of LOA e-books currently available, visit www.loa.org/ebooks.

* * *

This past year also marks a milestone of sorts: with the publication of volume #246 (Susan Sontag: Essays of the 1960s & 70s), the LOA series now contains over a quarter of a million pages.

WORDLESS! The Library of America’s Lynd Ward collection inspires new Art Speigelman show

A few years back (in the summer of 2010, to be precise) Art Spiegelman edited Six Novels in Woodcuts, The Library of America’s two-volume collection of Lynd Ward’s wordless novels. This past weekend he sent an e-mail message to LOA staff members: “Look what kinda ‘trouble’ you guys caused recruiting me into the Lynd Ward project and re-igniting my interest in Wordless books!”

The “trouble” we caused is WORDLESS!, Spiegelman’s self-described “odd hybrid”: a multimedia extravaganza featuring slides, talk, movies, and musical performance created in collaboration with acclaimed jazz composer Phillip Johnston. In his introduction to Six Novels in Woodcuts, Spiegelman wrote that Ward is “one of only a small handful of artists anywhere who ever made a ‘graphic novel’ until the day before yesterday.” WORDLESS! brings together that handful of illustrators—Frans Masereel, Milt Gross, Otto Nückel, and Si Lewen, in addition to Ward. The innovative performance also showcases new original work by Spiegelman.

In celebration of the show, Speigelman has set up a special Tumblr page, featuring a brief trailer, images, and reviews of the acclaimed worldwide premiere in Australia. The 90-minute program will make its American debut in Brooklyn this weekend before going on tour for two performances in Chicago and Colorado Springs:

• Saturday, January 18 – Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, NY
• Wednesday, January 22 – Colorado College, Colorado Springs, CO
• Saturday, January 25 – University of Chicago, Chicago, IL

How Jonathan Edwards talked about God

The William S. Newman Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Philip F. Gura is the editor of Jonathan Edwards: Writings from the Great Awakening, just published by The Library of America. Among his many previous books are Jonathan Edwards: America’s Evangelical and Truth’s Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel.

The following essay originally appeared online in the “On Faith” section of The Washington Post (November 21, 2013).

Why should one be interested in the writings of the eighteenth-century American revivalist and theologian Jonathan Edwards?

Edwards the merciless logician who published lengthy tomes in which he denied that we have free will and defended the notion that all humans struggle in bondage to original sin? Edwards, the fire and brimstone preacher who stared dispassionately at the bell rope across the space of the meetinghouse as he described God’s everlasting and just hatred of sinners and their proper condemnation to a vividly imagined hell? Edwards the apologist for emotional religious revivals that made his spiritual descendants Billy Sunday, Billy Graham, and Jimmy Swaggart into household names?

The answer is simple. We should read him for his mastery of language, and that is why he is in the Library of America. All attempts to speak of ultimate things are metaphorical and as such depend finally on the resource of language. Words are all we have to express such thoughts and perhaps our only way of “knowing” the world. And in this case in particular, Edwards helps us, as far as language goes, to understand our humanity. His language bends backward and forward, and allows us better to know ourselves, no matter in what religion we believe.

Consider two central matters for such self-knowledge: the presence in the world of sin or evil, and of its opposite, grace. With respect to the former, Edwards did not believe that some evil quality is “infused, implanted, or wrought” into human nature. Rather, evil is privative, “the withholding of a special divine influence to impart and maintain those good principles, leaving the common natural principles of self-love, natural appetite” to themselves without the government of superior motives. Innate depravity is spiritual emptiness, a longing for something larger than us, a lack of something that only grace can restore.

Edwards’s elaboration of this concept is striking. When man sins, he argued, superior principles leave his heart, as “light ceases in a room when the candle is withdrawn.” He is thus left in a state of “darkness, woeful corruption, and ruin,” like “a fatal catastrophe, a turning of all things upside down, and the succession of a state of most odious and dreadful confusion.” To compensate for this loss of spiritual compass, man acts predictably, immediately setting himself and his natural inclinations in God’s place.

Now consider Edwards’s Personal Narrative, in which he describes what he believed a genuine conversion. Just previous to this moment he had continued to rebel against the seemingly irrational notion of God’s utter sovereignty, “in choosing who he would to eternal life, and rejecting whom he pleased.” This seemed a “horrible” doctrine. “But I remember the time very well,” Edwards wrote, “when I seemed to be convinced, and fully satisfied, as to this sovereignty . . . but never could give an account how, or by what means, I was thus convinced; not in the least imagining, in the time of it, nor a long time after, that there was any extraordinary influence of God’s spirit in it; but only now that I saw further, and my reason apprehended the justice and reasonableness of it.”

