I rebelled years ago
at having the tradition, the spirit, the meaning of the soil to
which I belong utterly disregarded by interpreters of literature
and at the same time having the Increase Mather kind
of stuff taught as if it were important to our part of America.
Happily the disregard is disappearing, and so is Increase
Mather.
If they had to be rigorously classified into hard and fast
categories, comparatively few of the books in the lists that
follow would be rated as pure literature. Fewer would be
rated as history. A majority of them are the stuff of history.
The stuff out of which history is made is generally more vital
than formalized history, especially the histories habitually
forced on students in public schools, colleges, and universities.
There is no essential opposition between history and
literature. The attempt to study a people's literature apart
from their social and, to a less extent, their political history
is as illogical as the lady who said she had read Romeo but had
not yet got to Juliet. Nearly any kind of history is more
important than formal literary history showing how in a
literary way Abraham begat Isaac and Isaac begat Jacob.
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