When I met Baylis John Fletcher, Sr., he was nearing the end of his life and recounting his adventures on a cattle drive in 1879. Fletcher had been nineteen years old, "above fryin' size," when he made the trip. He had never been far from his Texas home, so most of what he saw and experienced as he rode the Chisholm Trail was new. For that one trip, Fletcher was a cowboy.

Baylis Fletcher died a century ago, well before I was born. I made his acquaintance as a reader, as you may have guessed. I'm a curious biographer even when I'm not writing, so as I sometimes do when I meet an interesting figure from our history, I set out to learn more.

Here's what I discovered about Baylis John Fletcher. He began life on the fourth of July, 1859, in Lexington, Texas. He was the youngest of seven children, all born within a decade that must have been a wearying blur for their overworked mother, who died bringing Baylis into the world. His maternal grandparents and an unmarried aunt, Ellen Roddy, took the infant off his grieving father's hands, and in their care Baylis grew up riding, roping, and branding. It was a neighboring cattleman named Tom Snyder, owner of 173,000 acres, who hired Fletcher to help bring his animals north. In places like Abilene, Kansas, Texas cattle were being bought and loaded onto railroad cars headed for slaughterhouses in the East, but Snyder's cattle were bound for Wyoming, where ranchers were building herds. Aunt Ellen worried about her nephew facing the dangers of the trail, from bandits to Indians to stampeding animals, but Baylis was determined to go. He traced his sense of adventure to the pioneering spirit of his grandparents, who had migrated to the Texas wilderness from South Carolina and Tennessee.

The cowhands and animals began their trek on April 11, and covered ten to twelve miles a day. They moved north in the daylight, and the men took turns guarding the herd after dark. And of course they encountered some of the hazards Aunt Ellen had feared. One quiet night, as Baylis and a companion spun yarns beside a campfire, they suddenly heard a steady roar and saw a cloud of dust coming closer. The herd was stampeding, for no apparent reason. The two cowboys dove behind an oak--the only shelter in sight--and held on for dear life as the cattle thundered past, so close that their horns tore the bark from the other side of the tree. "It was a moment of supreme terror, but only a moment," Fletcher recalled. In seconds the stampede had moved past, and he was on his horse, racing to outrun the herd and turn the lead animals back. The party met Indians, too, but they were hungry rather than hostile and grateful for the gift of a steer.

Fletcher saw sights that stirred his heart and others that saddened it. By mid-August the men and cattle had reached a high plateau from which Fletcher could make out snow-capped peaks in the Rocky Mountains, a hundred miles away. He compared their creamy color to something familiar, "the yellowish thunderheads seen sometimes at a great distance in Texas." Another day, he came upon the carcass of a horse that had been killed by lightning, lying beside a newly made grave. "No explanation was needed," he wrote. "Some Texas cowboy had cashed in--had been killed by lightning and was buried beside the body of his faithful horse...without a woman's tears, without a single tribute of flowers, and doubtless without a coffin."

Cowboys and cattle reached their destination, Cheyenne, Wyoming, five months after leaving Texas. The men delivered the herd, sold their saddle horses, and proceeded to a bank to collect their pay in cash. Filthy and shaggy from their time on the trail, they bought new clothes, visited a barber, and found rooms in a hotel. In Cheyenne they took in things they had never seen, such as the shoeing of oxen. While they were dining at their hotel, a black man came in and sat down near them. This would never have happened in Texas, and one cowboy was so incensed that he picked up a chair and broke it over the man's head. He was promptly arrested and fined, to his friends' great surprise. Even more astonishing was the news that African Americans could stay in any hotel in Wyoming Territory if they had the money to pay for a room; it was the law. The cowboys spent a few days in Wyoming and then were ready to board a Union Pacific train that took them as far as Waco, Texas, where they bought horses to ride the rest of the way home.

Despite his early training and skill at driving cattle, Fletcher felt drawn to occupations that kept his clothes clean. After his first and only cattle drive, he became a clerk in Lexington's general store. He married Marie Louise Hester, one of his employer's nine daughters, and with her he would have five children. Fletcher trained to be a teacher and rose to be principal of Lexington's public school. A Democrat, he served one term in the Texas legislature, from 1895 until 1897, and he was treasurer of Lee County, Texas, from 1900 through 1911. He also made money trading cotton.

