Good reads

What can a 50-year-old textbook teach us about America? It turns out, quite a lot

This article originally appeared in the Summer 2026 issue of Thinking Minnesota magazine.

Across America, celebrations of our nation’s 250th anniversary have centered on our founding documents, threshold moments in our history, and iconic statesmen like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

But another element of our heritage sheds invaluable light on the glorious achievement of our “American experiment.” That’s the treasure house of American literature — the short stories, novels, speeches, poetry, drama, and historical and biographical writing that bring to life the unique vision and virtues that built our constitutional republic.

Today, unfortunately, the names of writers like poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and essayist/philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson — once household words — often draw a blank stare. That’s no surprise. In recent years, our public schools have focused more on “career competencies” and superficial “problem-solving skills” than love of literature.

A well-educated young woman I know summed up her generation’s woeful lack of knowledge this way: “Many people my age think American literature is the cultural equivalent of ‘fast food.’”

This neglect of our nation’s literary birthright helps explain young Americans’ current frantic search for “identity.” Many are confused and culturally “weightless” with little idea of who they are, where they came from, where to look for wisdom and inspiration, and how much they owe to others.

How can we do better? Recently, I discovered — at the back of a dusty bookshelf — the American literature textbook my high school classmates and I used in Ft. Dodge, Iowa, more than 50 years ago. The book was “Adventures in American Literature,” Laureate edition, published by Harcourt, Brace & World — whose first imprint was in 1930 and last in 1963.

I turned its pages with fascination, captivated by its use of stories about the men and women who built this nation — their motivations, hopes, struggles, sacrifices, and triumphs — to convey to young readers the great and evolving human story of which they are so fortunate to be a part.

As I did so, it struck me that a good American literature textbook provides a unique window into the American spirit and the extraordinary range of our nation’s achievements.

Where else can one find, in one volume, a moving and powerful blend of great speeches, like Washington’s “Farewell Address”; stories like Edgar Allen Poe’s chilling “The Fall of the House of Usher”; poetic masterpieces like Longfellow’s “Evangeline”; and spirituals and cowboy ballads, as well as accounts of bygone everyday life like Thomas Wolfe’s “Circus at Dawn,” about Barnum and Bailey coming to town?

Reading and relishing a good American literature textbook will not only benefit our floundering Gen Z. I have also returned to it repeatedly to be informed, entertained, and reinspired as we celebrate our 250th anniversary.

The colonial period and Revolutionary War

“Adventures in American Literature” begins with a question that French immigrant Hector St. John de Crevecoeur posed in 1782 in his “Letters from an American Farmer”: “What is the American, this new man?”

Americans, Crevecoeur told European readers, have “melted into a new race of men…whose labors and industry will one day cause great changes in the world.” He viewed our ancestors as the forerunners of free people everywhere, and his words sparked the “melting pot” metaphor so familiar to us today.

Perusing the book’s chapter on our nation’s colonial days, I was drawn into narratives of the extraordinary challenges they faced and the risks they took.

There was William Bradford’s journal account of the Mayflower’s landing at Plymouth, known today as “Of Plymouth Plantation.” That day in 1620, the Pilgrims “fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean.” There was shopkeeper Sarah Kemble Knight’s journal of the hardships she braved in 1704 on her horseback journey from Boston to New York, and Colonel William Byrd’s adventures as he ran the boundary line between Virginia and North Carolina in 1728.

The book’s Revolutionary War chapter recounts the life-and-death stakes of our upstart nation’s struggle against the world’s military superpower. “Valor was needed,” it reminds us, “but not solely of a military brand; endurance was needed, but of hardships other than war.”

Patrick Henry’s soaring “give me liberty or give me death” speech before the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1775 captures the vision that allowed us to prevail. So does Thomas Paine’s electrifying call to arms. “In the black hours of discouragement” of December 1776, Paine’s first article in “The American Crisis” fortified men’s flagging spirits: “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

The colonial era also spawned the witty, homespun common sense of Benjamin Franklin — our nation’s “first great writer.” His “Poor Richard’s Almanack” counsels that “Experience keeps a dear school, but a fool will learn in no other,” and “A truly great man will neither trample on a worm nor sneak to an emperor.”