There was nothing special in the event, yet the experience was utterly transformative. Moreover, it pertained to the matter of sight. Edwards “saw further”—we would say he had insight—and his life was irrevocably changed. “The appearance of everything,” he continued, “was altered: there seemed to be, as it were, a calm, sweet cast or appearance of divine glory, in almost everything . . . in the sun, moon, and stars; in the clouds, and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, trees; in the water, and all nature.” It was a transcendent, with a small “t,” experience.

In his Treatise Concerning the Religious Affections, Edwards explains this further. When one receives grace, “There is a new inward perception or sensation of their minds, entirely different in its nature and kind, from anything that ever their minds were the subjects of” before. In the experience of a saint, something new “is felt, perceived, or thought” which could be “produced by no exalting, varying or compounding of that kind of perceptions or sensations which the mind had before; or there is what some metaphysicians call a new simple idea.”

Edwards borrowed the notion of “a new simple idea” from John Locke. After one experiences something new, he has a new idea of it that reorganizes all previous knowledge, makes everything congruent to it, much in the way that William James describes truth’s instrumentality. Something is true for us when it works for us, James explains, when it accords with other parts of our belief system.

But after Adam’s transgression, man was incomplete. He lacked something. His heart, or soul, or, as Edwards would say, his “affections,” were defined and dominated by self. When grace is added to that picture, though, all in the heart is realigned, so that goodness flows. One sees the world aright, sees what matters, and is a different being. Edwards thought this a supernatural event, God’s arbitrary and free gift. But the power of the experience—and how his words speak to us—resides in Edwards’s notion of a radical realignment of one’s sensibility as the result of purely natural phenomena, specifically, a right perception or seeing. New simple ideas can and do occur at frequent points in our lives; but the key is to recognize them as significant, as true, in such a way that they have a transformative effect on us.

Edwards speaks to us in this way, enlightening us as to what matters in our lives, and does so in language that, while it partakes of the clarity and symmetry of eighteenth-century rhetoric, continues to move our heart, our “affections,” as he would say. To borrow a sentence from Edwards in his discussion of grace, “Unless this is seen, nothing is seen that is worth the seeing.” That is why we should read him.

The Battle of Chattanooga (November 23–25, 1863): “Another laurel leaf is added to Grant’s Crown”

Guest blog post by Brooks D. Simpson, Foundation Professor of History at Arizona State University and one of the co-editors of The Library of America's four-volume series, The Civil War: Told by Those Who Lived It. The third volume of the series was published earlier this year.

On the afternoon of November 25, 1863, Ulysses S. Grant stood on Orchard Knob east of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and pondered what to do next. It was just over a month since he had arrived at the town where the Army of the Cumberland, in the aftermath of its defeat at Chickamauga on September 20, found itself besieged by the victorious Army of Tennessee under the command of Braxton Bragg. Grant’s job was to break the siege and defeat the enemy.

It was a daunting task. The Confederates looked down upon their beaten foe from defensive positions along Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain. The Rebels had also moved westward along the Tennessee River to sever the Yankee supply line, leaving the Army of the Cumberland in a perilous situation. The Lincoln administration labored to relieve the beleaguered army, dispatching two corps from the Army of the Potomac in Virginia and one from Grant’s Army of the Tennessee in Mississippi to do what they could to pry open the Confederate grip on Chattanooga. Having lost faith in the ability of William S. Rosecrans, the Army of the Cumberland’s commander, to salvage the situation, President Lincoln turned to the victor of Vicksburg to save the day. Elevated in mid-October to a command that spanned the area from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River valley, Grant took advantage of an option provided in his orders to replace Rosecrans with George H. Thomas, who promised Grant that he would hold Chattanooga until his men starved.

By the time Grant arrived at Chattanooga on October 23, the Union forces were ready to take action. Rosecrans and his chief engineer William F. Smith had already framed a plan to reopen a supply line along the Tennessee River. Grant ordered that it be implemented. Meanwhile, he hurried forward William T. Sherman’s troops from the Army of the Tennessee, intending to entrust the key blow of the upcoming battle to Sherman instead of Thomas or Joseph Hooker, who had come westward with the Potomac soldiers. It was not until November 23 that Grant could set his plan in motion. That day Thomas undertook a reconnaissance in force that easily captured Orchard Knob. The result was more than Grant expected. Still, one observer noted that he was “well pleased at what had been accomplished. He seems perfectly cool, and one could be with him for hours, and not know that any great movements were going on. Its a mere matter of business with him.”¹

That night there was a near total eclipse of the moon. Major James A. Connelly of the 123rd Illinois Infantry noted that “it was ominous of defeat, but not for us; we concluded that it meant Bragg because he was perched on the mountain top, nearest the moon.”² As noon came on November 24 “the fiercest and most tremendeous roars of both cannon and musketry” broke out along Lookout Mountain. Hooker’s men scrambled up its slopes, driving the enemy away. That night Union observers could see “Camp fires and flashes of musketry” illuminate the mountain’s slopes: the following morning Grant’s headquarters discovered that Hooker’s men had planted a United States flag at the summit.³ Meanwhile, Sherman had moved into place opposite the Bragg’s right on Missionary Ridge, ready to smash the Confederate flank and drive the Rebels off the ridgeline.

