Sitting just below it on my shelf is another book that has served me equally well when I was expanding my reading of serious literature: 501 Great Writers.
Like Hammerton's masterwork, it isn't a book you read straight through. It's a book you browse. Open it almost anywhere and you'll encounter someone you've always meant to read—or someone you've never heard of but suddenly want to discover. That's one of the great pleasures of reference books. They don't simply answer questions, they create curiosity.
I've often heard people dismiss the classics as old, difficult, or irrelevant. Yet I've found the opposite to be true. The classics are the books and authors that have survived fashions, politics, literary movements, and changing tastes. Thousands of writers have faded into obscurity while Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Tolstoy, Steinbeck, Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Orwell continue finding new readers.
This doesn't happen by accident.
They continue to speak because they continue to tell us truths about ourselves and our human predicament. Technology changes. Governments rise and fall. Languages evolve. But human nature changes very little. We still love and envy. We still hope and despair. We still wrestle with pride, ambition, betrayal, forgiveness, and the search for meaning. The great writers understood this, and that's why they still feel surprisingly contemporary.
One of the unexpected benefits of books like 501 Great Writers is that it continually introduces us to authors we've somehow overlooked. Some become lifelong companions. Others simply remind us that the world of literature is much larger than my own reading history.
The structure of 501 Great Writers is different from Outline, which is primary excerpts and summaries. 501 features writer bios accompanied by their signature titles, and photos, pointings or illustrations of the authors themselves. For Robert Louis Stevenson, the first three "signature titles" listed are Treasure Island (1883), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and Kidnapped (1889). He also wrote poetry and did some travel writing.
The book is useful for introducing readers to authors with whom we're often unfamiliar such as Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman to win the Noel Prize for literature. Occasionally there's a little sidebar briefly describing one of the author's most significant work. For Lagerlöf there's a callout on The Wonderful Adventures of Nils.
Every writer needs teachers. Some teach us through personal friendship. Others mentor us across centuries. I've frequently mentioned how a mentor, the late John Prin, helped jumpstart my writing career.
The value of a book like this is that it introduces us to writers who have already stood the test of time. They remind me that clarity outlasts cleverness, substance survives fashion, and honest observations about the human condition never become obsolete.
Books are conversations across generations. Every time we open a classic, we're listening to someone whose voice has refused to disappear.
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PostScript: Yesterday I wrote about Thomas Carlyle. I find it interesting that Carlyle's name didn't appear in this volume. I'm curious whether he appears in this publisher's companion volume 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. I just took a peek at the first books listed and see that I've read nine of the first twelve. So many (great) books, so little time!
What recent book have you read that you'd like to recommend to more readers?
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