Henry Miller Makes a List of “The 100 Books That Influenced Me Most”

in Books, Literature | April 20th, 2015

Image licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Take a survey of a hundred writers from the mid- to late-twentieth century about the books that influenced them most and you’re bound to find plenty of Henry Miller tucked in with the Victorians, the Russians, and the Beats. The Brooklyn-raised author of such notoriously banned novels as Tropic of Capricorn and Tropic of Cancer has long appealed to contemporary writers not only because of his frank explorations of sexuality and other taboo subjects but also because—like so many avant-garde and not so avant-garde writers after him—he had the audacity to present his own life and loves as literary material. Long before the memoir became the dominant force in American letters, with all of the attendant controversies about truth-telling in the form, Miller blended fact and fiction in ways that made it hard to tell where one ended and the other began.

Miller’s reputation for living his fiction—or fictionalizing his life—may have led many readers with only a passing familiarity with his books to regard him as a kind of shameless self-mythologizer. The characterization isn’t necessarily wrong, but it only captures part of the story. Like every serious writer, Miller was also a serious reader, and his work is as much informed by the books he loved as by the women he loved.

Miller freely acknowledged the literary relationships in his life, the authors who exerted influence on his work and whose styles and ideas he borrowed and made his own. He wrote an entire book on the subject, The Books in My Life, which Maria Popova at Brain Pickings describes as “a singular lens on his approach to reading.” In the book, Miller’s “central concern is a kind of anatomy of influence,” Popova writes, taking a phrase from literary critic Harold Bloom.

In his meditation on “his sources of creative spark,” Miller discusses at length his ideas about education, and its many failings. And in the book’s appendix—as if anticipating our current mania for lists—he makes a comprehensive record of “The 100 Books that Influenced Me Most.” See Miller’s complete list below, and read The Books in My Life free at the Open Library. A fair number of the books on Miller’s list can be found in our collection, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices.

