How America was shaped

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Just in time for today's 236th anniversary of American independence, the Library of Congress has opened an exhibition that explores the forging of the culture of the nation.
"Books That Shaped America" will run through September 29 at the library's Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First Street S.E. For those who can't make it to Washington, the exhibit's list is available online here. The library welcomes comments, and nominations for books to add, here.
The inaugural list, which contains books published as early as 1751 and as recently as 2002, has much merit.
Authors honored include women as well as men, and are not limited to writers of fiction. On the list as well as the novel are the schoolbook and the cookbook, the epic poem and the expedition log, the autobiography and the adventure story.  Even a road atlas.
As a list of what shaped America, though, it has a glaring omission:
Books by non-Americans.

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Seems unlikely that this is the library's subliminal comment on the American strain of isolationism. It is equally unlikely, though, that the listmakers meant to say that nothing published outside the United States affected the United States. The latter group of books helped Americans, as the Scottish poet Robert Burns put it, "To see oursels as ithers see us!"
A few examples:
► Works by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels erected an ideological framework that existed in opposition to, and so helped to etch the identity of, American political economy.
► Not only did litigation over James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) create a legal opening for freer expression within the United States, but the work itself helped American authors to free their own creativity.

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► For many Americans, The Diary of a Young Girl, as the 1952 U.S. edition was titled, is the touchstone account of the horrors of the Holocaust. It first was published in Dutch, as Het Achterhuis, 2 years after the 1945 death of its author, Anne Frank, at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.
Thus even as we celebrate Library of Congress recognition of our favorite books -- including ones by IntLawGrrls foremothers Betty Friedan (Feminine Mystique, 1963) and Rachel Carson (Silent Spring, 1962) -- we look forward to a richer, more global list of books that shaped America.

On March 5

On this day in ...
... 1882 (130 years ago today), Dora Marsden (right) was born in the community of Marsden in Yorkshire, England. When she was about 8, economic reversals led her father and eldest brother to leave for America while her mother worked as a seamstress. At 13, she began to work as a tutor, and after attending what's now Victoria University in Manchester, she became a schoolteacher. (photo credit) Active in the women's suffrage movement even as a student, she would work full-time for the Women's Social and Political Union for a couple years. From 1911 on, Marsden devoted herself to publishing, serving as editor of feminist, modernist magazines whose patron was Harriet Shaw Weaver: The Freewoman, The New Freewoman, and The Egoist. The last was the 1st to publish "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" by James Joyce. Following the poor reception accorded her own writings, The Definition of the Godhead (1928) and Mysteries of Christianity (1930), Marsden suffered a breakdown. She died in 1960, having spent the last quarter-century of her life as a patient in a psychological institution in Scotland.

(Prior March 5 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On February 2, ...

... 1922, on the 40th birthday of James Joyce, Irish expatriate, a crowd gathered outside Shakespeare & Company, the bookstore that the American expatriate publisher, Sylvia Beach, maintained in the shadow of Notre Dame, at 12, rue de l'Odéon, Paris. They awaited the arrival from Dijon, France, of the very 1st copies of Ulysses (right), the latest novel by Joyce. He and Beach are shown below left in the store, sitting in front of an edition of "the Sporting Times, also known as The Pink 'Un because it was printed on pink paper," which "contained a particularly vitriolic review of Ulysses," which claimed that the book "'appears to have been written by a perverted lunatic who has made a speciality of the literature of the latrine.'" Today Ulysses stands as a preeminent novel of the 20th century. Among its most memorable characters is Molly Bloom, modeled on Joyce's wife, Nora Barnacle (below right). (Dare we call Molly the original Desperate Housewife?) Molly's extended soliloquy -- a piece savored by actors like Fionnula Flanagan -- may be distilled into one oft-repeated word: "Yes."
... 1943 (65 years ago today), after 5 months of heavy fighting, the Soviet Union "announced the final defeat of the German 6th Army at the port of Stalingrad, in southern Russia." According to the BBC, "The battle has been described as among the most terrible of the war so far. " According to the New York Times, "more than 100,000 had been killed" in the last 20 days of the battle.