He liked to attend reunions of Confederate soldiers, although he had been too young to fight in the Civil War. And as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, Fletcher began to write historical articles for magazines, inspired by his childhood recollections of religious camp meetings and Indian raids. His longest, most ambitious piece of writing was an account of the cattle drive of his youth. It remained unpublished until 1966, when The Cattleman ran it as a serial. In 1968, the University of Oklahoma Press published it as a book, titled Up the Trail in '79. Fletcher's book is one of the longest and most detailed factual accounts of cowboy life ever written.

Baylis John Fletcher died on December 19, 1912, in Giddings, Texas, the seat of Lee County. He is remembered for his public service and for his book, but he is not the best-known person resting in Giddings City Cemetery. That distinction belongs to William "Wild Bill" Longley, a notorious outlaw if there ever was one.

Now I am curious all over again. What can I discover about Longley? I'll let you know.

"The blaze and glitter of the sea..."

Can't you just see it? Light flashing and fading away as surface plankton phosphoresce, so that the ocean displays "the blazing colors of the autumn leaves before they wither and fall."

These lines are from Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us, a vivid, loving portrait of a region as familiar as it is strange, and the abundant and varied life within it. Carson's sea is a place where finger-long fish form a "silver shower," where "life is scattered almost everywhere through the surface waters like a fine dust." Swept up by the current of Carson's poetic prose, readers watch the seasons change far from shore, as autumn's bloom of plankton gives way to winter's gales. "There is the promise of a new spring in the very iciness of the winter sea," Carson reassures them. At sea it's just as on land, where trees only await the year's first warmth to burst into bud.

Carson asks readers to imagine themselves on the deck of an oceangoing vessel and invites them to stare down at "shimmering disks of jellyfish, their gently pulsating bells dotting the surface as far as you can see." She guides them to the Sargasso, "a place forgotten by the winds," where creatures have adapted to life in a tangle of seaweed miles above the ocean floor. And she reveals so much more to make readers wonder: undersea canyons and mountain ranges, swells raised by strong winds into towers sixty feet tall, or even taller. It's no mystery why I pick up Carson's beautiful book, read a few lines, and am hooked every time.

Rachel Carson published The Sea Around Us in 1951, more than a decade before Silent Spring, her landmark work that alerted the world to the dangers of pesticides. When The Sea Around Us appeared, Jacques Cousteau was only starting to bring his cameras underwater, so most people had never seen the natural wonders Carson wrote about. Like me, they were captivated and could easily imagine the fantastic creatures she brought to life or feel the pulsing tides she described. The reading public loved Carson's book well enough to keep it on the New York Times best-seller list for eighty-six weeks. The Sea Around Us won the National Book Award and the John Burroughs Medal.

Carson was a marine biologist who thoroughly researched her book, but she insisted she had been collecting material for it all her life. "Ever since childhood I've been fascinated by the sea," she said. "And my mind has stored up everything I have ever learned about it as well as my own thoughts, impressions and emotions." She also said, "If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry." I don't question the sea's poetic nature, but I do believe it takes a gifted writer to capture it in words.

The Sea Around Us is something rare, a science book that is timeless. Researchers have added significantly to our knowledge of the sea in the sixty years since it was published, but nothing about The Sea Around Us feels dated. It stands up as literature.

In the 1920s, when Ernest Hemingway started publishing stories and novels, his writing style had people talking. His way of crafting short, declarative sentences and reporting strictly what could be observed opened realms for writers. He wrote like a journalist, and journalists are trained not to speculate. Hemingway demonstrated that a writer who skillfully applies this discipline to fiction can reveal a great deal that remains unwritten and in so doing give the work extraordinary depth.

Readers liked this new writing style, too, but some complained--as many readers of Hemingway do today--that his endings are unresolved. Some people tend to feel uneasy when elements of a story are left hanging in the air, but Hemingway believed that if he had done his job right, readers would know what was going to happen--what had to happen--because of what had come before. And, really, it is a good rule of writing that if something is obvious, then it need not be stated.

