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The New York Public Library's Books of the Century (1995)

door Elizabeth Diefendorf (Redacteur), New York Public Library

Andere auteurs: Diana Bryan (Illustrator)

Reeksen: New York Public Library Series

LedenBesprekingenPopulariteitGemiddelde beoordelingAanhalingen
455454,107 (3.59)8
What are the books that helped shape and define the last hundred years? This was the question put to the librarians of The New York Public Library as part of the Library's 100th anniversary celebration. Which books had influenced the course of events for good or ill? Which interpreted newworlds? Or delighted millions of readers? Their answers to these questions formed ""Books of the Century,"" a highly popular exhibit during the Library's centennial celebration (1895 to 1995), highlighting an exhilarating collection of important works by some of the greatest writers of our times. Now, the… (meer)
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  laplantelibrary | Mar 1, 2022 |
There are already two excellent reviews of "Books of the Century" directly below this one, so I recommend reading those. The point of this review is to publically shame myself with the statement that I have read just thirteen of these 160-odd books of the century, and nearly half of the thirteen were read in school.

Of the thirteen, I'd rank six as worthy of the praise heaped upon them ("Lolita", "The Stranger", "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", "Clockwork Orange", "Darkness at Noon" and "To Kill a Mockingbird"), three where I just didn't see the fuss ("On the Road", "Bonfire of the Vanities" and "Catcher in the Rye") and the balance somewhere in between ("The Great Gatsby", "Grapes of Wrath", "Carrie", "The Cat in the Hat", "Nineteen Eighty Four" and "The Hobbit").

And, so the main interest in this book is the ample opportunities to say "why on earth is that piece of pseudo-intellectual rubbish included on the list while masterpiece x is missing?" and the like. Have fun. ( )
  MiaCulpa | Jan 15, 2015 |
Of the making of many books there is no end, the ancients declared. Of the making of many lists there is no end. We moderns know that for a fact. Ergo, of the making of many booklists there will be no end. You can bet on it.

And I for one can’t resist them. Maybe that’s because I worked my way through graduate school, in part, by preparing annotated booklists for my advisor. Maybe it’s because I am, by nature, a collector, and listing is just another way of collecting. Maybe it’s because booklists are so much more pleasurable than to-do lists, even for a retired person. For whatever reason, I delight in lists of books. Whenever I find them, I can’t resist scanning them, critiquing them, keeping them around. Even whole books of them.

On one shelf in my library, for example, you would find Books That Changed America (Macmillan, 1970), from Common Sense to Silent Spring; 100 Great Books (Century Books, 1974) from the Iliad and the Bhagavadgita to The Alexandria Quartet and Doctor Zhivago; American Literacy.Fifty Books That Define Our Culture and Ourselves (William Morrow, 1993), from Amerigo Vespucci to Daniel Ellsberg; and The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written (Barnes & Noble, 1998), from the I Ching to B. F Skinner.

One of my favorites is Books of the Century (Oxford U P, 1996) put out by the New York Public Library to celebrate its centennial, 1895-1995. The book grew out of an exhibit of books that “would recall this past century and its tremendous changes.” Planned with the collaboration of more than sixty librarians representing all fields, the display of 159 books was ultimately categorized according to eleven themes—such as, Landmarks of Modern Literature, Protest & Progress, Women Rise, Economics & Technology, Utopias & Dystopias, and the like. All the books had to be published for the first time during the span of time indicated, and only one title could be included for each author: those were the rules. The public got to suggest titles that should not have been omitted: eight of their choices were added to the list in appropriate categories. Because there was such an outcry that books written for young readers should be given more attention, a twelfth category has been added: Favorites of Childhood and Youth, with eight titles. So all in all, there are 175 book of the century!

Of course, quarreling with such lists is one of the principal pleasures of reading them. So I the first thing I did was to search out the eight titles the public insisted on adding. Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, of course. I should have guessed that one. No Faulkner title had been included originally (omigod, you don’t mean it!), so The Portable Faulkner, edited by Malcolm Cowley, was added to represent his whole career. It is this book that eventuated in Faulkner’s widespread recognition and his selection for a Nobel Prize. Most of the titles added were, in fact, literary works: Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country, and Elie Wiesel’s Night. The only title in the collection that I had never heard of was one added to the section on economics: Friederich A. von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, a 1944 publication arguing that socialism would lead to totalitarianism and arguing the virtues of individualism. He, too, was awarded a Nobel Prize, in Economics, and his ideas became the motivating factors behind Margaret Thatcher’s conservatism.

