Since America’s birth, its writers have attempted to cap­ture the essence of the American dream. Jay Parini, a prolific poet and novelist and one of the nation’s foremost literary scholars, taps into that common project in 

. Putting a welcome twist on the concept of the ­best-­oflist, he searches the landscape of American literature for works that “played a role in shaping the nation’s idea of itself.” Parini is quick to note that his choices aren’t necessarily the “greatest” books, but rather a handful of “nodal points, places where vast areas of thought and feeling gathered and dispersed, creating a nation as various and vibrant as the United States.”

Inspired by British journalist Melvyn Bragg’s 2006 lecture “Twelve Books That Changed the World”—all of them, ahem, English—­Parini settled on a baker’s dozen of works (a nod to the original 13 colonies) that he believes “helped to create the intellectual and emotional contours of this country.” The choices cover a wide swath of literary traditions, ranging from a ­17th-­century journal to 20th-century ­self-­help volumes. (Perhaps anticipating the arguments sure to result from his choices, Parini includes a helpful appendix, “One Hundred More Books That Changed America.”)

He proceeds chronologically, and each book receives the same treatment: a short introduction and author biography, a close reading, and analysis of the work’s legacy. The approach is by nature formulaic, but it is also effective, and Parini’s erudition allows him to deftly maneuver among these classic works to highlight major themes of American life: immigration and assimilation; the struggle for religious and civic freedom; the capacity for ­self-­transformation and personal betterment; the desire to“‘light out for the Territory,’ as Huck Finn put it so well.”

Certain works also cluster together in their similarities.Of Plymouth Plantation(published in 1856), William Bradford’s chronicle of colonial life and possibly “America’s first immigration narrative,” is echoed in the Old Country/New Country dichotomies of Jewish émigré Mary Antin’s memoir 

(1912). The tradition of nature and travel writing initiated by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in their 

 (1814) comes to bear on the meticulous detailing of wilderness living in Henry David Thoreau’s 

 (1854), as well as the acute observations of Mark Twain’s legendary narrator in 

(1885). The latter two works certainly had some effect on the unabashed celebration of freedom that is Jack Kerouac’s propulsive novel

A concern with freedom, in nearly every sense of the word, is the hallmark of all the authors Parini examines: Benjamin Franklin, whose emphasis on self-reliance in his 

(1793) reflected a desire for autonomy and personal independence; Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, who in 

 (1787–88) sought to defend and explain the Constitution, the very embodiment of free democracy; and Harriet Beecher Stowe, creator of 

 Tom’s Cabin(1852), and W. E. B. Du Bois, the revolutionary author ofThe Souls of Black Folk(1903), who both wrote of the struggle to win freedom from slavery and racism; Twain and Jack Kerouac, endlessly curious explorers on the road toward adventure; or Betty Friedan, author ofThe Feminine Mystique(1963) and ambassador for ­second-­wave femin­ism’s struggle to get women out of the ­house.

Though two of Parini’s ­picks—­Dale Carnegie’s 

The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care

 (1946)—may not excite students of literature, their practical, quotidian nature is not out of keeping with the other texts, all of which illuminate “a climate of opinion, consolidating a tradition or marking a fresh turn in a long and winding road.”

Parini’s professorial tendencies show only in the occasional passage of academic-speak. He describes 

, for example, as “clear and crisp, yet highly nuanced, with extraordinary flexibility and a mature sense of subordination—a far cry from the monosyllabic, flat style (with a fear of subordinate clauses) so popular today, post-Hemingway.” Such circumlocutions may deter some readers, but 

 reminds us of the diversity and potency of American literature and its profound connection to the country’s history.

 is the managing editor and nonfiction editor of Kirkus Reviews. His reviews have appeared in

 The New Yorker, The San Francisco Chronicle, The St. Petersburg Times, Mother Jones, 

Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America

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Eric Liebetrau assesses Jay Parini's quest to find thirteen books that changed America.

Canon Fodder

A glance at any bestseller list demonstrates the popularity of memoir. Books such as Mary Karr’s

 (2006) have become literary touchstones for American readers, many of whom identify with the authors’ troubled childhoods and searches for redemption. But the genre itself has ancient roots, writes University of Delaware journalism professor Ben Yagoda in 

. ­First-­person accounts reach back at least as far as 50 BC, when Julius Caesar recounted his war campaigns in his ­self-­flattering 

. Much of the autobiographical writing from that time does not survive, and Yagoda points to 

 (AD 397–98) as the first ­autobiography.

To avoid muddying the waters, Yagoda uses the words “memoir” and “autobiog­raphy” somewhat interchangeably, to mean “a book understood by its author, its publisher, and its readers to be a factual account of the author’s life.” Recently, the genre’s very identity as “factual” has come into question. When in 2005 Oprah Winfrey confronted James Frey about the fabrications and exaggerations of his addiction tale 

—­a book she had touted from her powerful book-club ­pulpit—­the backlash was unprecedented. Feeling emotionally defrauded, readers, critics, and journalists began to question the veracity of other memoirists, including Burroughs (who has written about his childhood living in the dysfunc­tional household of his mother’s psychiatrist) and Ishmael Beah, author of the best-selling book 

, which describes his experience as a child soldier in Sierra Leone. Burroughs’s foster family disputes his account; reporters questioned details and the chronology of Beah’s war years.

The genre’s appeal persists, however, and Yagoda examines its development with a journalist’s thoroughness, beginning with a few modern milestones: the 

fiasco; the record $10 million advance paid to Bill Clinton for 

 (2004); the bizarre sagas surrounding both O. J. Simpson’s 

(2007), his supposedly hypothetical confession of how he murdered his ex-wife, and Peter Golenbock’s “inventive memoir” detailing the sexual exploits of Mickey ­Mantle.

Yagoda tends to lean on extended excerpts, and some readers may skim the longer quotations. But the narrative accelerates as he chronicles the first half of the 19th century, when the “most original and remarkable American autobiographical subgenre . . . drew on narratives of conver­sion, repentance, captivity, and adventure,” as in 

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass 

(1845). The mid-1800s were dominated by works from P. T. Barnum, Ulysses S. Grant, and Mark Twain, all accomplished storytellers and showmen. Barnum, “perhaps the greatest ­self-­promoter of all time,” eagerly and candidly described many of the hoaxes he perpetrated during his performances, including the Feejee Mermaid, “likely the result of someone surgically connecting a fish tail with a monkey’s torso and head.”

The 20th century saw the birth of the “as told to” memoir, as well as the modernist tradition of transforming autobiography into fiction, exemplified by such classics as Marcel Proust’s 

 (1963). In the last several decades, Yagoda observes, memoir has become more open, even graphic, and authorship has been “democratized”—no longer confined to celebrities and politicians. Today, nearly anyone with a hard-luck story can foist it upon an ­often ­eager ­public.

And what of truth in memoir? In closing, Yagoda excavates the cases of Burroughs, Frey, and numerous others whose integrity was ­challenged—­on the grounds of mere exaggeration for effect, the restructuring or shuffling of chronology, or, in Frey’s book, outright lies. Ultimately, Yagoda concludes, “once you begin to write the true story of your life in a form that anyone would possibly want to read, you start to make compromises with the truth.”

 was managing editor and nonfiction editor of Kirkus Reviews until it closed at the end of last year.

Memoir A History.jpg

In the last several decades, memoir has become more open, even graphic, and authorship has been "democratized", no longer confined to celebrities and politicians. Readers continue to eat it up. 