On the morning of November 25 Sherman attacked, only to discover that he has misjudged the terrain in front of him. Patrick Cleburne’s division repelled several Union assaults, and by early afternoon it was clear that Sherman was getting nowhere. On the Union right Hooker’s men found it tough going to make progress against the Confederates, in part because they needed to replace destroyed bridges. At Orchard Knob, Grant, Thomas, and several officers stood in a cold wind and contemplated what to do next as Confederate shells “whizzed past” every few minutes.⁴

By mid-afternoon Grant knew he had to do something. He directed Thomas to order his four divisions to move forward and capture, the Confederate rifle pits at the base of Missionary Ridge, and then await further orders. When the moment was right, he would order them to resume their advance.

It didn’t quite work out that way. After Union artillery commenced shelling the ridge, Thomas’s men “moved forward at the rifle pits of the enemy as if they knew they were going to succeed,” as Smith described it. The Confederates “broke from behind their protection and up the hill, our men following with chear upon chear and the cannon and musketry on top of the hill pouring shot and shell upon them.”⁵

In truth, the advancing Yankees had no choice. Having taken the rifle pits with relative ease, they discovered that they were now vulnerable to deadly fire from the ridge above them. Withdrawal would only expose them to more fire. The only option was to advance without waiting for orders from headquarters. Some commanders thought that the crest of the ridge was the ultimate objective; others thought the advance was to stop at the rifle pits. That confusion no longer mattered. “The line ceased to be a line,” Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs recalled. “The men gathered towards the points of least difficult ascent” and streamed up toward the crest. Although Confederate artillery fired away, Major Connolly later explained that “they couldn’t even scare us, as they couldn’t depress their guns to reach us, but had to blaze away far over our heads.” As Smith described it, “Regiment after regiment gained the top and planted their colors—most of them gaining it by the many roads that passed from the valley to the top of the ridge.”⁶

That was not how Grant had planned it. Meigs recorded how Grant declared that “it was contrary to orders, it was not his plan—he meant to form the lines and then prepare and launch columns of assault, but, as the men[,] carried away by their enthusiasm had gone so far, he would not order them back.” What had seemed at first akin to suicide had turned into a smashing success.⁷

That evening no one could quite believe what they had seen, although it did not take long for the assault on Missionary Ridge to pass into legend. Bragg’s “beaten and discontented army” was “in full retreat”; Tennessee and Kentucky were now safe from invasion. It was, Meigs decided, “[t]he grandest stroke yet struck for our country.… It is unexampled—Another laurel leaf is added to Grant’s Crown.”⁸

Years later the editors of Century Magazine suggested to Grant that Bragg had detached some of his army to attack Knoxville in early November because he thought the Missionary Ridge position was impregnable. With “a shrewd look,” Grant replied: “Well, it was impregnable.”<sup>9

1</sup> William Wrenshall Smith: Journal, November 13–25, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It, 576.
² James A. Connolly to Mary Dunn Connolly, December 7, 1863, ibid., 593.
³ Smith, ibid., 577-78.
⁴ Montgomery C. Meigs: Journal, November 23–25, 1863, ibid., 585.
⁵ Smith, ibid., 580.
⁶ Meigs, ibid., 587; Connolly to Mary Dunn Connolly, November 26, 1863, ibid., 590; Smith, ibid., 580.
⁷ Meigs, ibid., 587.
⁸ Ibid., 589.
⁹ Ulysses S. Grant: Chattanooga, in Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence Clough Buel, eds., Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (1888), vol. III, 693n.

(This item is cross-posted at Civil War 150, cosponsored by The Library of America, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the National Endowment of the Humanities)

Recent Reader's Almanac posts on the Civil War

• Aaron Sheehan-Dean: Jefferson Davis tries to rally Confederate morale (Fall 1863)
• Brooks D. Simpson: The Battle of Chickamauga (September 19–20)
• Brooks D. Simpson: Grant lays siege to Vicksburg (May 22, 1863)