February 27, 2009
Washington, DC

“…it will all boil down to work. If I can write again then I can be happy again. I know I will put off doing it for fear it has all been drained out of me, although I don’t for a moment believe that. Indeed, I feel the stirring of some power.” — John Steinbeck to his friend Bo Beskow, Pacific Grove, CA, Sept. 19, 1948

“If I can write again then I can be happy again.”

Today, February 27 — what would have been John Steinbeck’s 107th birthday — I catch myself falling for the man all over again. Reread that sentence of Steinbeck’s, and listen to how it inverts all the conventional wisdom about writers and depression. He doesn’t say, “If I can be happy again then I can write again.” No, he puts the writing first, where I suspect it belongs. “If I can write again then I can be happy again.”

Society has brainwashed us into thinking that writer’s block is a symptom, not a cause. We look at the interrupted arc of, say, Dashiell Hammett’s career — the decade of apprenticeship, the five years of intense productivity, the long decades of sodden silence — and we know the question we’re supposed to ask. After The Thin Man, what kept him from finishing anything?

It was the drink. It was the success. It was New York. It was that mean Lillian.

It was all of that. It was none of that. Or was it depression? His father always was a little aloof…

Can I possibly be the first to ask whether we don’t have it all exactly backwards? What if, one day, Hammett stopped writing for the most ridiculously trivial of reasons? Maybe he ran out of ribbon, and his motor wouldn’t start. Could be. It doesn’t really matter, because he wasn’t lost yet. He could always just take the car into the shop tomorrow, and buy fresh ribbons by the cartonload.

No, I’m betting what killed him was the next day, when he fixed his Nash and got the ribbon home and then just idly wondered, innocent as a powderburn, what he should have written the day before. And later, if only to stop himself from wondering, that’s when he took the drink. And got depressed, and went to New York, and all the rest of it.

Steinbeck understood this. He didn’t believe that writer’s block was a symptom of depression, any more than the flu is a symptom of sneezing. On the contrary, writer’s block invites depression, at least for a writer, just as surely as sloth invites bedsores. And writing well isn’t a byproduct of happiness, but a spell to summon it, and an amulet against its loss. “If I can write again then I can be happy again.”

So here’s mud, on his birthday, in John Steinbeck’s undeceived eye. Like most writers, he could be streaky in both output and quality. But he never kidded himself that writing was anything other than what it is: a daily prayer for the ability to do it well.

February 27, 2009
Washington, DC

Another two-fer Big Read birthday today — Happy Birthday to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807) and John Steinbeck (1902).

February 26, 2009
Washington, DC

I remember how thrilling it was to learn how to cross the high-traffic Merrick Boulevard by myself when I was a second grader. (I also remember that when my mother let me cross the street by myself to go to ballet lessons, I made my teacher call her to make sure it was okay for me cross the street by myself on the way back!) Well, it turns out that “Stop, look, and listen” aren’t just good rules to follow when crossing the street. It’s also great advice for browsing the newly expanded Big Read Web site.

STOP wondering what to do with your free time. Check out The Big Read calendar to find an event taking place near you.

LOOK at the new films on Ray Bradbury and Amy Tan to get the inside track on these popular Big Read authors.

LISTEN to an excerpt from a Big Read audio guide like this one of author Richard Rodriguez talking about John Steinbeck’s rendering of California in The Grapes of Wrath.

And I’ll add a fourth “do” to the list — REPEAT!

February 25, 2009
Washington, DC

The 81st Academy Awards are already receding into the distant past — who knew Anne Hathaway could sing!?! — but still it’s worth noting that four film versions of Big Read titles have received Best Picture noms. A Farewell to Arms (1931-32), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), The Maltese Falcon (1941), and To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) all made Oscar’s Best Picture short list, although none took home top flick gold.

From the Readers’s Guide to The Grapes of Wrath, here’s John Steinbeck’s response to his first look at 20th Century-Fox’s take on his novel:

“[Producer Darryl] Zanuck has a hard, straight picture in which the actors are submerged so completely that it looks and feels like a documentary film and certainly has a hard, truthful ring . . . it is a harsher thing than the book, by far. It seems unbelievable but it is true.”

Learn more about Steinbeck and The Grapes of Wrath in the Reader’s Guide.

August 27, 2008
Washington, DC

25 states. 15 days. 8 novels. 2 countries. 1 Ford Escape Hybrid. 1 seriously saddle-sore G-man.