I wonder if the real issue isn't something else, though. Because by picking up Hemingway's plot lines and thinking them through to their likely resolutions, we can be left feeling empty; we fail to reach happy endings. But then Hemingway wrote about emptiness. The characters in The Sun Also Rises, members of the Lost Generation, rush off to places like Pamplona, with its festivals and bullfights, to divert themselves, to hide from the fact that their lives have no purpose. "It seemed out of place to think of consequences during the fiesta," Hemingway wrote. The characters drink heavily for the same reason: "Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy," says Jake Barnes, the narrator. Life doesn't get much emptier than this.

Frederic Henry, protagonist of A Farewell to Arms, has emptiness thrust upon him. He volunteers for ambulance duty in the First World War only to learn that war yields nothing noble, that it "is not won by a victory." War is death and suffering and waste, and in the end Frederic is left with naught. He loses even the British nurse he loves, Catherine Barkley, who dies after delivering a stillborn son. "Everything was gone inside of me" is how Frederic describes his emptiness. About Catherine he reports what he can observe: "She was unconscious all the time, and it did not take her very long to die." 

I have to say that I love Hemingway's endings. Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley thinking pretty thoughts in a Spanish taxicab; Frederic Henry walking from the hospital to his hotel in the nighttime rain; Robert Jordan, in For Whom the Bell Tolls, hiding in a pine forest with a broken leg and a ready weapon. Perfect, every one.

The cover of the August 31, 1946, New Yorker featured a summer scene of people cavorting outdoors, playing tennis and sunning at the shore. Subscribers opened the magazine to find not the humor and light reading they were used to in the New Yorker, and which the cartoonish cover had led them to expect, but a statement from the editors informing them that this issue's pages were devoted to a single, somber piece of reporting, "an article on the almost complete obliteration of a city by one atomic bomb." The New Yorker was taking this step "in the conviction that few of us have yet to comprehend the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon, and that everyone might well take time to consider the terrible implication of its use."

The literary work given this extraordinary treatment was John Hersey's Hiroshima, a piece of writing that has become a modern classic. There had been other articles on the devastation in Japan, but these had focused on the damage on the ground, the obliterated buildings and flattened city blocks. Hersey's was the first to explore the human cost. Soon after its publication, the Book of the Month Club printed Hiroshima as a book that was distributed free of charge to all club members. This was one of at least nineteen editions in English and other languages that have appeared since 1947. In 1999, a panel appointed by the Journalism Department at New York University named Hiroshima the finest piece of reporting of the twentieth century. It remains a moving and powerful book, and it is beautifully written.

In fact, Hiroshima is of such consistent quality that in any one piece of it, no matter how small, a reader can see what makes it great. Take the opening sentence:

At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.

We know what happens next, of course, but we can't help reading on. By recording small, seemingly mundane details in the lives of ordinary people, and by employing a journalistic style so plain that it all but disappears, Hersey eloquently communicated the enormous horror of what it was like to live through the atomic-bomb attacks that ended World War II.

The approach was intentional. Hersey sought to remove himself from the narrative, so that no one stood between the reader and the text, to make the reading feel immediate and unedited. "My choice was to be deliberately quiet in the piece," Hersey said in a rare interview,  "because I thought that if the horror could be presented as directly as possible, it would allow the reader to identify with the characters in a direct way."

Characters. It's not a word we usually associate with journalism, yet it seems right. Hersey focused on six people who survived the bombing of Hiroshima and recounted what they saw, felt, and thought in the days and weeks that followed. In addition to Miss Sasaki, he wrote about Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a Methodist minister who had been educated at Emory University; Hatsuyo Nakamura, a seamstress and mother of three who had lost her husband in the war; Masakazu Fuji, a well-established physician who owned a private hospital; Terufumi Sasaki, a younger doctor working for the Red Cross; and Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a Catholic priest and native of Germany.