1 Ancient Greek Dramatists
2 Arabian Nights (for children)
3 Elizabethan Playwrights (excepting Shakespeare)
4 European Playwrights of 19th Century
5 Greek Myths and Legends
6 Knights of King Arthur’s Court
7 Abèlard, Pierre, The Story of My Misfortunes
8 Alain-Fournier, The Wanderer
9 Andersen, Hans Christian, Fairy Tales
10 Anonymous, Diary of a Lost One
11 Balzac, Honoré de, Seraphita
12 Balzac, Honoré de, Louis Lambert
13 Bellamy, Edward, Looking Backward
14 Belloc, Hilaire, The Path to Rome
15 Blavatsky, Mme. H. P., The Secret Doctrine
16 Boccaccio, Giovanni, The Decameron
17 Breton, André, Nadja
18 Bronte, Emily, Wuthering Heights
19 Bulwyer-Lytton, Edward, Last Days of Pompeii
20 Carroll, Lewis, Alice in Wonderland
21 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, Journey to the End of the Night
22 Cellini, Benvenuto, Autobiography
23 Cendrars, Blaise, Virtually the complete works
24 Chesterton, G.K., Saint Francis of Assisi
25 Conrad, Joseph, His works in general
26 Cooper James Fenimore, Leatherstocking Tales
27 Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe
28 De Nerval, Gérard, His works in general
29 Dostoievsky, Feodor, His works in general
30 Dreiser, Theodore, His works in general
31 Duhamel, Geoges, Salavin Series
32 Du Maurier, George, Trilby
33 Dumas, Alexander, The Three Musketeers
34 Eckermann, Johann, Conversations with Goethe
35 Eltzbacher, Paul, Anarchism
36 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Representative Men
37 Fabre, Henri, His works in general
38 Faure, Elie, The History of Art
39 Fenollosa, Ernest, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry
40 Gide, André, Dostoievski
41 Giono, Jean, Refus d’Obéissance
42 Giono, Jean, Que ma joie domeure
43 Giono, Jean, Jean le Bleu
44 Grimm Brothers, Fairy Tales
45 Gutkind, Erich, The Absolute Collective
46 Haggard, Rider, She
47 Hamsun, Knut, His works in general
48 Henty, G. A., His works in general
49 Hesse, Hermann, Siddhartha
50 Hudson, W. H., His works in general
51 Hugo, Victor, Les Misérables
52 Huysmans, Joris Karl, Against the Grain
53 Joyce, James, Ulysses
54 Keyserling, Hermann, South American Meditations
55 Kropotkin, Peter, Mutual Aid
56 Lao-tse, Tao Teh Ch’ing
57 Latzko, Andreas, Men in War
58 Long, Haniel, Interlinear to Cabeza de Vaca
59 M, Gospel of Ramakrishna
60 Machen, Arthur, The Hill of Dreams
61 Maeterlinck, Maurice, His works in general
62 Mann, Thomas, The Magic Mountain
63 Mencken, H. L., Prejudices
64 Nietzsche, His works in general
65 Nijinsky, Diary
66 Nordhoff & Hall, Pitcairn Island
67 Nostradamus, The Centuries
68 Peck, George Wilbur, Peck’s Bad Boy
69 Percival, W. O., William Blake’s Circle of Destiny
70 Petronius, The Satyricon
71 Plutarch, Lives
72 Powys, John Cowper, Visions and Revisions
73 Prescott, William H., Conquest of Mexico
74 Prescott, William H., Conquest of Peru
75 Proust, Marcel, Remembrance of Things Past
76 Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel
77 Rimbaud, Jean-Arthur, His works in general
78 Rolland, Romain, Jean-Christophe
79 Rolland, Romain, Prophets of the New India
80 Rudhyar, Dane, Astrology of Personality
81 Saltus, Edgar, The Imperial Purple
82 Scott, Sir Walter, Ivanhoe
83 Sienkiewicz, Henry, Quo Vadis
84 Sikelianos, Anghelos, Proanakrousma
85 Sinnett, A. P., Esoteric Buddhism
86 Spencer, Herbert, Autobiography
87 Spengler, Oswald, The Decline of the West
88 Strindberg, August, The Inferno
89 Suarès, Carlo, Krishnamurti
90 Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro, Zen Buddhism
91 Swift, Jonathan, Guilliver’s Travels
92 Tennyson, Alfred, Idylls of the King
93 Thoreau, Henry David, Civil Disobedience & Other Essays
94 Twain, Mark, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
95 Van Gogh, Vincent, Letters to Theo
96 Wassermann, Jacob, The Maurizius Case (Trilogy)
97 Weigall, Arthur, Akhnaton
98 Welch, Galbraith, The Unveiling of Timbuctoo
99 Werfel, Franz, Star of the Unborn
100 Whitman, Walt, Leaves of Grass

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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F. Scott Fitzgerald Has a Strange Dinner with James Joyce & Draws a Cute Sketch of It (1928)

in Literature | April 16th, 2015

The characters in many of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories—rakish, drunken undergraduates and overeducated gadabouts—so resemble their creator that it’s tempting to read into all of his work some autobiographical intent. One episode in the writer’s life that didn’t make it into his fiction, Fitzgerald’s meeting with James Joyce in Paris, nevertheless makes a fascinating anecdote all its own, and seems so perfectly in character that it could have inspired an amusing short story for The Saturday Evening Post.

According to Sylvia Beach, doyenne of the expat American literary scene in Paris, founder of Shakespeare and Company Books, and publisher of Ulysses, Fitzgerald “worshipped James Joyce, but was afraid to approach him.” In her memoir, Shakespeare and Company, Beach relates how in 1928 she and her friend, lover, and fellow bookseller Adrienne Monnier, “cooked a nice dinner and invited the Joyces, the Fitzgeralds, and André Chamson and his wife Lucie.”