The Big Read initiative will hit the highway Sept. 12-27 for the Big Ride, a fortnight of events around the country designed to stitch together more than a dozen of the two hundred cities and towns hosting NEA-sponsored one-city-one-book programs during the 2008-2009 school year. As project director, I’ll have a ringside seat behind the wheel as all these communities come together for monthlong celebrations of great literature.

The tentative waypoints of the Big Ride loop, with this caveat: I brake for historical markers.

Among other pit stops on the trip, I’ll meet up with residents of Winston-Salem reading The Grapes of Wrath, help unveil an NEA-midwifed anthology of Mexican literature in El Paso, celebrate The Great Gatsby on a phantom pub-crawl of San Francisco’s Prohibition-era speakeasies, watch Coloradoans learn how to mush a dogsled team in tribute to The Call of the Wild, and just generally make a spectacle of myself in service of The Big Read.

Envisioned as the first of several such road trips, September’s Ride marks a sort of national debut for The Big Read. Developed three years ago in response to the 2004’s alarming Reading at Risk report ( http://www.arts.gov/research/Research_Brochures.php ) — which found that fewer than half of Americans today read for pleasure — The Big Read has given people in hundreds of cities and towns something in common to talk about more interesting than the weather. Never before, though, have consecutive events across the country communicated the ambitious scope of the project.

Since 2005, organizations ranging from libraries to zoos have received grants to create calendars of events around books they choose from a growing NEA list. The roster of more than 20 books includes stories as beloved as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and as new as Tobias Wolff’s Old School — a book I had the honor of reviewing in the San Francisco Chronicle just five years ago as the Chron’s book critic.

Thanks to the generosity of the Ford Motor Company, my colleagues and I at The Big Read now have an eye-catching, borscht-red, fuel-efficient pair of wheels to tool around the country in. Nicknamed Rosie — for the paint job, but also for Don Quixote’s old mount Rocinante — this hybrid gives the initiative a kitschy sense of adventure too rarely associated with reading nowadays. Here at the NEA, we avail ourselves of Rosie for transportation to keynote speeches, event introductions, even appearances in the occasional holiday parade. But Rosie’s trips have always been short hops — until now.

The whole idea of The Big Read has always been to remove from great books any taint of the medicinal, and restore the freshness that gave them their staying power in the first place. Cities and towns that participate report substantial upticks in library circulation, book sales, and general civic involvement. In other words, all indicators tell us that The Big Read is onto something. If a cross-country road trip in a hybrid can help rope lapsed readers into picking up a book, nobody should be above this kind of showmanship.

So watch this space for dispatches leading up to, and especially during, The Big Ride. Please bombard me at bigreadblog@arts.gov with any questions or suggestions about road food, deep-pocketed and/or philanthropy-minded gas or motel chains, audiobooks for company, mobile voice-recognition systems for dictation, literary sidetracks along the way, techniques for averting deep-vein thrombosis, and anything else that seems even tenuously relevant.

And please take a look at the tentative route map above. From the starting line here on Pennsylvania Ave. Sept. 12, to the breakers beyond Pacific Coast Highway Sept. 20, to the checkered flag back here on Sept. 27 at the National Book Festival, the Big Ride will help create readers from coast to coast and back again. If you find yourself anywhere along Rosie’s itinerary, or if you just see a red hybrid festooned with Big Read signage speeding by, by all means wave me down…

May 7, 2008
Delaware Valley, PA

Do you know the term “run of show”? It’s performers’ lingo for the printed rundown of every segment in any given revue, vaudeville bill, or other raree show. Submitted below, with abiding gratitude and wonderment, is an annotated run of show for last Friday’s kickoff of Pike County’s The Grapes of Wrath Big Read at the Delaware Valley High School auditorium, just inside the jagged Pennsylvania slice of the Penn-New York-New Jersey border pie. . .

“JAZZ BAND playing as audience enters under the direction of Lance Rauh

1. WELCOME REMARKS by Jeffrey Stocker”

A word here about Jeff Stocker’s American Readers Theatre, the principal grantee for this Pike County Big Read of Steinbeck: Beats me why more theater companies don’t apply for Big Read grants. To go by this troupe, rep companies have the showmanship, the elbow grease, and the chutzpah to round up partners all over town and put a Big Read out where everybody can see it. One instance of this is the terrific school participation that A.R.T. has lined up…

“2. GOD BLESS AMERICA MEDLEY” performed by DVHS Band And Chorus under the direction of Gordon Pauling.