For these six, as for all Hiroshima's survivors, life changed forever in a silent flash of light. After the blast, news of this desolating, humbling new weapon reached people everywhere--except those coping with life at ground zero, who struggled to understand what had happened to them. Word got around that enemy planes had poured gasoline on the city. If another rumor could be believed, a huge bundle of incendiaries had been dropped. Only after a week had passed, and survivors were falling ill from radiation sickness--and a second bomb had been dropped, on Nagasaki--did people in Hiroshima have access to newspapers explaining how the "sheet of sun" that leveled their city had been the energy released when an atom was split. They stretched their minds to grasp this concept, but "already, Japanese physicists had entered the city with Lauritsen electroscopes and Neher electrometers," Hersey wrote; "they understood the idea all too well."

Time speeds up as Hiroshima progresses. Hersey begins by measuring time in moments, but as the explosion retreats into the past he reports events in terms of hours and then days and weeks. His hope, he said, was that the narrative would "open out into a sense of a long and terrible future." Certainly the future looked bleak in a place where 78,000 people had been instantly wiped out and two-thirds of the buildings had been destroyed; where Miss Sasaki was left permanently disabled and many city residents suffered from burns and sickness. Yet writing is a hopeful act, and in the final pages of Hiroshima Hersey can't help mentioning that just twelve days after the blast, the Hiroshima branch of the Yokohama Specie Bank was already doing business, and he writes that within weeks the wreckage was covered in "a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green." His book ends with the most promising image of all: children. They may have lived through unimaginable horrors, but months after the catastrophe, they are attending school and, like the adults who look after them, carrying on.

I am reminded of a deceptively simple poem by the haiku master Buson, as translated by the scholar Mark Morris, which seems appropriate here:

Now each and every night will end
Dawning in white plum blossoms.

Challenges wear all kinds of disguises. One recently entered my house hidden in the pages of The Gourmet Cookbook.

My husband and I received this hefty yellow book for Christmas. We both love to cook, so a new cookbook is always welcome in our home. This one was, too, although it overwhelmed us. The recipes were long, and complicated. Green chili cheesecake with papaya salsa. Pistachio turkey ballottine with madeira sauce. Apricot souffles with vanilla rum creme anglaise. We couldn't plunge right in; no way. We needed to test the waters slowly and swim into the middle only when we were good and ready. So we placed the book on the kitchen counter and leafed through it whenever we had a few moments to spare.

I considered the various cakes and soups, yet I kept returning to a particular dish: coulibiac. I can't tell you exactly why. Perhaps because the name, which sounds more like an adjective than something to eat, awakened my curiosity. Coulibiac is a classic French rendition of a Russian dish, a relic of haute cuisine of yesteryear: salmon poached in white wine and topped with chopped eggs, then blanketed in a rice mixture, wrapped in a brioche crust, and baked. Whew!

The instructions stretched over three pages, which would generally make a busy person like me pass quickly by. But, "Psst!" coulibiac whispered, and I kept turning back. I read and reread the three pages, and I said to my husband, "John, I think I can do this." Challenge offered and accepted.

No single part of the procedure was especially daunting. Everything I needed to do to make my coulibiac I had done before. It's just that there were so many parts, so many opportunities for something to go wrong. My strategy was to divide and conquer, to break the process into steps that could be completed over two days. Day one: poach the salmon, cook the rice in the poaching liquid, chop and saute two onions, boil four eggs, make the brioche dough. Day two: chop and cook a pound of mushrooms, chop the eggs, and shortly before baking time, assemble the pièce de résistance.

As I chopped and cooked and kneaded, the aroma in the house kept changing. The perfume of salmon in white wine gave way to the mouth-watering promise of onions in the pan, which yielded to the soul-soothing essence of rising dough and the earthiness of mushrooms. But how would the finished product taste? I waited until just before assembly to mix up the rice filling. Into the rice I folded the onions and mushrooms, sour cream, parsley, and dill. I seasoned with salt and pepper, and John gave the filling a taste. "Mmm," he said. "It's going to be good."

And so it was. The crust baked up light and tender, the salmon stayed velvety and moist, and every ingredient contributed its flavor, with none overpowering. And the slices looked so pretty on my testers' plates! Would I make a coulibiac again? Maybe not in a heartbeat, but yes.

