Little Women: Yet Another Movie Version Released

Last updated 7/6/2020.

Little Women Louisa May Alcott

First Publication: 1868 Category: coming-of-age novel Sales: 1 million

Accolades:

About the Book: “Generations of readers young and old, male and female, have fallen in love with the March sisters,” BN “united in their devotion to each other and their struggles to survive in New England during the Civil War.” BN “Here are talented tomboy and author-to-be Jo, tragically frail Beth, beautiful Meg, and romantic, spoiled Amy.” BN Although Little Women is set in a very particular place and time in American history, the characters and their relationships have touched generations of readers and still are beloved.” LC “Far from being the ‘girl’s book’ her publisher requested, it explores such timeless themes as love and death, war and peace, the conflict between personal ambition and family responsibilities, and the clash of cultures between Europe and America.” BN “The novel is a classic coming of age story which follows the development of the young women into adulthood.” AZ “Central to the theme of the novel is the issue of overcoming one’s character flaws. For Meg it is vanity; Jo, temper; Beth, shyness; and Amy, selfishness. Through the various activities of the four sisters told throughout the novel lessons are learned of the consequences of these particular flaws.” AZ “The story begins to unfold during Christmastime. With their father away at war, the family must endure great poverty induced hardship, often times going hungry.” AZ “It is no secret that Alcott based Little Women on her own early life. While her father, the freethinking reformer and abolitionist Bronson Alcott, hobnobbed with such eminent male authors as Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, Louisa supported herself and her sisters with ‘woman’s work,’ including sewing, doing laundry, and acting as a domestic servant. But she soon discovered she could make more money writing.” BN “Little Women brought her lasting fame and fortune.” BN “This first edition…was published in 1868 when Louisa was thirty-five years old. Based on her own experiences growing up as a young woman with three sisters, and illustrated by her youngest sister, May, the novel was an instant success, selling more than 2,000 copies immediately. Several sequels were published, including Little Men (1871) and Jo’s Boys (1886).” LC The book has been adapted seven times for film, first in 1917 and most recently a 2019 version directed by Greta Gerwig. It starred Saoirse Ronan as Jo, Emma Watson as Meg, Florence Pugh as Amy, and Eliza Scanlen as Beth. The cast also included Meryl Streep, Laura Dern, Timothée Chalamet, and Chris Cooper. Some critics called it “the definitive adaptation.” WK Resources and Related Links: AZ Amazon BN Barnes & Noble LC Library of Congress (2012). “Books That Shaped America” SparkNotes (study guide) Wikipedia

In July 2018, I became the organizer of the Classic Novels Book Club. Check out the Book Club tab here or Meetup for more information. This is our March 2020 book.

Library of Congress "Books That Shaped America"

First posted 6/9/2020.