I have to confess, I was a mite skeptical of that “GOD BLESS AMERICA MEDLEY.” Stocker introduced it by recounting how Steinbeck asked to have the lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” printed on the endpapers to the hardcover edition of The Grapes of Wrath. The novel’s title comes from the song’s lyrics — written just a couple-three blocks from here, by Julia Ward Howe in the Willard Hotel, as all of us with bumper stickers reading “I Brake for Historical Markers” will tell you. But if the lyrics come from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” why not sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”? Still, any misgivings about the musical offerings were allayed in short order by the return of the high-school Jazz Band, and by some glorious musical surprises farther down the bill…

3. Introduction of DVHS Administration and Faculty by Dr. Candice Finan

4. Art Show on screen projections while Jazz Band plays

5. RED RIVER VALLEY performed by Dingman/Delaware Middle School Chorus under the direction of Brian Krauss”

Here’s where some real thought had obviously gone into the program. Up on a scrim behind the singers passed a montage of carefully chosen New Deal images by Dorothea Lange and other photographers for the Farm Security Administration. “Red River Valley” made the perfect followup to this medley, since it crops up not just in the John Ford and Nunnally Johnson’s classic movie of The Grapes of Wrath, but in just about every other picture Ford ever directed.

As you might expect of a Big Read ringmastered by a theatrical company, the film component of the Delaware Valley’s Big Read is especially strong. They’re showing The Grapes of Wrath, of course, but whose inspired idea was it to show Robert Riskin’s It Happened One Night, or Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo? Great ideas both, the first for its pure screwball 1930s escapism, the second for its loving evocation of what movies and moviehouses meant to a country sandbagged by the Depression. Speaking of which, the vintage unrestored Milford Theatre in town is a real bijou in the rough. Anybody out there looking for a treasure is hereby enjoined to follow the neon glow to on Catherine Street in Milford, PA..

“6. Introduction of FILM FESTIVAL with showing of original trailer for THE GRAPES OF WRATH by Greg Giblin

7. “SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW” sung by Natasha Paolucci, DVHS student

8. “THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES” sung by Ray Weeks, Pike County HS”

There’s nothing like an old standard, belted out for all its worth by a teenager born around the time its copyright expired. Natasha Paolucci fairly sang the stuffing out of Yip Harburg’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” followed by music teacher Ray Weeks plangently crooning “Thanks for The Memories.” Just the thing for a Big Read wayfarer like me, pining from the road for the Jonathan Schwartz-programmed High Standards channel of our sainted Big Read partner XM Satellite Radio…

“9. AMERICAN READERS THEATRE read from THE GRAPES OF WRATH screenplay with Jared Feldman

10. JOFFREY BALLET SCHOOL presents “THE GHOST OF TOM JOAD,” performed by Danny Ryan and Nicole Padilla, choreography by John Magnus”

By this point, I was discreetly weeping. The whole kickoff was turning into a perfect distillation of the month to come, a sampler of the kind of meal I regrettably never get to stick around for. American Readers Theatre finally got to shine with one early and then one late scene from Nunnally Johnson’s Grapes of Wrath screenplay. The latter was Tom Joad’s climactic “Wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat” speech, which producer Darryl Zanuck used to take credit for with unwary interviewers — who didn’t that know it comes straight from the book.

Then came a mindblower. Turns out the choreographer John Magnus has a place in the area, so he corralled a couple of Joffrey dancers in from Chicago to perform a original pas de deux, set to Bruce Springsteen’s haunting “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” Lovely, simply lovely.

“11. HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN,” performed by Sandy Stalter

12. CLOSING REMARKS by David Kipen, NEA Director of Literature, National Reading Initiatives

13. THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND,” performed by Natasha and Jared, with sing-along”

In between Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign song “Happy Days Are Here Again” and America’s shadow national anthem, Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land “– in its true uncensored version, no small mercy — I took the microphone and snorfled out my lachrymose thanks for about double the allotted five minutes. Why had I never heard of Milford, Pennsylvania, before? Why haven’t you? All I know is, I wouldn’t have traded my aisle seat in the Delaware Valley High School Auditorium for Joel Cairo’s own orchestra seats at the Geary Theater in San Francisco.

