Dictionary of American Literature

I read the Dictionary of American Literature to prepare for Jeopardy! We got the book from someone we knew from the puzzle parties. He used to prepare the Sunday crossword for the L.A. Times and last year he was giving away many of his reference books. With the Internet he no longer needed many of them. He passed away last year.

This version of the Dictionary of American Literature was first published in 1959 and had an original price of $1.50. It's about 253 pages long and is organized by the writers' last names. In addition to entries for writers it also has entries for literature magazines such as Harper's or Smart Set and it has surveys each several pages long on Criticism, Drama, the Novel, Poetry, and the Short Story. The more famous writers usually have longer entries and more biographical information. The most famous have their photo shown in separate sections. The entries tend to focus more on the writers' works than their bios though they don't give plot summaries. There are entries for nearly every published author, poet, playwright, or critic up to that point. (There are some omissions that I'll mention later.) I had never heard of most of them.

In the Dictionary authors that are more well known under a pseudonym are listed under their pseudonym (e.g. Mark Twain). Authors that wrote under both their real name and a pseudonym have their full entry under their real name and a cross reference under their pseudonym. Some of them had rather humorous pseudonyms such as "Geoffry Crayon" for Washington Irving and "Timothy Titicomb" for Josiah Gilbert Holland.

The book is in pretty good condition for a 1959 paperback. I did have to tape the back to keep it from falling apart. It has all its pages and there's some underlining in pencil. This is probably where our fellow puzzler used the book to make up crossword clues. The book does show its age in the language it uses. Screenplays for motion pictures are called "scenarios" and screenwriters are called "scenarists."

Most of the entries are for Caucasian males, mostly deceased, though quite a few were alive at the time of the book. I was curious about whether any of the entries are still alive today and I only found one, Richard Wilbur, a poet born in 1921 making him 37-38 at the time of the book and 86-87 today. The youngest entry is probably for Truman Capote who was born in 1925 but I think he passe away in the 70's or 80's.

There are many female writers and some African American male writers such as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. However, African Americans James Baldwin and Zora Neal Hurston were missing and they put out works at the same time as many of the writers who had entries. I couldn't find any African American women that I knew of with entries. They didn't usually state the writer's race directly but they sometimes alluded to it. There didn't seem to be any entries for Latino or Asian American writers either.

The entries were hardly unbiased accounts and the compiler tried to make them interesting. Some writers had comical premises for stories and novels. Robert Herrick's The Common Lot concerns "an architect who builds cheap tenements that crumble on the tenants." Fitz-Jame O'Brien's short story "The Diamond Lens" is "about an inventor whose powerful microscope enabled him to see a tiny female in a drop of water, with whom he falls in love." Joseph Hergesheimer has a slightly funny entry describing how he "studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and in Italy until he had spent his inheritance." The most humorous opinion of the compiler is of Josiah Gilbert Holland: "His major distinction is achieving incredible popularity with incredibly poor work."

You might think that reading a dictionary of any kind would be rather boring and tedious and it more or less is. However, I still feel I got some things out of it. I learned of authors I had never heard of before such as Erskine Caldwell and John Gould Cozzens. It will also be worth it if it helps me on Jeopardy!