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Here’s a little list, take, read, don’t kibbutz or kvetch. Could be they will help you, I don’t know. You want total certainty, watch Fox News!
Ring Lardner, “The Young Immigrunts” and any short stories you can find (1920s). He was probably the greatest sportswriter we ever had but also a very funny man for one so sad and wise. You’ll have to dig to find his stuff, because nobody today is grown up enough to understand the razor-sharp irony he used. A master beyond compare of American vernacular speech idioms and patterns.
George and Weedon Grossmith, The Diary of a Nobody (1892). One of the simplest and funniest books by two actor-writer brothers from Gilbert and Sullivan’s palmy days, detailing the guileless thoughts of a suburbanite, when that category of human being was brand new. Impossible to summarize but als0 impossible to stop reading once you commence.
Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus and Other Stories (1959). First book by one of the finest ironists of the sad old 20th century, with incisive views of Jewish middle-class culture at its mid-point. Many brilliant views of growing up into an America already bound for the Cold War. Don’t miss hilarious “Conversion of the Jews.”
Caroline Gordon, Aleck Maury, Sportsman (1934). Probably the best single narrative of hunting and fishing ever written—and by a mere woman, gol darn it! She was Allen Tate’s wife, wrote better than he did, probably wrote better than any other southerner of her time (always excepting William Faulkner, the Eternal Great Exception). Huge insights into a life with nature and all its creatures.
H. Allen Smith, The Compleat Practical Joker (1946). The Holy Bible for people who like to commit, if only in imagination, elaborate, harmless and extraordinarily funny pranks. A thorough, highly detailed chronicle of the great jokers of the first half of the 20th century and their hapless victims.
Eudora Welty, The Golden Apples of the Sun (1946). First off, how could you not read a book by someone named Eudora? One of the terrific Southern Renaissancers, she wrote like an angel with a red-hot scalpel in one hand. She was a superb photographer, and her word-portraits show why. Based on Greek myth, haunted by Beethoven’s Für Elise, these interlinked stories are funny, wise, sad, beautiful and pinpoint-accurate about human nature.
William Faulkner. Any or all of his grand novels, but if you must be insufferably reductive, at least read “The Bear,” from Go Down, Moses (1942), which details everything you need to know about human v. nature collisions, the hyper-tragic aftermath of slavery, growing up a boy, how to camp in the deep woods, lose your innocence and drink whisky, how not to shoot a bear and many other experiences essential for life above the level of consciousness of a ball-peen hammer. Greatest single American author of that last, awful century.
Ernest Hemingway. Any short story collection, but at least In Our Time (1926), the first and best. The preeminent reformer of literary American English in recent decades, Hem was also an enthralling condenser of reality and collector of peak moments in really-alive life, the writer’s hardest assignment. Personally an undoubted bigot, liar, scoundrel and bore, his work reminds us that if we ignore trivial academic dreck like “criticism,” “theory” or “biography,” we can still acquire from reading the unique experience literature struggles to teach us.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952). Quite possibly the most important American novel of the past 100 years, I.M. (note absence of an article) is funny, ribald, tragic, wildly comic, intricate, simple, drenched with jazz and the blues and an unparalleled literary tour de force accessible to anyone with high school literacy. Charts African-American life and history with brilliant precision. Ellison never again matched its concentration, truth and emotional fury, though he wrote superb essays in a long career as a distinguished Man of Letters in the grand old sense.
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn (1884). A river runs through it. Anyone who thinks Huck Finn is a “children’s book” has missed the big news of the past 100-odd years. It encapsulates so much of the American character, with all its huge glories and profound faults, that it is impossible to catalog. Twain was one of the angriest, saddest and funniest writers in our history, and in this tale, life comes at you at the speed of a raft drifting down the Mississippi River, manned by a boy, and buoyed by a man.
So, go to a fartuckt library or go to Amazon.com or to the Google, take books in your hands and read!!! Who will know?
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luminance
