Books about an idealized American character often make for a body of elusive, exasperating speculations, delivered either on the fly or from a special-pleading pulpit of one sort or another. So there’s something appealing about reversing the polarity of such inquiries, and pursuing the fugitive American character through a series of allegedly representative books. That’s the task literary journalist Jess McHugh has set herself in Americanon, gathering a baker’s dozen of influential and top-selling books that have helped shepherd our republic through the successive trials of mass democracy, industrialism, and modernity, along with various upheavals in private and domestic life.
For McHugh, most canonical works in the American grain follow a pretty straightforward template: They are nonfiction books of advice, built around a conception of a “good American” that, in McHugh’s telling, always works to promote a narrowly exclusive brand of nationalism and marginalizes any expression of racial, gender, or class-bound difference as suspiciously alien and morale-sapping. These representative studies “allow us to see how we’ve arrived in a time when fact is up for debate and American identity is more divided than ever,” McHugh writes. “These books grapple with questions such as: What does it take to be an American? And who gets to decide?” Just as important, McHugh argues, these American texts are typically documents of abiding personal struggles; they tend to narrate, inadvertently or otherwise, an author’s quest for perennial self-improvement projected onto the national stage. The books these writers have handed down to us “are the result of personal and national trauma, and the stories they wrote come out of survivorship.”
McHugh launches her survey with a tandem of reference works: The Old Farmer’s Almanac, first published in 1792, and Daniel Webster’s landmark school “speller” and his dictionary of American English, respectively launched in 1783 and 1823. (This latter work, of course, has been regularly revised and updated through its long subsequent publishing career.) The pairing seems a fitting departure point for a New World social order steeped in the mindset of Enlightenment empiricism, but as McHugh notes, each work bears the idiosyncratic stamp of its creators and the ethos of the early American republic.