Surprisingly, with the addition of these titles, I found very little to argue about in the list as a whole: few obvious omissions, virtually no need for deletions. Several features of the list surprisef me and pleased me immensely. First was the decision to include popular titles that captured the public imagination as well as the expected works of literary merit and intellectual sophistication. For readers, the century would not have been the century it was without Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan, Zane Grey’s westerns, Agatha Christie’s mysteries, Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves, and Langston Hughes’ Simple—even Grace Metalious’ Peyton Place and Dr. Seuss. All are represented. And those inimitable how-to books (guides to self improvement) had to have their place: The Joy of Cooking, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Emily Post’s Etiquette, and Dr. Spock.

Second, I was surprised and glad to see a healthy representation of poetry. Along with William Butler Yeats’ The Wild Swans at Coole, T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and W. H. Auden’s Age of Anxiety and The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon were Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Renascnce, Elizabeth Bishop’s Complete Poems, Anna Akmatova’s Requiem (a determination to give women equal billing, I’m sure) and—would you believe?—Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. No Robert Frost or Marianne Moore. No Robert Lowell or Sylvia Plath. Not Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. But then one can’t expect perfection, can one?

Third, I must admit being especially pleased at some of the themes focused upon: Utopias & Dystopias; Optimism, Joy & Gentility; and—a real thrill—Mind & Spirit. The last one includes such titles as Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams; Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex; William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience; Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa; the Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible; Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Death and Dying; and even Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment (on the importance of fairy tales for the growing child in a complex society), as well as several other titles. As the introduction to this section says, “. . . at the end of the century, the life of the spirit thrives.”

Fourth, the number of fine books available to Americans in good translations is attested to by many, many selections, including works by Anton Chekhov, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Luigi Pirandello, Thomas Mann, Frederico García Lorca, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Marquez, Maurice Maeterlinck, Marie Curie, Mohandas Gandhi, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Erich Maria Remarque, Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn as well as a number of others. Americans do read the world—though we require translations to do so.

Finally, though I understand the editor’s decision to add a section of literature for young readers, the same argument could have been made for a number of other categories: poetry, drama, history, love & marriage—you can name your own favorites. What is commendable is the number of children’s books that were included in the original exhibit and the variety of themes they represented: Rudyard Kipling, Kim (Colonialism & Its Aftermath); Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat (Popular Culture & Mass Entertainment); L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (Utopias & Dystopias); Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl (War, Holocaust, Totalitarianism); and A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh, J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, and Margaret Wise Brown, Goodnight Moon (Optimism, Joy, Gentility).

OK, you’ve been waiting all this time for my complaints. I know that. So here goes—not many, but a few. History, not to mention historical fiction, is virtually unrepresented (well, there is Gone with the Wind). You’d think a twelfth theme would have been The Past Revisited. My personal commitments make me wonder why there are so few books on language, education, art, music and travel/adventure. Drama is represented by Chekhov, Pirandello, and George Bernard Shaw, but no Americans—not Eugene O’Neill, Thorton Wilder, Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, or Edward Albee.

But perhaps my highest praise would be directed to the brief but illuminating comments on each selection included as well as the introductory remarks to each section. Brevity is the soul of wisdom, when it comes to comments in a booklist. And Diana Bryan’s illustrations, reproduced from murals accompanying the exhibit, are delightful. Consisting of black paper cut-outs, designed for each section, they are humorous but sensitive, and altogether appropriate.

Oh, yes. I have to say it. In my opinion, THESE are the books of the century, my top ten: (1) Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, (2) The Autobiography of Malcolm X—really written by Alex Haley, (3) Edward Steichen, The Family of Man—photography, (4) George Orwell, Nineteen Eight-Four, (5) John Hersey, Hiroshima, (6) Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, (7) J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, (8) Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, (9) Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, and (10) Paul Tillich, The Courage To Be.

And if I could have added only eight titles, what would have been my choices? Oh, wow. Now I see the problems the selectors faced. Using the criteria of quality and public influence, these might have been my additions (listed in no particlar order): John Dewey, Art as Experience; Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children; Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key; Allen Ginsberg, Howl; Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960; Robert N. Bellah and others, Habits of the Heart; Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time; Edwin Way Teale, North with the Spring; Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People; Leonard Bernstein, The Infinite Variety of Music. (OK, I cheated: that’s ten. Sue me.)

At least today those are my choices. Tomorrow—well, of the making of many lists there is no end.

Find Books of the Century or some book like it, examine the whole list, read the comments, register your own complaints. You’ll have fun, I promise.Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country, and Elie Wiesel’s Night. The only title in the collection that I had never heard of was one added to the section on economics: Friederich A. von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, a 1944 publication arguing that socialism would lead to totalitarianism and arguing the virtues of individualism. He, too, was awarded a Nobel Prize, in Economics, and his ideas became the motivating factors behind Margaret Thatcher’s conservatism.