When Shakespeare wrote King Henry the Eighth at the start of the seventeenth century, he gave it a different title, All Is True, because to his contemporaries, real people and actual events outrivaled any character or incident an author could invent. Today the opposite  prejudice prevails. Too many writers and readers accept the notion that nonfiction is less insightful, less innovative, less creative than other literary forms without really thinking about whether this is true. The modern viewpoint overlooks the fact that to nonfiction belongs some of the finest prose written in English. And, like any bias, the current  attitude denies enrichment to those who hold it.

I have savored many profound and beautiful nonfiction books over a lifetime of reading, and in this and upcoming journal entries I will revisit several favorites. Some are acknowledged classics, other titles may be less well known, but each has left its mark on me. I'm starting today with a book that entered the world in 1854.

"Simplify, simplify," Henry David Thoreau famously wrote in Walden. We tend to think of Thoreau's account of his year beside Walden Pond as a manifesto on simple living, a how-to manual on letting go of unneeded possessions and unnucessary tasks, and at its most basic level his book is just this. To a cabin snug as an overcoat he brought only a bed, a desk, a table, some chairs, and a few utensils. Living in this way, Thoreau felt close to the earth and in tune with its rhythms. He planted and tended a garden and, as he wrote, "came to love my rows, my beans." But if the day dawned too beautiful for work, he would sit in his doorway to savor the songs of birds and the sunlight filtering through the branches overhead. After all, "To maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely," he taught.

Living as he did, Thoreau became a close watcher of nature, and he recorded his observations in Walden. He described the "rare beauty" of the spotted pickerel that swam up to his rowboat when he sat still on the pond. "They are not green like pine, nor gray like stones, nor blue like the sky," he wrote. Rather, they shone in "yet rarer colors, like flowers and precious stones, as if they were pearls." In winter he put his face to the pond's frozen surface to peer into the tiny bubbles trapped within. They were "very clear and beautiful," he noted. "You see your face reflected in them through the ice." Come spring, buds appeared on the trees and bushes of the woods, giving "a brightness to the landscape, especially on cloudy days, as if the sun were breaking through the mists and shining faintly on the hill-sides here and there." Thoreau called Walden Pond "the earth's eye." The bordering trees he saw as "the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around it [were] its overhanging brows."

Studying nature alongside Thoreau is one of the pleasures of reading Walden, but the book becomes most profound only when its author decides to move on. He has fallen into a routine; he has made a beaten path for himself, both physically and mentally. "I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there," he wrote. "Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one." There it is: a truth that I hold dear and have tried to apply to my own life and work. We need to seek new experiences, because they change us, causing us to learn and grow throughout life in expected and unexpected ways. In Walden Thoreau challenges us to seek the new, to move through life like "curious passengers."

"Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening up new channels, not of trade, but of thought." I come away inspired. This is a book about life.

In 1912, U.S. Army Captain Charles Young attributed "all progress and all advance in human society" to "the force and energy of minorities, who by their leadership and often martyrdom, clear the obstacles to advance and give character to the masses." When I consider the social progress Americans have witnessed in the past century, progress that has included the historic gains of the Civil Rights Movement, achievements in women's rights, and the ongoing effort to secure marriage equality, I conclude that Young was right. A comfortable majority is not going to seek change; the impetus must come from those who feel excluded, passed over, or ignored. And, without a doubt, Young's own life proved the truth of this words.

Born to enslaved parents in Mays Lick, Kentucky, in 1864, Charles Young had the humblest of beginnings. After emancipation, his parents took him to Ripley, Ohio, where he went to school, graduated with honors, and became a teacher. The people around him saw his potential to go far in life, and this was why his principal urged him to take the qualifying examination for the United States Military Academy when it was offered nearby. Young took the test and received the second highest score.

The academy had admitted a few African Americans by the time Young arrived in West Point, New York, in 1884, and it had even graduated one, Lieutenant Henry O. Flipper. But as Young discovered, it didn't welcome them. The white cadets insulted their black peers and shunned their company, but Young stuck it out, and in 1889 he became the third African American graduate of the military academy. (John Hanks Alexander, who was commissioned in 1887, was the second.)

The army sent Lieutenant Young to Fort Robinson, Nebraska, and Fort Duchesne, Utah, to lead units of Buffalo Soldiers, the African American regiments that served as peacekeepers on the western frontier. In these assignments and at traditionally black Wilberforce University, where he taught military science from 1894 through 1898, Young commanded no whites. That changed when he was sent to Camp Algers, Virginia. There, a white soldier refused to salute Young until the camp commander reminded him that he could salute an officer's jacket and not the man in it.