There followed wine, cheese, and a whole lot of grapes, and at last a sorrowful look at the American flag bunting that became Abraham Lincoln’s impromptu death shroud, which reposes at, of all places, the Milford Historical Society. Then a festive wrap party hosted by Jeff Stocker and A.R.T. trouper Greg Giblin — who, I suspect, did a lot more of the heavy lifting for this thriving Big Read than he was letting on — and, belatedly, back to the nearby Port Jervis Comfort Inn for a warm bed and a too-early wake-up call. . .

March 21, 2008
Washington, DC

Lately, politicians and pundits agree that America seems reluctant to talk about racism in any but the most sensationalistic terms. They’re not wrong, either. Quietly though, one city and town at a time, a nationwide program called The Big Read is starting to help Americans kick around subjects like race — and class, and free speech, and immigration, and any number of other topics that good neighbors usually make a habit of avoiding.

Nobody expected this civic side benefit when my colleagues at the National Endowment for the Arts and I went about hatching The Big Read. All we wanted was to arrest the mortifying erosion in American pleasure reading that, like a rush-hour mudslide, can narrow the road toward a humane, prosperous society down to one elite lane.

Cynthia Ozick. Photo © Nancy Crampton

But sometimes, instead of working against us, the law of unintended consequences is actually on our side. In the course of helping cities do successful one-city one-book programs, I’m discovering a nationwide hunger to talk about the very subjects that tend to make us nervous. Traveling around the country watching The Big Read work, I’ve noticed a real impatience with “polite conversation,” with having to choose one’s words so carefully that any hope of a natural give-and-take gets lost.

Take Wallowa County, Oregon, where a literary center called Fishtrap won a modest grant to do a Big Read of The Grapes of Wrath. It might have been easy to treat the book like a period piece, showing the movie, hosting book discussions, having teenagers record oral histories of senior citizens who remember the Depression firsthand — all of which Fishtrap did, and did well. But they also devised a “hard-luck dinner,” where ticket-buyers didn’t know ahead of time whether they’d get steak, hardtack, or go hungry. That led to the kind of frank discussion that might be awkward in a checkout line, but somehow crops up spontaneously whenever a great book comes to hand.

Then there’s Lewiston, Maine, where the nationally ranked Bates debating team took up the question “Should communities have the right to ban books from school libraries?” in a public forum on Fahrenheit 451. Or Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, where a keynote address on To Kill a Mockingbird and racial equality moved the city editor of the local paper to face up to her family’s slave-owning past. Or consider Waukee, Iowa, which chose arguably the most challenging book on our list, Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl , and has turned it into a citywide consideration of the Holocaust.

In Los Angeles, the County Library will celebrate Rudolfo Anaya’s novel Bless Me, Ultima with — among dozens of other events this spring — “A Bulldozed Barrio: Recalling Chavez Ravine.” It’s a presentation by those inquisitive, award-winning mavens of The Baseball Reliquary, so don’t expect any checked swings about how the Dodgers wound up on land once promised for affordable housing.

Don’t get me wrong. The Big Read won’t solve America’s reading woes single-handedly, and a few candid discussions with our neighbors about issues we usually duck isn’t going to turn any American city into Periclean Athens overnight. (Even Athens lied to itself about slavery.) But anything that helps not only defrost the usual glacial pace of racial reconciliation around America, but also defuse artist-rancher misunderstanding in Marfa, Texas, and Russian immigrant tensions among the Mennonites in Ephrata, Pennsylvania — where they’re reading Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich – is at least worth the candle.

How does the simple act of reading a good book and hashing it out with the person next to you break the ice for more and, just as important, less serious conversations? The NEA could conduct ten times as many surveys and evaluations as we’re already doing of The Big Read, and still never get to the bottom of that one.

My best guess is that reading is, sappy as it sounds, like falling in love: It works us over when we’re not looking. It unlocks us. We forget ourselves, and wake to find we’re talking more freely, laughing louder. We’re quicker to cry, and we blush brighter than we ever used to. To paraphrase the last line of the book that first hooked me –Jim Bouton’s Ball Four – you spend your time cracking open a book, and “in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”

February 15, 2008
Washington, DC

Things ain’t what they used to be. Adam and Eve expelled from Paradise. The Dodgers leaving Vero Beach. Warren Zevon dead. Reading down. The list goes on.

There’s a word for this type of melancholy, and it isn’t griping. It’s elegy, from the Greek elegos, meaning a poem lamenting a bygone era or someone lost. For as long as there have been people to say it, there have been people saying how soft we all used to have it — back when publishing was a gentleman’s profession, when ballplayers didn’t juice, when fire didn’t make the cave walls all sooty. Not many people know this, but right after the Big Bang, guys said to a bartender, “Sure was nicer when all matter was compressed into a single point no larger than this shotglass.”

