It is both comforting and exciting to have a collection of great writing at your fingertips. The following suggestions, relating to American literature, will get collectors on their way with 50 hand-picked selections. Read on to learn build a classic book collection.
Instructions
Planning Process
1. Begin by making a list, either by printing out the one below or by making your own, of books you would like as part of your collection. Keep the file handy on your computer, but also print it out in the tiniest font size you can comfortably read. Check off the books you already own, tuck the list in your wallet, and you’ll be ready should a book-buying opportunity come your way.
2. Add volumes to your bookshelves in any of the following ways: Buy them at major booksellers, looking on sale table for bargains. Hunt them out in thrift stores and garage sales. Inquire at antiquarian bookshops or on-line stores for hard-to-find volumes. Ask for them for birthday or holiday gifts.Bid for them on eBay.
What to Collect
3. For fiction, the following authors should be represented in a classic book collection of American literature. Note that parentheses indicate preferred works for each author: Nathanial Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter), Edgar Allan Poe (short stories), James Fenimore Cooper (The Deerslayer), Herman Melville (Moby Dick), Mark Twain (Huckleberry Finn), Bret Harte (short stories), Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom’s Cabin), Henry James (Turn of the Screw), Edith Wharton (Age of Innocence), Stephen Crane (Red Badge of Courage), Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie), Upton Sinclair (The Jungle), F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby), John Dos Passos (U.S.A.), Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises) and William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury).
4. For poetry, look for anthologies containing works by the following poets: William Cullen Bryant, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Edna St. Vincent Millay and T. S. Eliot.