Surprisingly, with the addition of these titles, I found very little to argue about in the list as a whole: few obvious omissions, virtually no need for deletions. Several features of the list surprise me and pleased me immensely. First was the decision to include popular titles that captured the public imagination as well as the expected works of literary merit and intellectual sophistication. For readers, the century would not have been the century it was without Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan, Zane Grey’s westerns, Agatha Christie’s mysteries, Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves, and Langston Hughes’ Simple—even Grace Metalious’ Peyton Place and Dr. Seuss. All are represented. And those inimitable how-to books (guides to self improvement) had to have their place: The Joy of Cooking, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Emily Post’s Etiquette, and Dr. Spock.

Second, I was surprised and glad to see a healthy representation of poetry. Along with William Butler Yeats’ The Wild Swans at Coole, T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and W. H. Auden’s Age of Anxiety and The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon were Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Renascnce, Elizabeth Bishop’s Complete Poems, Anna Akmatova’s Requiem (a determination to give women equal billing, I’m sure) and—would you believe?—Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. No Robert Frost or Marianne Moore. No Robert Lowell or Sylvia Plath. Not Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. But then one can’t expect perfection, can one?

Third, I must admit being especially pleased at some of the themes focused upon: Utopias & Dystopias; Optimism, Joy & Gentility; and—a real thrill—Mind & Spirit. The last one includes such titles as Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams; Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex; William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience; Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa; the Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible; Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Death and Dying; and even Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment (on the importance of fairy tales for the growing child in a complex society), as well as several other titles. As the introduction to this section says, “. . . at the end of the century, the life of the spirit thrives.”

Fourth, the number of fine books available to Americans in good translations is attested to by many, many selections, including works by Anton Chekhov, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Luigi Pirandello, Thomas Mann, Frederico García Lorca, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Marquez, Maurice Maeterlinck, Marie Curie, Mohandas Gandhi, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Erich Maria Remarque, Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn as well as a number of others. Americans do read the world—though we require translations to do so.

Finally, though I understand the editor’s decision to add a section of literature for young readers, the same argument could have been made for a number of other categories: poetry, drama, history, love & marriage—you can name your own favorites. What is commendable is the number of children’s books that were included in the original exhibit and the variety of themes they represented: Rudyard Kipling, Kim (Colonialism & Its Aftermath); Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat (Popular Culture & Mass Entertainment); L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (Utopias & Dystopias); Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl (War, Holocaust, Totalitarianism); and A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh, J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, and Margaret Wise Brown, Goodnight Moon (Optimism, Joy, Gentility).

OK, you’ve been waiting all this time for my complaints. I know that. So her goes—not many, but a few. History, not to mention historical fiction, is virtually unrepresented (well, there is Gone with the Wind). You’d think a twelfth theme would have been The Past Revisited. My personal commitments make me wonder why there are a few books on language, education, art, music and travel/adventure. Drama is represented by Chekhov, Pirandello, and George Bernard Shaw, but no Americans—not Eugene O’Neill, Thorton Wilder, Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, or Edward Albee.

But perhaps my highest praise would be directed to the brief but illuminating comments on each selection included as well as the introductory remarks to each section. Brevity is the soul of wisdom, when it comes to comments in a booklist. And Diana Bryan’s illustrations, reproduced from murals accompanying the exhibit, are delightful. Consisting of black paper cut-outs, designed for each section, the are humorous but sensitive, and altogether appropriate.

But there are a few more titles that must be mentioned in a review like this one. Oh, yes. I have to say it. In my opinion, THESE are the books of the century, my top ten: (1) Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, (2) The Autobiography of Malcolm X—really written by Alex Haley, (3) Edward Steichen, The Family of Man—photography, (4) George Orwell, Nineteen Eight-Four, (5) John Hersey, Hiroshima, (6) Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, (7) J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, (8) Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, (9) Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, and (10) Paul Tillich, The Courage To Be.

And if I could have added only eight titles, what would have been my choices? Oh, wow. Now I see the problems the selectors faced. Using the criteria of quality and public influence, these might have been my additions (listed in no particlar order): John Dewey, Art as Experience; Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children; Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key; S. I. Hayakawa, Language in Action; Sheldon Cheney, Men Who Have Walked with God; Allen Ginsberg, Howl; Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960; Robert N. Bellah and others, Habits of the Heart; Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time; Edwin Way Teale, North with the Spring; Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People; Robert McCrum and others, The Story of English; Leonard Bernstein, The Infinite Variety of Music. (OK, I cheated: that’s thirteen, a baker's dozen. So sue me.)

At least today those are my choices. Tomorrow—well, of the making of many lists there is no end.