Scott drew a picture in my copy of The Great Gatsby of the guests—with Joyce seated at the table wearing a halo, Scott kneeling beside him, and Adrienne and myself, at the head and foot, depicted as mermaids (or sirens).

You can see Fitzgerald’s quirky little sketch above. Beach’s telling, it seems, omits many of the colorful details of the meeting. According to Herbert Gorman, another guest at the dinner and Joyce’s first biographer, Fitzgerald—so overawed by the Irish author that he referred to the evening as the “Festival of St. James”—“sank down on one knee before Joyce”—as in his drawing—“kissed his hand, and declared: ‘How does it feel to be a great genius, Sir? I am so excited at seeing you, Sir, that I could weep.’”

Most likely very drunk on champagne, Fitzgerald’s antics apparently quite alarmed Joyce. In her literary history, Noel Riley Fitch tells us that the American “offered to show his esteem for the Irish writer… by jumping out of the window. An amazed Joyce is supposed to have prohibited the display and exclaimed, ‘That young man must be mad—I’m afraid he’ll do himself some injury.’” The bizarre incident did not prevent Fitzgerald from obtaining Joyce’s autograph in his copy of Ulysses. Nor did it prevent him, on a later occasion, from threatening to jump from his apartment balcony onto the street, “drunk and depressed by his failing marriage.” This time, he was stopped by French novelist André Chamson, with whom he had struck up a friendship at the Joyce dinner.

Beach’s memoir contains many other charming, and somewhat dismaying, stories about the Fitzgeralds, most involving profligate spending and drinking of champagne. We may not have the pleasure of hearing these tales from the Gatsby author himself—save through his essays, letters, and many fictionalizations of his life. But the genial Beach, who outlived Joyce, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and most every other author of the “Lost Generation,” appeared in several filmed interviews, in French and English, and told stories of 1920s Paris. In one such interview, above, hear her describe the founding of Shakespeare and Company, that Parisian literary hub without which some of the greatest literature of the 20th century may never have reached the reading public.

via Austin Kleon

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Günter Grass Takes On Facebook: “Someone Who Has 500 Friends, Has No Friends.”

in Current Affairs, Literature, Politics | April 15th, 2015

Incisive social critic, novelist, poet, sculptor, and inspiration to such trenchant fabulists as John Irving and Salman Rushdie, German writer Günter Grass passed away this week with a well-defined legacy as “his country’s moral conscience.” Winner of the Nobel Prize in 1999, the author did not shy away from controversial political stances—despite his own once-hidden past as a teenage member of the Hitler Youth and Waffen-SS. In 2012, Grass caused an international stir with the publication of his poem “What Must Be Said,” a fierce critique of Israel’s militarism. The poem drew some rather predictable charges, and its publication, wrote Der Spiegel, broached what many considered a taboo subject. The incident represents only one of Grass’s many public statements, woven throughout his art and life, against nationalism and war.

Which brings us to the video interview above from 2013. While not exactly addressing a matter of dire geopolitical significance, Grass nonetheless levies his characteristic critical wit against a corporate entity that threatens to swallow the globe, virtually—Facebook. Remarking on his children and grandchildren’s experience with the social network, Grass says he told one of them, “Someone who has 500 friends, has no friends.” It’s something of a familiar sentiment by now—we’ve all read numerous think-pieces more or less saying the same thing. But Grass goes on to define the value of what he calls “direct experiences” in specific terms—with the admission that he feels like “a dinosaur” for writing his manuscripts by hand and typing them on an old Olivetti typewriter.

The idea of owning a mobile phone and being accessible at all times—and as I know now, under surveillance, is abhorrent to me. With the latest findings in mind, it surprises me—that millions of people do not distance themselves from Facebook and all that—and say “I want no part of it.”