For contemporary readers, it’s hard to imagine a more counter-cultural exercise than Franklin’s “Project of Arriving at Moral Perfection.” This was the “daily course of action” he devised to develop virtues such as “temperance, resolution, frugality, industry, justice, humility.” Examples include: “Temperance — eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation” and “Resolution — Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.”

I was particularly inspired by the book’s forthright celebration of American heroism. Historian Douglas Southall Freeman’s “Washington Attacks at Trenton” illustrates this. “Follow Washington through the action, watching, planning, leading,” the book’s editors advise readers:

Then the attack on Trenton will no longer be just a fact in history books, but a triumph that you feel as keenly as if you had personally battled the icy river and felt the stinging sleet in your own face. Better still, you will know, as those early Americans did, the strength and courage and military leadership of George Washington.

Another stirring example is an account of the “Battle off Flamborough Head,” by Samuel Eliot Morison, official U.S. Navy historian of World War II. In that conflict, John Paul Jones, America’s first naval hero, refused a British demand to surrender, responding defiantly: “I have not yet begun to fight!”

The chapter also highlights heroism of a different kind. In his “Farewell Address” in 1796, Washington, who had rejected offers of kingship, gave his fellow citizens a civics lesson that contemporary Americans would do well to study. Among them: Preserve liberty and the system of checks and balances, cherish religion and morality, and promote education.

The American imagination awakens

Most of us know something about our nation’s founding era. But few likely recall much about the 80 years between the American Revolution and the Civil War.

I learned from “Adventures in American Literature” that in 1820, English critic Sydney Smith asked contemptuously, “Who reads an American book?”

Bad timing, Smith. Just a few years later, as American literary output exploded, the answer was “almost anyone who reads at all.” Writers who seized European attention included New York’s Washington Irving (author of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle”) and James Fenimore Cooper, author of “The Last of the Mohicans,” whose career began in 1820 when his wife dared him to write a better novel than the dull English one she was reading.

Then came a “boy wonder” and literary sensation from Massachusetts, William Cullen Bryant. At age 16, Bryant penned “Thanatopsis,” a “serene and noble” poem about death. Later, English critic Matthew Arnold described Bryant’s “To a Waterfowl” as “the most perfect brief poem in the language.”

These authors paved the way for the American literary heavyweights who took the stage around the 1850s. In 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne published “The Scarlet Letter,” and in 1851 Herman Melville’s extraordinary “Moby Dick” appeared. Melville died alone and forgotten, never learning that his epic about the White Whale would one day be considered the greatest American novel.

Today, we think of Edgar Allen Poe, whose short, tragic life ended in 1849, as the author of “The Raven” and perhaps the haunting “The Tell-Tale Heart.” But who knew that Poe — more famous in Europe than his home country — “founded the school of the detective story” and “almost alone, was responsible for the short story as a form of fiction”?

New England’s golden years

“Adventures in American Literature” describes the period from roughly 1830 to 1860 as “New England’s Golden Years.” “Preachers, educators, jurists, orators, scientists and historians contributed,” notes the book, and writers including Emerson, Longfellow, and Thoreau were “born within a few years and a few miles of each other.”

During this time, debate swirled around two great, related causes: preservation of the Union and abolition of slavery. In 1849, Longfellow took up the first in “The Ship of State.” “Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State! Sail on, O Union, strong and great!” Abraham Lincoln reportedly wept on reading Longfellow’s words.

Poets like John Greenleaf Whittier championed abolition — and paid a price. Whittier, a small-town, largely self-educated Quaker, faced angry mobs and saw his office burned in retaliation. James Russell Lowell, another anti-slavery poet, wrote “Stanzas on Freedom”: “Men! Whose boast it is that ye/Come of fathers brave and free/If there breathe on earth a slave/Are ye truly free and brave?”

In 1836, Emerson — the “sage of Concord” — launched the Transcendentalist movement, which focused on truths that go beyond, or transcend, proof. “A doctor can tell scientifically whether a man is alive or not,” he explained, “but he cannot tell whether it is good or not to be alive.” Emerson’s 1837 poem, “Concord Hymn,” immortalized the Revolutionary War’s opening battle: “Here once the embattled farmers stood/And fired the shot heard round the world.”

