List-O-Mania: The Library of Congress’s arguable roster of ‘Books That Shaped America’
In 1987, David Letterman inaugurated his famous Top Ten lists, which included Elf Pickup Lines (Sample: “I’m down here”); Ways to Reduce the Federal Deficit (“Sell ad space on president’s forehead during State of the Union speeches”); Unsuccessful Mall Shops (“Jiffy-Spay”); and many others. American media had already been infected; magazines and newspapers promptly took List-o-mania to the next level. Today Esquire publishes a roster of the Top 100 Women, Time offers mini-biographies of the Most Influential People, Forbes identifies the Most Powerful Celebrities, the New York Times informs its readers of the Top Ten Must-Have Apps, and the Washington Post reveals the Top 15 Happiest Countries.
One might think the august Library of Congress would be immune to pop trends, but one would be wrong. A group of anonymous librarians have just revealed their own list: 88 “Books That Shaped America.” The fiction list is mainly a catalogue of obvious choices: Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, The Red Badge of Courage, The Catcher in the Rye, The Scarlet Letter, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Little Women, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Among them, however, are some questionable items. Why Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, and not his Collected Stories, which completely reshaped American prose? Why Gone with the Wind? Did it really change America, or just the budgets of American cinema? Similarly, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan is hardly a nation-shaping novel; its sway—if any—was to give employment to a parade of Hollywood actors, white and black, as well to a series of chimpanzees who played Cheetah.