THE AMERICAN CLASSICS: A Personal Essay

In his strange new book, one of our leading literary critics anoints five books as American classics. These works, or more appropriately, these writers—Melville, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman and Twain—are forced to be representative of the ante- and post-bellum cultures that produced them and those that followed. Donoghue begins by tracing all of American thought to Emerson, which puts the critic in a bit of a bind, since he can't find anything positive to say about the man or his writing. This leads Donoghue to condemn all of American literature as driven by a need to escape the limitations of the culture in which it is rooted. Although each essay presents an interesting argument and Donoghue makes some acute literary observations, the book as a whole is hampered by the naming of Emerson as the progenitor of American letters. For Donoghue also decries that some recent American political thinkers claim Emerson as the father of American imperialism—which is the villain of Donoghue's account, embodied by George Bush and the military-industrial complex. Whatever contemporary critique is contained in the book is so intermittent, though, that it seems more of an intrusion than an integral part. Donoghue, Irish by birth, has put himself into the enviable but bizarre position of allowing himself to love America and its literature only insofar as he can condescend to it. Agent, Georges Borchardt. (May)