Young stayed in the army despite such shameful treatment and was promoted to captain. He married and in 1904 was sent as military attache to Haiti, where he came into his own. In addition to fulfilling his regular military duties, Young produced maps of Haiti and its neighbor, the Dominican Republic, and reports on their shared culture. He wrote a play based on the life of Francois-Dominique Toussaint Louverture, the Haitian revolutionary leader, and a study of military efficiency throughout the world that was published in 1912 as Military Morale of Nations and Races. In this book he demonstrated that a soldier's effectiveness has nothing to do with his race. All humans, he wrote, have an "equally inherent capacity for progress."

As military attache to Liberia, beginning in 1912, Young carried out exploratory expeditions, oversaw the building of roads, and reorganized the Liberian army. For these accomplishments, the NAACP awarded him its Spingarn Medal in 1916. Then Young went back to the western United States to take part in the Punitive Expedition, the aborted attempt to capture Mexican revolutionary leader Pancho Villa. Promotions came regularly, to major and to lieutenant colonel.

Young was a full colonel in 1917, when the United States entered World War I. His desire to command soldiers in France presented the army's leaders with a dilemma. If he excelled as a battlefield commander (and there was no reason to think he would not), then he would be eligible for promotion to general. Rather than risk bestowing this honor on an African American, they sent Young for a physical exam. It was hardly a surprise when the doctors found some early signs of kidney disease and declared him unfit for overseas service.

Young retired from the army rather than accept a stateside command, but he proved his fitness in June 1918 by journeying the 497 miles from Wilberforce, Ohio, to Washington, D.C., by foot and on horseback. Young returned to active duty and, ironically, was sent overseas--to Liberia rather than France. After he died while making an exploratory trip to Lagos, Nigeria, in January 1922, W. E. B. DuBois observed, "Duty to him, as to few modern men, was spelled in capitals. It was his lodestar, his soul; and neither force nor reason swerved him from it."

Still, the gratitude and respect this soldier had earned from his fellow citizens were long in coming. I know this because several years ago, my research on Young took me to the National Archives, the repository of his military records and papers. I wanted to see the maps and reports he had created while serving in Haiti, but I was out of luck. I was informed that decades earlier, a clerk had decided these documents had no value and had thrown them all away.

It was the kind of question I like best. My niece Lauren, a Peace Corps volunteer, asked me to recommend some classic books for her to load onto her Kindle. An e-reader is invaluable for someone who lives in a small village in Paraguay, where books are hard to come by, as Lauren does. And she can download so many classics at no cost--what a help to a young person with a small income!

How to choose? So many great books have won my loyalty and affection over a lifetime of reading. I decided to narrow my list to the titles that have the firmest hold on my heart.These books are the best kind of old friends, the ones I can revisit after a long absence and feel immediately at home.

The earliest book on my list was Tom Jones. I first read Henry Fielding's delightful picaresque novel as a teenager after seeing the movie starring Albert Finney and Susannah York. Enamored of the love story, I skipped the chapters introducing each "book" of the novel, in which Fielding addresses the reader directly on such topics as the world vs. the stage, and writers and writing, because I wanted to get to the good parts. But when I read Tom Jones a second time, as an adult, I had patience enough to slow down and savor these chapters. In them I met a likable man of wisdom and wit, whom my son has described as something of a "goofball." Fielding projected an avuncular persona, so it is surprising to learn that he was just forty-two years old in 1749, when Tom Jones was published, and that he died five years later.

"It was the universal opinion...that he was certainly born to be hanged," wrote Fielding about his hero. "It is a truth univerally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife," wrote an author two or three generations removed. The duels, carriage chases, and near hanging that Fielding described held less interest for Jane Austen than did subtleties of thought and feeling. My niece had read Sense and Sensibility, Austen's first published novel, so I recommended the second, Pride and Prejudice. Many readers consider it her greatest work, and it happens to be my favorite. 