For Emerson and his friend, Henry David Thoreau, “self-reliance and independence of mind ranked above all,” “Adventures in American Literature” tells us. In his essay on “Self-Reliance,” Emerson declared that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Thoreau, author of “Walden,” coined the famous phrase, “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.”

The advancing frontier

Meanwhile, to the west, American explorers and adventurers were forging roads through the wilderness. They included not only Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, but also ornithologist John James Audubon, who kept a journal of his trip to Labrador to study sea birds in 1833; Francis Parkman, who wrote “The Oregon Trail” in 1846; and Sarah Eleanor Royce, whose journal recounts the perils of crossing the desert to search for gold in California’s 1849 Gold Rush.

There’s also the harrowing survival story of trapper John Colter’s “race for life” against the Blackfeet Indians, and Richard Henry Dana’s “Two Years Before the Mast.” In 1834, Dana, a former Harvard student, shipped out as a common seaman from Boston to California around Cape Horn and wrote “one of the best-loved adventure stories America has produced.”

In addition to these selections, “Adventures in American Literature” introduces readers to American Indian songs and stories, and the “most important folk literature developed in America” — cowboy ballads and black spirituals such as “Let My People Go” and “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.”

The Civil War

The Civil War, our nation’s great moral crusade, produced some of the finest oratory in American history. This included statesman Daniel Webster’s famous “Reply to Hayne” in 1830 (“Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!”) and, of course, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

In “Lincoln Speaks at Gettysburg,” poet Carl Sandburg tells the story behind Lincoln’s immortal words. After the speech, Lincoln remarked to his friend Ward Hill Lamon: “Lamon, that speech won’t scour. It is a flat failure and the people are disappointed.” Readers also ponder Robert E. Lee’s moving “Farewell to the Army of Northern Virginia” and our 16th president’s transcendent “Second Inaugural Address.”

The Civil War era spawned great poetry, too. Among the most notable was Walt Whitman’s searing, heartsick tribute to Lincoln after his death — “O Captain! My Captain!” — and the seminal Whitman works that launched a poetic revolution — “I Hear America Singing” and “Leaves of Grass.” (“I believe a leaf of grass is no less perfect than the journeywork of the stars.”)

Another major forerunner of modern poetry was Emily Dickinson. Dickinson lived a reclusive life in Amherst, Mass., but after her death in 1886, her sister discovered roughly 1,800 poems in bundles in her rooms. “Though the life of the poet was solitary,” points out “Adventures in American Literature,” “her vision penetrated the patterns of existence.”

The post-Civil War years

The years following the war saw rapid change. Most of us know of Mark Twain’s “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn.” But few have likely read his entertaining narratives, “I Find Fool Gold” and “Across the Plains by Stagecoach.” Twain conducted a wildly popular tour of public readings after studying the theatrical storytelling skills of English novelist Charles Dickens.

Ole Rolvaag — a Norwegian immigrant and St. Olaf College professor — was another distinguished post-war author. In his unforgettable 1924 novel, “Giants in the Earth,” Rolvaag depicted the soul-killing isolation and struggle for existence in a sod hut in the Dakota Territory. The next year, James Stevens, a former lumberjack, published a very different work — “Paul Bunyan.” There, Stevens compiled now-famous “tall tales” about “the American Hercules,” tracing their genesis from loggers’ storytelling competitions during “the magic of bunkhouse nights.”

The early 20th century brought urbanization, industrialization, and writers such as humorist O. Henry, Robert Frost, Eugene O’Neill, E.E. Cummings, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, and Minnesota’s own F. Scott Fitzgerald.

* * *

“Adventures in American Literature” is a powerful antidote to the “presentism” — the tunnel vision — of today, when many “enlightened” Americans believe that we morally superior moderns have little to learn from previous generations, and little to thank them for.

The book brings “flesh and blood” to our nation’s greatest characteristics: public-spiritedness; generosity; self-reliance; boundless energy and initiative; and devotion to liberty, equality, and the common good.

The editors put it best: “American literature, a vigorous, varied and magnificent body of writing” is “one of our best means of understanding who and what we are.”