Grass’ aversion to Facebook—and the online world in general—isn’t strictly political, but literary as well. He acknowledges the ease and speed of the internet as a research tool, and yet… “literature… You can’t speed it up when you work with it. If you do, you do so at the expense of quality.” To hear more from Grass about the writing process and his attitudes toward literature and activism, read his interview in the Paris Review.

via Bibliokept

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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T.S. Eliot, Edith Wharton & Gertrude Stein Tell F. Scott Fitzgerald That Gatsby is Great, While Critics Called It a Dud (1925)

in Books, Literature | April 13th, 2015

This month marks the 90th anniversary of the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby. Perhaps no other book so embodies the ideal of the Great American Novel as Gatsby — and yet, when it first came out 90 years ago, it was regarded as a flop. As a headline writer for the New York World put it, “F. SCOTT FITZGERALD’S LATEST A DUD.”

Fitzgerald had a lot riding on Gatsby. He and his wife Zelda were living beyond their means, and he was desperately hoping the book would bring financial security as well as critical respect. On April 10, 1925 he wrote a letter to his editor, Maxwell Perkins:

Dear Max
The book comes out today and I am overcome with fears and forebodings. Supposing women didn’t like the book because it has no important woman in it, and critics didn’t like it because it dealt with the rich and and contained no peasants borrowed out of Tess in it and set to work in Idaho? Suppose it didn’t even wipe out my debt to you — why it’ll have to sell 20,000 copies even to do that!

The author’s fears and forebodings were more or less realized. The first print run of 20,870 copies sold slowly. A second run of 3,000 was ordered a few months later, but many of those copies were still gathering dust on the warehouse shelves when Fitzgerald died in 1940. And while a few critics recognized Gatsby’s brilliance, many missed it. H.L. Mencken, for example, praised Fitzgerald’s maturing craftsmanship as a prose stylist but savaged the story itself, calling it “no more than a glorified anecdote.”

It must have cheered the author up, then, to receive letters of praise from several of the most influential writers of his time. Fitzgerald had sent inscribed copies of the book to Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein and T.S. Eliot — all of whom responded. Of the three, Wharton was the most tepid in her praise, with echoes of Mencken running through her comments:

Dear Mr. Fitzgerald,
I have been wandering for the last weeks and found your novel — with it’s friendly dedication — awaiting me here on my arrival, a few days ago.
I am touched at your sending me a copy, for I feel that to your generation, which has taken such a flying leap into the future, I must represent the literary equivalent of tufted furniture and gas chandeliers. So you will understand that it is in the spirit of sincere deprecation that I shall venture, in a few days, to offer you in return the last product of my manufactory.
Meanwhile, let me say at once how much I like Gatsby, or rather His Book, & how great a leap I think you have taken this time — in advance upon your previous work. My present quarrel with you is only this: that to make Gatsby really Great, you ought to have given us his early career (not from the cradle — but from his visit to the yacht, if not before) instead of a short résumé of it. That would have situated him, and made his final tragedy a tragedy instead of a “fate divers” for the morning papers.
But you’ll tell me that’s the old way, and consequently not your way…

Wharton made it clear she thought of Gatsby as a literary advance only in respect to Fitzgerald’s own earlier work. Gertrude Stein allowed only that the new book was “different and older”:

My dear Fitzgerald:
Here we are and have read your book and it is a good book. I like the melody of your dedication and it shows that you have a background of beauty and tenderness and that is a comfort. The next good thing is that you write naturally in sentences and that too is a comfort. You write naturally in sentences and one can read all of them and that among other things is a comfort. You are creating the contemporary world much as Thackeray did his in Pendennis and Vanity Fair and this isn’t a bad compliment. You make a modern world and a modern orgy strangely enough it was never done until you did it in This Side of Paradise. My belief in This Side of Paradise was alright. This is as good a book and different and older and that is what one does, one does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure. Best of luck to you always, and thanks so much for the very genuine pleasure you have given me.