Find Books of the Century or some book like it, examine the whole list, read the comments, register your own complaints. You’ll have fun, I promise.
3 stem bfrank | Nov 6, 2007 |
A collection of synopses of the New York Public Library's "books of the century", arranged by category. The selections are, of course, subjective, and the guidelines are a little vague. Some don't even strictly qualify as books. But these are interesting selections, many of which I've read, and several that this collection inspires me to add to my reading list. Just for my own reference, the books listed here which I have read as of this date are: "The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka), "The Great Gatsby" (F. Scott Fitzgerald), "Waiting For Godot" (Samuel Beckett), "Invisible Man" (Ralph Ellison), "On the Road" (Jack Kerouac), "Portnoy's Complaint" (Philip Roth), "A Sand County Almanac" ((Aldo Leopold), "King Solomon's Ring" (Konrad Lorenz), "The Jungle" (Upton Sinclair), "The Grapes of Wrath" (John Steinbeck), "Lord Jim" (Joseph Conrad), "The Stranger" (Albert Camus), "The Family of Man" (Edward Steichen), "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (Ken Kesey), "The Turn of the Screw" (Henry James), "Tarzan of the Apes" (Edgar Rice Burroughs), "Gone With the Wind" (Margaret Mitchell), "The Cat in the Hat" (Dr. Seuss), "Catch-22" (Joseph Heller), "In Cold Blood" (Truman Capote), "Ball Four" (Jim Bouton), "Carrie" (Stephen King), "The Age of Innocence" (Edith Wharton), "Brave New World" (Aldous Huxley), "Lost Horizon" (James Hilton), "Walden Two" (B.F. Skinner), "Nineteen Eighty-Four" (George Orwell), "Fahrenheit 451" (Ray Bradbury), "Atlas Shrugged" (Ayn Rand), "A Clockwork Orange" (Anthony Burgess), "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (Ernest Hemingway), "Darkness At Noon" (Arthur Koestler), "Hiroshima" (James Hershey), "The Gulag Archipelago" (Alexander Solzhenitsyn), "Maus: A Survivor's Tale" (Art Spiegelman), "The Hobbit" (J.R.R. Tolkien), "Goodnight Moon" (Margaret Wise Brown), "To Kill a Mockingbird" (Harper Lee), and "The Catcher in the Rye" (J.D. Salinger). The books listed which I would like to read some day are: "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" (James Agee and Walker Evans), "And the Band Played On" (Randy Shilts), "Cry, the Beloved Country" (Alan Paton), "Dracula" (Bram Stoker), The Hound of the Baskervilles (Arthur Conan Doyle), "Riders of the Purple Sage" (Zane Grey), "The Big Sleep" (Raymond Chandler), "Peyton Place" (Grace Matalious), "The Color Purple" (Alice Walker), "The Time Machine" (H.G. Wells), "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" (L. Frank Baum), "Peter Pan" (J.M. Barrie), "The Handmaid's Tale" Margaret Atwood), "The Diary of a Young Girl" (Anne Frank), "The Country of the Pointed Firs" (Sarah Orne Jewett), "The Story of My Life" (Helen Keller), "The Innocence of Father Brown" (G.K. Chesterton)"The Inimitable Jeeves" (P.G. Wodehouse), "Winnie-the-Pooh" (A.A. Milne), "Shadows on the Rock" (Willa Cather), "The Complete Poems" (Elizabeth Bishop), "A Tree Grows In Brooklyn" (Betty Smith), "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" (C.S. Lewis), "Charlotte's Web" (E.B. White), and "Sarah, Plain and Tall" (Patricia MacLachlan). ( )
1 stem burnit99 | Jan 9, 2007 |
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» Andere auteurs toevoegen (2 mogelijk)

AuteursnaamRolType auteurWerk?Status
Diefendorf, ElizabethRedacteurprimaire auteuralle editiesbevestigd
New York Public Libraryprimaire auteuralle editiesbevestigd
Bryan, DianaIllustratorSecundaire auteuralle editiesbevestigd

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INTRODUCTION: The New York Public Library's Books of the Century grew out of an exhibition created to celebrate the Centennial of The New York Public Library. ... Elizabeth Diefendorf
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What are the books that helped shape and define the last hundred years? This was the question put to the librarians of The New York Public Library as part of the Library's 100th anniversary celebration. Which books had influenced the course of events for good or ill? Which interpreted newworlds? Or delighted millions of readers? Their answers to these questions formed ""Books of the Century,"" a highly popular exhibit during the Library's centennial celebration (1895 to 1995), highlighting an exhilarating collection of important works by some of the greatest writers of our times. Now, the

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