The Big Read author John Steinbeck interrogated the impulse to lazy elegy in his other triple-decker classic besides The Grapes of Wrath, the elegiacally named East of Eden. In it the sheriff’s deputy and his boss are riding across the valley to grill Steinbeck’s hero, Adam Trask, about how his monstrous wife, Cathy, happened to shoot him in the shoulder. The deputy looks out at the land and says — with Steinbeck’s great ear picking up every last word — “Christ, I wish they hadn’t killed off all the grizzly bears. In eighteen-eighty my grandfather killed one up by Pleyto weighed eighteen hundred pounds.”

Steinbeck’s gift is to put into the deputy’s mouth a nostalgia that most of us feel at one time or another, and then to undercut it immediately. Sure, Julius misses the now-extinct California grizzly — but maybe if his own family hadn’t been so quick with a Remington, there might still be one or two left. Steinbeck doesn’t ridicule our elegiac reflex, but he’s far too smart not to point out the hypocrisy that often thrums under it like an aquifer.

Then again.

For almost as long as folks have been saying how soft we all used to have it way back when, there have been others who’ll say that’s a crock. They insist that everybody always thinks we’re living in, to invoke Thomas Pynchon, “the spilled, the broken world.” They like to write opinion pieces with elegiac quotes about how the automobile has ruined everything, or how insipid television is, and then – whoa, Nelly! – try to make you feel like an idiot for not guessing that the quote in question was written in 1910 or 1940, respectively. In other words, the world can’t be getting worse because folks thought the world was getting worse even when it was better, so how bad can it be?

Alas, there’s a logical flaw in this anti-elegy argument that wants exposing. Isn’t it just possible that the world has always been getting worse? That things seemed worse a hundred years ago because they really were, but that things seem worse now because they’re even worse than they were?

To which anyone might be forgiven for saying, “Thanks, and you have a nice day too.” I’m arguing no particular brief for either side. But it’s interesting to note that of the 21 fine novels to date on the Big Read list, elegies are conspicuous by their near absence.

Poetry may lend itself to elegy more than novels do, or than good novels do. As I look down the Big Read list, I see a lot more stories about what lousier lives we used to lead. A Lesson Before Dying, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Shawl, The Age of Innocence – not a lot of nostalgia there. Only the pretty happy childhoods in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and My Ántonia’s sweet prairie eventually plowed under – have a look at it now, Willa, and see what “plowed under” really looks like – sound like wistful sighs over yesteryear.

In a weird way, Fahrenheit 451 is the most elegiac book on the list. It warns us of a dystopian future without books, a future whose roots could already be glimpsed when Bradbury wrote it half a century ago. If anything, Montag’s story aches with a kind of nostalgia for the present — a useful phrase, into which my preliminary provenance inquiries have proven inconclusive.

Dubious speculation about this expression, or about all things elegiac, are most emphatically welcome at kipend@arts.gov. And now, this post isn’t what it used to be. It used to be unfinished…

December 11, 2007
Baltimore, MD

As Herman Glogauer of Kaufman and Hart’s Once in a Lifetime would say, the “beauty part” of The Big Read is that it keeps outstripping anything we can mastermind for it. Right now we’re piloting a possible extension of TBR into what I have to keep reminding myself are called correctional facilities. The thinking around here goes that, while we’re working at getting Americans to read – something hardly anybody would dream of arguing with — we should also make time to do something for as friendless a population as you can name, i.e., people in prison.

Only hitch is, anything we can think of here in the office, Big Read organizers have already improvised out there on the hustings. Quite a few Big Reads have already incorporated some kind of correctional component, including the prison arts workshop in Canton, Ill., that created a remarkable 6-foot papier-mache copy of To Kill a Mockingbird (A Cantonese Big Read, October 12th, 2007).

So yesterday, when I took the train — up? down? over? — to Baltimore for a presentation to a conference of state arts agencies, who did I meet but a woman who’s already ringmastered a successful Big Read prison partnership? This was Catherine Richmond-Cullen, who as part of a Grapes of Wrath read in Scranton, Pa., brought Steinbeck’s novel – about, lest we forget, Tom Joad’s release from the graybar hotel and his attempt to make it on the outside – to a readership primed to appreciate it as few others ever have.