The strongest and least equivocal praise came from Eliot:

Dear Mr. Scott Fitzgerald,
The Great Gatsby with your charming and overpowering inscription arrived the very morning I was leaving in some haste for a sea voyage advised by my doctor. I therefore left it behind and only read it on my return a few days ago. I have, however, now read it three times. I am not in the least influenced by your remark about myself when I say that it has interested and excited me more than any new novel I have seen, either English or American, for a number of years.
When I have more time I should like to write to you more fully and tell you exactly why it seems to me such a remarkable book. In fact it seems to me to be the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.

Fitzgerald was especially pleased with that last line. “I can’t express just how good your letter made me feel,” he wrote back to Eliot “– it was easily the nicest thing that’s happened to me in connection with Gatsby.”

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Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tips on How to Write a Good Short Story

in Literature, Writing | April 10th, 2015

When it came to giving advice to writers, Kurt Vonnegut was never dull. He once tried to warn people away from using semicolons by characterizing them as “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing.” And, in a master’s thesis rejected by The University of Chicago, he made the tantalizing argument that “stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper, and that the shape of a given society’s stories is at least as interesting as the shape of its pots or spearheads.” In this brief video, Vonnegut offers eight essential tips on how to write a short story:

Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
Every sentence must do one of two things–reveal character or advance the action.
Start as close to the end as possible.
Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them–in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Vonnegut put down his advice in the introduction to his 1999 collection of magazine stories, Bagombo Snuff Box. But for every rule (well, almost every rule) there is an exception. “The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O’Connor,” writes Vonnegut. “She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.”

Now if you want to learn to write with style, that’s another story. And Vonnegut has advice on that too here.

via BrainPickings

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Edgar Allan Poe Animated: Watch Four Animations of Classic Poe Stories

in Animation, Literature | April 9th, 2015

I can well imagine that the insertion of modern technology into many of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories would have a tremendous benefit for those stories’ victims, and a deleterious effect on their monomaniacal plots. In one of the ironies of cultural transmission, the timeless quality of Poe’s work seems to depend upon its use of deliberately ancient methods of surveillance and torture. In a further paradox of sorts, Poe’s work never suffers, but only seems to shine, when technology is applied to it.

Filmmakers as esteemed as Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, and Federico Fellini have adapted him; singular dramatic talents like James Earl Jones, Christopher Walken, Vincent Price, and Christopher Lee, and Lou Reed and Willem Dafoe have made fine recordings of his most famous poem; The Alan Parsons Project recorded a pretty amazing prog rock version of “The Raven,” the first rock song to feature a digital vocoder.

Poe also appears as an animated puppet, alongside Dickens and Dostoevsky, in a successful Frank Capra-directed science education film. This role belongs to a rich tradition of Poe in animated film. “The Raven” inspired one of Tim Burton’s first animated films, Vincent, at the top, about a boy who wants to be Vincent Price (narrated of course by Vincent Price). The poem was also adapted by The Simpsons (above). South Park has featured the morbid 19th century writer, and Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” birthed an award-winning animated short, as well as an interactive digital comic book.

Even before his screen time in Capra’s film, shared with famous actor Eddie Albert, Poe appeared in animated film with movie stars. In the 1953 adaptation of “The Tell Tale Heart” above, a menacingly suave James Mason narrates the story. This take on Poe’s tale of madness perfectly captures its nearly giddy air of dread. The film, we wrote in 2011, “was given a bizarre reception” upon release, garnering an “X” rating—the first animated film to do so—in the UK. The British Board of Film Censors deemed the film “unsuitable for adult audiences.” That said, it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.

Above (with Spanish subtitles) in a much later work, a less famous but no less menacing, actor, Billy Drago, narrates a stark retelling of “The Raven,” with a central character drawn like one of the homicidal creeps Drago typically plays on screen. Argentinian filmmaker Mariano Cattaneo remarks that he and fellow director Nic Loreti focused on the idea that the speaker’s mysteriously lost love Lenore “might have been murdered and wants to come back,” citing their influences as “German expressionist films” and filmmakers like “Sam Raimi, George A. Romero, Tim Burton, Robert Rodriguez, John Carpenter and even Stephen King.” If not all of these creators’ work is evident, the influence of German Expressionist film, particularly The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, certainly is.