Library of Congress: Books That Shaped America

From the Library of Congress website: “The titles featured here (by American authors) have had a profound effect on American life, but they are by no means the only influential ones…Curators and experts from throughout the Library of Congress contributed their choices, but there was much debate – even agony – in having to remove worthy titles from a much larger list in order to accommodate the physical constraints of this exhibition space. Some of the titles on display have been the source of great controversy, even derision, yet they nevertheless shaped Americans’ views of their world and often the world’s view of the United States.” Here are the 88 featured titles, listed alphabetically by the authors’ names. Henry Adams The Education of Henry Adams (1907) Louisa May Alcott Little Women (1869) Horatio Alger Jr. Mark, the Match Boy (1869) anonymous A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible (1788) anonymous The New England Primer (1803) James Baldwin The Fire Next Time (1963) L. Frank Baum The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe The American Woman’s Home (1869) Boston Womens’ Health Book Collective Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973) Benjamin A. Botkin A Treasury of American Folklore (1944) Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 (1953) Sarah H. Bradford Harriet, the Moses of Her People (1901) Gwendolyn Brooks A Street in Bronzeville (1945) Dee Brown Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1971) Margaret Wise Brown Goodnight Moon (1947) Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan of the Apes (1914) Truman Capote In Cold Blood (1966) Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936) Rachel Carson Silent Spring (1962) Christopher Colles A Survey of the Roads of the United States of America (1789) Steven Crane The Red Badge of Courage (1895) Emily Dickinson Poems (1890) Frederick Douglass Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) W.E. Burghardt Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (1903) Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (1952) William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury (1929) Federal Writers’ Project Idaho: A Guide in Word and Pictures (1937) F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (1925) Benjamin Franklin Experiments and Observations on Electricity, Made at Philadelphia in America (1751) Benjamin Franklin Poor Richard’s Almanac (1757) Benjamin Franklin The Private Life of the Late Benjamin Franklin (1793) Betty Friedan The Feminine Mystique (1963) Robert Frost New Hampshire, a Poem (1923) Allen Ginsberg Howl and Other Poems (1956) Samuel Goodrich Peter Parley’s Universal History (1837) Zane Grey Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) Alex Haley and Malcolm X The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay The Federalist Papers (1787) Dashiell Hammett Red Harvest (1929) Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter (1850) Robert A. Heinlein Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) Joseph Heller Catch-22 (1961) Ernest Hemingway For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) Langston Hughes The Weary Blues (1926) Zora Neal Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) Washington Irving The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820) William James Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking: Popular Lectures on Philosophy (1907) Richard Jensen and John C. Hammerback (editors) The Words of César Chávez (2002) Ezra Jack Keats The Snowy Day (1962) Jack Kerouac On the Road (1957) Alfred C. Kinsey Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) Meriweather Lewis History of the Expedition Under the Command of the Captains Lewis and Clark (1814) Jack London The Call of the Wild (1903) William Holmes McGuffey McGuffey’s Newly Revised Eclectic Primer (1849) Herman Melville Moby-Dick (1851) Margaret Mitchell Gone with the Wind (1936) Toni Morrison Beloved (1987) Ralph Nader Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile (1965) Eugene O’Neill The Iceman Cometh, a Play (1946) Thomas Paine Common Sense (1776) Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged (1957) Jacob Riis How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (1890) Irma Rombauer Joy of Cooking (1931) Carl Sagan Cosmos (1980) J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (1951) Margaret Sanger Family Limitation (1914) Maurice Sendak Where the Wild Things Are (1963) Dr. Seuss The Cat in the Hat (1957) Randy Shilts And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (1987) Amelia Simmons American Cookery (1796) Upton Sinclair The Jungle (1906) Betty Smith A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943) Benjamin Spock Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946) John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath (1939) Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) Ida Tarbell The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904) Henry David Thoreau Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854) Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) James D. Watson The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (1968) Noah Webster A Grammatical Institute of the English Language (1783) E.B. White Charlotte’s Web (1952) Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass (1855) Thornton Wilder Our Town: A Play (1938) Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) William Carlos Williams Spring and All (1923) Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith Alcoholics Anonymous (1939) Richard Wright Native Son (1940) Resources and Related Links: Business Insider (2012). Library of Congress Reveals the 88 ‘Books That Shaped America’” Library of Congress (2012). “Books That Shaped America”

Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged published 50 years ago today

First posted 7/4/2020; last updated 7/5/2020.

Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand

First Publication: October 10, 1957 Category: philisophical science fiction Sales: 25 million

Accolades (click on badges to see full lists):

About the Book: “Rand’s fourth and final novel, it was also her longest, and the one she considered to be her magnum opus in the realm of fiction writing. Atlas Shrugged includes elements of science fiction, mystery, and romance.” WK “Although mainstream critics reacted poorly to Atlas Shrugged it was a popular success.” LC “The book explores a number of philosophical themes from which Rand would subsequently develop Objectivism…It expresses the advocacy of reason, individualism, and capitalism, and depicts what Rand saw to be the failures of governmental coercion.” WK “The book’s negative view of government and its support of unimpeded capitalism as the highest moral objective have influenced libertarians and those who advocate less government.” LC “The book depicts a United States caught up in a crisis caused by a corrupt establishment of government regulators and business interests.” LC “Railroad executive Dagny Taggart and her lover, steel magnate Hank Rearden, struggle against looters who want to exploit their productivity…A mysterious figure called John Galt is convincing other business leaders to abandon their companies and disappear…[He] is leading a ‘strike’ of productive individuals against the looters. The strike escalates when Galt announces his views in a radio address, leading to a collapse of the government.” WK He helms a plan “to build a new capitalist society based on [his] philosophy of reason and individualism.” WK “Peopled by larger-than-life heroes and villains, charged with towering questions of good and evil, Atlas Shrugged is a philosophical revolution told in the form of an action thriller.” AZ “This novel presents an astounding panorama of human life-from the productive genius who becomes a worthless playboy...to the great steel industrialist who does not know that he is working for his own destruction...to the philosopher who becomes a pirate...to the woman who runs a transcontinental railroad...to the lowest track worker in her train tunnels.” AZ Resources and Related Links: AZ Amazon LC Library of Congress (2012). “Books That Shaped America” WK Wikipedia