Take it from Catherine, none of this will ever be easy. Most prison regulations forbid giving inmates so much as a PostIt, which means you can’t exactly leave them books to read between visits. Also, prison regs are notoriously changeable, so that something a visiting facilitator could do one week may well be against the rules the next. Makes it kind of tricky to plan a curriculum. Also, as the NEA’s recent To Read or Not to Read study demonstrates, most felons tend not to be very big readers in the first place. Not to put too fine a point on it, the majority of prisoners can’t read, or not above a third-grade level.

Still, somehow, dedicated people like Catherine and Natalie Costa Thill, who does terrific writing workshops with prisoners in the Adirondacks, find ways to get inmates reading and writing. They do it with guided reading, where the fluent readers help nonfluent ones keep up. They do it with peer writing, where the literate prisoners help write for those who can’t. It all pays off, not least when the smartest inmates, who — as in school — are often the biggest discipline problems, suddenly become model prisoners for fear of losing their workshop privileges.

Here, amid the, ahem, artful chiaroscuro of this photo, Catherine is showing off some quotes from prisoners about The Grapes of Wrath. The one that stays with me is the guy who wrote about Steinbeck’s desert tortoise – the one that creeps across Route 66, gets sideswiped off onto the shoulder, and then just climbs back out and resumes his crawl. “The turtle,” this prisoner wrote, “reminds me of myself: hard shell – and a soft underside.” If this guy, reading literature for only a few sanctioned minutes a week, can recognize himself and his world in it, what excuse do the rest of us have not to?

July 13, 2007
Washington, DC

I hate to deluge the Communications office with yet another post, but by the clock on the wall, it’s time for Uncle David to dip into the ol’ mailbag and see what you blog fans out there in cyberland are exercised about. Turns out there’s a fascinating letter from someone who writes:

“I am curious of your stance on books which constantly battle censorship in schools and the public realm, such as Huckleberry Finn. Will you push to raise awareness of certain books which parents, or communities may deem inappropriate for the way they describe slavery, war, sexuality, inequality?”

Good question. As it turns out, there aren’t a whole lot of books out there that haven’t been deemed inappropriate by “somebody.” Here at the Big Read, at least three of our books reliably rank pretty high on the American Library Association’s annual list of challenged books: The Grapes of Wrath, To Kill a Mockingbird, and A Farewell to Arms. I’d guess that the mystical elements in A Wizard of Earthsea and Bless Me, Ultima make them frequent targets, too.

But as for whether we’ll “push to raise awareness” of these or other potentially controversial books, my instinct is not to do any more pushing than our Readers Circle already did by putting them on the list. None of us would choose a book because it’s been banned, any more than we’d choose a book because it’s innocuous.

Our principal criterion is and always will be literary excellence. If that means ruffling a few mockingbird feathers, we’ll just have to live with it. Certainly Dashiell Hammett, author of our list’s Maltese Falcon — and nobody’s schoolmarm — isn’t going to be getting any posthumous medals from GLAAD any time soon.

As for Huck Finn, Big Read aficionados may have noticed that among our announced new additions for Fall ‘08 will be The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In the first place, Tom Sawyer is an unalloyed gem, and I’d argue a much deeper book than many smart people give it credit for. While more people may know a set-piece or two from Tom Sawyer — painting the fence, etc. — I suspect that more people have read Huck Finn, and one of things the Big Read endeavors to do as it hits its stride is to enlarge people’s ideas about
what is or isn’t canonical.

Second, Tom Sawyer is, on its own terms, a more successful book than Huck Finn. By that I don’t mean better, or deeper, or more worth reading. I only mean that Tom Sawyer realizes its own modest ambitions more completely than its sequel. The ending of Huck Finn just plain doesn’t work, as Big Read mainstay Ernest Hemingway was not the first to point out. The ending of Tom Sawyer, while perhaps less memorable, unquestionably delivers.

Third, as I’ve suggested, there’s more to Tom Sawyer than meets the eye, as there usually is to less-read books by great writers. Here, after all, is a book set in the antebellum South that begins with a scene about a fence–that is to say, a border — being painted white — that is to say, the opposite of black — as a result of somebody getting other people do his work for him. As Tom Lehrer once remarked, you don’t have to be Freud to figure that one out.

We do our best around here, but we need questions like this one to help keep us honest. So please, keep that correspondence coming. And in the meantime, check out the Big Read Blog’s maiden foray into the age of streaming video: some footage that Thomas Edison shot of Mark Twain …