In another international adaptation, acclaimed Czech stop-motion animator Jan Svankmajer uses high-contrast, dramatic lighting to very different, impressionist effect to recreate the chilling despair of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. It is interesting that Poe’s work—obsessed with isolation and bookishness and history—should have the effect it has on modern media, particularly on animation. But then again, Poe himself was a technician, interested not in the past for its own sake but in its usefulness in achieving a vivid “unity of effect.” That his almost clockwork tales would make such excellent material for such technical means of storytelling as animated film makes perfect sense. But should you wish to return to the source of these humorous and grim adaptations, visit our list of the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe, in free eBook and audio book form.

Seven Tips from Edgar Allan Poe on How to Write Vivid Stories and Poems

Gustave Doré’s Splendid Illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” (1884)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Artists Illustrate Dante’s Divine Comedy Through the Ages: Doré, Blake, Botticelli, Mœbius & More

in Art, Literature | April 8th, 2015

For a book about medieval theology and torture, filled with learned classical allusions and obscure characters from 13th century Florentine society, Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, first book of three in his Divine Comedy, has had considerable staying power, working its way into pop culture with a video game, several films, and a baleful appearance on Mad Men. While the Mad Men reference may be the more literary, the former two may hint at the more prominent reason the Inferno has captivated readers, players, and viewers for ages: the lengthy poem’s intensely visual representation of human extremity makes for some unforgettable images. Like Achilles dragging Hector behind his chariot in Homer, who can forget the lake of ice Dante encounters in the ninth circle of Hell, in which (in John Ciardi’s modern translation), he finds “souls of the last class,” which “shone below the ice like straws in glass,” and, frozen to his chest, “the Emperor of the Universe of Pain,” almost too enormous for description and as hideous as he once was beautiful.

Like the rest of us, artists have been drawn to Dante’s extraordinary images and extensive fantasy geography since the Divine Comedy first appeared (1308–1320). In prolific French artist Gustave Doré’s rendering of the ninth circle scene, above, Satan is a huge, bearded grump with wings and horns. Doré so desperately wanted to illustrate the Divine Comedy (find in our collection of 700 Free eBooks) that he financed the first book in 1861 with his own money.

Afterwards, as Mike Springer wrote in a previous post on Dore’s illustrations, his publisher Louis Hachette agreed to put out the next two books with the telegram, “Success! Come quickly! I am an ass!” Doré’s eerie, beautiful drawings are just one such set of famous illustrations we’ve featured on the site previously.

Another artist perfectly suited to the task, William Blake, whose own poetry braved similar heights and depths as Dante’s, took on the Inferno at the end of his life. While he didn’t live to complete the engravings, his unsettling, yet highly classical, renderings of the poet the Italians call il Sommo Poeta—“The Supreme Poet”—certainly do justice to the vividness and horror of Dante’s descriptions. Above, see Blake’s 1827 interpretation of the thief Agnolo Brunelleschi attacked by a six-footed serpent in Canto twenty-five, a scene reprinted many times in color.

Centuries earlier, Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli made an attempt at all three books, though he fell short of finishing them. See his “Panderers, Flatterers” above, the only drawing he made in color, and more black and white illustrations here.

Like the makers of films and video games, artists have mainly chosen to focus on the most bizarre and harrowing of the three books, the Inferno. One modern artist who undoubtedly would have had a fascinating take on Dante’s hell instead illustrated his heaven, being chosen to imagine Paradiso by the Milan’s Nuages Gallery in 1999. I refer to graphic artist Jean Giraud, known in the world of fantasy, sci-fi, and comics as Mœbius. Despite some arguable artistic miscasting (Mœbius did after all make films like Alien and Tron “even weirder”), the French artist took what may be the least visually interesting of Dante’s three Divine Comedy books and created some incredibly striking images. See one above, and more at our previous post.

