American Authors

           9. Of course I am thankful for a zillion things about America right where I live but as a nation we share a heritage that is greater than geography and I want to point that out in these entries also. We have a rich heritage in our American authors and I am a huge fan of several American authors living and dead.

The sublimity of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden brings me a sense of comfort as does his inspiring Civil Disobedience which has the capacity to give a sense of order to even the most disorderly times as now.

            Edgar Allen Poe and Stephen King share a rich American experience of the horror genre. I know it might sound weird but it can be so much easier to fall asleep with the scary clown of It or one of Poe’s live burial stories than watching the news. As far as contemplating life, Robert Frost and Sylvia Plath are number one in my book. “Nothing gold can stay.” I love the help F. Scott Fitzgerald gives of humanizing the Jazz Age and Hemingway is a master at giving complex thoughts meaning through the least amount of words. The two of them help me understand so much about those film strip memories I have of my grandparents and great grandparents 50 years ago.

          You know I have studied and taught these masters for years. I could go on and on about the great American poets, What Whitman, Emily Dickinson giving voice to the voiceless, ee cummings stylistically rearranging the world; Langston Hughes daring to dream; Frederick Douglass forcing us to look beyond the fuzzy warm poetry of the fireside to the realities of oppression and slavery. And what about the angst of Holden Caulfield and the navigation of life from the point of view of an adolescent? Thank J. D. Salinger. Thank you America for your beautiful writers. Go read some of these masters.