Jack Kerouac's On the Road published 50 years ago today

First posted 6/11/2020; updated 7/5/2020.

On the Road Jack Kerouac

First Publication: September 5, 1957 Category: Beat Generation semi-autobiographical novel Sales: 3 million

Accolades (click on badges to see full lists):

About the Book: This is “the defining novel” LC “of the postwar Beat and Counterculture generations, with its protagonists living life against a backdrop of jazz, poetry, and drug use.” WK It features “many key figures in the Beat movement, such as William S. Burroughs (Old Bull Lee), Allen Ginsberg (Carlo Marx) and Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty) represented by characters in the book, including Kerouac himself as the narrator Sal Paradise.” WK “On the Road has achieved a mythic status in part because it portrays the restless energy and desire for freedom that makes people take off to see the world.” LCThis “is a semiautobiographical tale of a bohemian cross-country adventure” LC between two friends on “a quest for meaning and true experience. Written with a mixture of sad-eyed naiveté and wild ambition and imbued with Kerouac’s love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz, On the Road is the quintessential American vision of freedom and hope, a book that changed American literature and changed anyone who has ever picked it up.” AZ It “has influenced artists such as Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, and Hunter S. Thompson and films such as Easy Rider.” LC “The idea for On the Road…was formed during the late 1940s in a series of notebooks, and then typed out on a continuous reel of paper during three weeks in April 1951.” WK “When the book was originally released, The New York Times hailed it as ‘the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘beat,’ and whose principal avatar he is.” WK Resources and Related Links: AZ Amazon LC Library of Congress (2012). “Books That Shaped America” WK Wikipedia

In July 2018, I became the organizer of the Classic Novels Book Club. Check out the Book Club tab here or Meetup for more information. This is our April 2020 book.

Jack London's The Call of the Wild published 100 years ago

First posted 7/5/2020.

The Call of the Wild Jack London

First Publication: 1903 Category: adventure novel Sales: ?

Accolades (click on badges to see full lists):

About the Book: “Jack London’s novels and ruggedly individual life seemed to embody American hopes, frustrations, and romantic longings in the turbulent first years of the twentieth century, years infused with the wonder and excitement of great technological and historic change. The author’s restless spirit, taste for a life of excitement, and probing mind led him on a series of hard-edged adventures.” AZ His “experiences during the Klondike gold rush in the Yukon were the inspiration for The Call of the Wild. He saw the way dogsled teams behaved and how their owners treated (and mistreated) them.” LC “The Call of the Wild is “a gripping tale” AZ of Buck, a pampered house dog who has known comfort all of his life.” BN He is “kidnapped from his California home and sold to prospectors embarked for the Yukon Gold Rush.” BN He “finds himself thrust into a brutal world of cruel human masters, savage fellow sled-dogs, and an unforgiving wilderness full of hardship and misery.” BN “From then on, survival of the fittest becomes Buck’s mantra as he learns to confront and survive the harsh realities of his new life as a sled dog.” LC “Buck earns the love of a man as rugged as he is, and he reacquaints himself with his true animal nature, a noble heritage passed down through tens of thousands of years of his kind's survival.” BN Buck “ultimately faces a choice between living in man’s world and returning to nature.” AZ “Adventure and dog-story enthusiasts as well as students and devotees of American literature will find this classic work a thrilling, memorable reading experience.” AZ Resources and Related Links: AZ Amazon BN Barnes & Noble LC Library of Congress (2012). “Books That Shaped America”