Other artists, like Alberto Martini, who worked on his Divine Comedy for over forty years, have produced terrifying images (above) and highly stylized ones—like these medieval illuminations from a 1450 manuscript. The range of interpretations all have one thing in common—their subject matter seems to allow artists almost unlimited freedom to imagine Dante’s weird cosmography. No vision of the Inferno or the loftier realms above it can go too far, it seems, even in the absurd video game finale you really have to see to believe. Somehow, I think Dante would approve… well… mostly.

William Blake’s Hallucinatory Illustrations of John Milton’s Paradise Lost

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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The Mad Men Reading List: 25 Revealing Books Read by the Characters on the Show

in Literature, Television | April 7th, 2015

Image courtesy of The New York Public Library.

The good people over at the New York Public Library compiled a list of books read by the characters of Mad Men, which just started the last half of its seventh and final season. Over the course of the series, the show’s characters drank several swimming pools worth of cocktails, engaged in a host of ill-advised illicit affairs and, on occasion, dreamed up a brilliant advertising campaign or two. As it turns out, they also read quite a bit.

All the books seem to say something about the inner life of each character. The show’s enigmatic main character, Don Draper, favored works like Dante’s Inferno and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury – books that point towards Draper’s series-long downward spiral. The whiny, insecure Pete Campbell read Thomas Pynchon’s paranoid classic The Crying of Lot 49. And Bert Cooper, the aristocratic bow-tie sporting patriarch of Sterling Cooper is apparently an Ayn Rand fan; he’s seen reading Atlas Shrugged early in the series. You can see the full reading list below or here in a beautiful PDF designed by the NYPL.

A number of the texts listed below also appear in our Free eBooks and Free AudioBooks collections.

DON DRAPER’S PICKS:

EXODUS by Leon Uris (Episode 106 “Babylon”)

THE BEST OF EVERYTHING by Rona Jaffe

MEDITATIONS IN AN EMERGENCY by Frank O’Hara

THE SOUND AND THE FURY by William Faulkner

THE CHRYSANTHEMUM AND THE SWORD by Ruth Benedict

THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD by John Le Carre

THE FIXER by Bernard Malamud

ODDS AGAINST by Dick Francis

THE INFERNO by Dante Alighieri

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW by Larry McMurtry

PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT by Philip Roth

ROGER STERLING’S PICK:

CONFESSIONS OF AN ADVERTISING MAN by David Ogilvy

JOAN HARRIS’S PICK:

LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER by D. H. Lawrence

PETE CAMPBELL’S PICKS:

THE CRYING OF LOT 49 by Thomas Pynchon

GOODNIGHT MOON by Margaret Wise Brown

BETTY DRAPER’S PICKS:

BABYLON REVISITED AND OTHER STORIES by F. Scott Fitzgerald

THE GROUP by Mary McCarthy

LANE PRYCE’S PICK:

THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER by Mark Twain

HENRY FRANCIS’S PICK:

THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN by Mark Twain

BERT COOPER’S PICK:

ATLAS SHRUGGED by Ayn Rand

SALLY DRAPER’S PICKS:

THE HISTORY OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE by Edward Gibbon

TWENTY ONE BALLOONS by William Pene Du Bois

NANCY DREW: THE CLUE OF THE BLACK KEYS by Carolyn Keene

THE BLACK CAULDRON by Lloyd Alexander

ROSEMARY’S BABY by Ira Levin

via The New York Public Library

Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intelligent Person Should Read

Ernest Hemingway’s List for a Young Writer

Carl Sagan’s Undergrad Reading List: 40 Essential Texts for a Well-Rounded Thinker

David Foster Wallace’s 1994 Syllabus: How to Teach Serious Literature with Lightweight Books

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

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