 | The Pioneers (Signet Classics) by James Fenimore Cooper
Buy new: $6.95 / Used from: $1.88 This is one of America's few honest novels. It shows that we had all of our today's faults in the very beginning. They are the basis of what we are.
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 | In the American Grain (New Directions Paperbook) by William Carlos Williams
Buy new: $11.07 / Used from: $1.37 This is our best history book. You will have to struggle through this one. It contains no sugar to help its medicine go down.
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 | Arundel by Kenneth Roberts
Buy new: $12.89 / Used from: $2.24 Kenneth Roberts is America's best historical novelist, which explains why he is mostly out of print. Shouldn't we value the truth?
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 | Manhattan Transfer: A Novel by John Dos Passos
Buy new: $10.20 / Used from: $1.13 Another of America's few honest novels. Its mirror shows all our faults intact at the beginning of the 20th Century. A story of hope deferred.
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 | The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
Buy new: $10.08 / Used from: $1.09 Another of America's honest novels. Chandler struggled up through pulp and success to give us this. And all America took was the narrator's tone. We should have taken the honesty.
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 | Human Comedy (An Hbj Modern Classic) by William Saroyan
Buy new: $25.65 / Used from: $1.97 More honesty, from the Second World War. Its ending was so challenging to the common mind that there are editions out there with a less-challenging ending.
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 | The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Buy new: $9.79 / Used from: $3.85 Americans' desire for naughtiness convinces them that this is a naughty book. It isn't. It is only showing us as we are and the hopelessness of living with that if left unchanged.
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 | Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Buy new: $6.95 / Used from: $3.97 This is the greatest, most honest, book America has produced. It, in turn, produced the greatness of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and of many other honest men who brought their own honest goodness to the world. That is why Americans hate this book and consistently defame its author.
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 | The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet's Memoir of Living Off the Grid by Baron Wormser
Buy new: $17.05 / Used from: $13.14 This is the only memoir written by an American which approaches the honesty and depth expressed in Walden. Which explains why Americans ignore it.
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 | Leaves of Grass: The Original 1855 Edition (Thrift Edition) by Walt Whitman
Buy new: $3.00 / Used from: $1.00 Our best book of poetry.
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 | ABC of Reading by Ezra Pound
Buy new: $11.16 / Used from: $2.25 Trying to overcome America's faults destroyed Pound. This does not make his understanding of them less true. The Cantos are our most difficult poetry requiring one to know all the hard languages of the world. This book is in English, or rather American.
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 | The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family's Progress (American Literature Series) by Gertrude Stein
Buy new: $12.71 / Used from: $0.30 Oh your God, as a friend of mine would say, read this and understand us -- I dare you.
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