Another Book You Needn't Bother Reading

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One of my guilty pleasures is reading outdated collections of essays and the like. Sometimes you discover forgotten treasures: A. A. Milne's essay on The Wind in the Willows, for example, or Edward Mott Woolley's writer's-autobiography, Free-Lancing for Forty Magazines. Then again, however, you may come up with Grant Overton's Cargoes for Crusoes, a 1924 guide to what Overton deemed the best fiction of the times.

In all fairness, he did hit upon a few writers with staying power: Aldous Huxley, Stephen Crane, and Edith Wharton, most notably, though he was a little condescending toward Ms. Wharton and most of her gender. The bulk of the book is taken up by writers who are, I fear, little remembered today: Philip Gibbs, Melville Davisson Post (author of the Uncle Abner detective stories), Cosmo Hamilton, E. V. Lucas, Courtney Ryley Cooper... and Thomas Dixon, author of the Clansman trilogy of novels "undoing the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe and giving the deferred answer to Uncle Tom's Cabin." The first of which D. W. Griffith turned into The Birth of a Nation.

The fact that these authors were all once household names and many of them quite wealthy as a result should teach humility to even the most successful of today's writers.

So much work went into this book! Yet, now that I've read it, it's going into the Wee Free Library out front of our house. There to await another antiquarian reader of dubious tastes.

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