Opportunities for Austen and her heroines were restricted by law and by what society deemed proper feminine behavior. Not a whole lot had changed by the 1840s, when the Bronte sisters were writing their novels, but social conventions had eased enough for Charlotte Bronte to admit to feeling passion, an emotion generally considered the privilege of men. What was more, she created a heroine who felt passion, too, and who had the courage to act on it. My next recommendation for Lauren was the admirable Jane Eyre. 
 
The Brontes wrote during the Victorian period, when Charles Dickens was peopling English literature with so many memorable characters. My list for Lauren had to include something from the man who gave us our picture of Victorian England, and again I went with my favorite: David Copperfield. "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show": the opening sentence is an invitation that book lovers find hard to resist. David's story is the adventure of life. We readers travel with him from childhood to maturity, as he endures cruelty and finds kindness and, finally, love. David's friends become our own, and we never  forget the faithful servant, Peggotty, or well-meaning Mr. Micawber, who can never quite get his financial act together.  Of course, villians are fun, and in David Copperfield Dickens gives us one of his best, the conniving Uriah Heep.

Two great Russian novelists also made my list: Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. How could I not include Leo Tolstoy! Even in translation his prose flows simply and beautifully. His stories move at a lively pace, and his characters come to life on the page. I recommended Anna Karenina, in which love leads the title character to a tragic end but brings happiness to others. This novel, too, has a famous opening line, translated in my edition as, "All happy families are like one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Anna Karenina was published in  serial form between 1873 and 1877. Fyodor Dostoyevsky completed The Brothers Karamazov just three years later, but in its penetrating exploration of psychology and its weighing of faith and doubt it points the way to twentieth-century literature. A character in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five remarks that "everything there [is] to know about life is in The Brothers Karamazov," and this is only a small exaggeration.

While Dostoyevsky was writing his masterpiece, a world away Henry James was publishing Washington Square. James's canvas was old New York, and on it he painted a portrait of Catherine Sloper, the only daughter of a rich man who looks out for her well-being and that of her inheritance at the expense of her happiness. Catherine is an ordinary girl, and James portrayed her with great sensitivity--a difficult achievement. This is why I simply had to suggest Washington Square.

I went back to England to list works by two authors writing in the twentieth century, E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf. Both offered readers several good books, but from Forster I singled out A Room with a View (1908), in which Lucy Honeychurch, a young woman from a well-to-do Edwardian family, marries fror love rather than social station. The exquisite Merchant-Ivory film based on this novel makes plain that Lucy's family supports her decision not to marry the socially acceptable bore Cecil Vyse, but the novel brings out something more interesting, that they cannot understand her elopement with handsome George Emerson, whose social standing may be questionable.

From the brilliant Woolf I chose Mrs. Dalloway (1925), which chronicles a day in the life of a middle-aged married woman, and was an early experiment in stream-of-consciousness writing. I will end this long discussion with a sentence from Mrs. Dalloway, because it contains one of my favorite images in all of literature: "And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning--fresh as if issued to children on a beach."

From the front door to the mailbox at the edge of the road seemed a hike when I was small, but if I made the trek, reached inside, and felt a familiar cardboard mailer, then the run back to the house was quick. I would tear away the packaging with excited fingers, because I knew what I would find. A treasure! A book! I would have in my hands the newest of the Best in Children's Books.

Doubleday Book Clubs released these forty-two volumes between 1957 and 1961. My brother and I received them thanks to our grandmother, who was a great reader. Each book came in a dust jacket, but I barely remember these, because the paper jackets lived such short lives. The books exist in memory as hardcover volumes of pink, green, or gray, impressed with two-color illustrations that hinted at what awaited me inside.

The people who chose the contents of these books respected young readers and knew what they were doing. Each one was an anthology--a treasury, because each held a rich and perfect mix. Some stories were best read aloud, whereas others enticed a child to curl up in an armchair or stretch out on a carpet to read and reflect. There might be a selection that encouraged a taste for serious literature: Longfellow's "Hiawatha" or "Gulliver in Lilliput." I delighted in "The Magic Fishbone," Dickens's charming tale of King Watkins the First, his wife, and their nineteen children--a middle-class Victorian family who wait anxiously for "quarter-day" and whose lives are touched by fairytale wonder.

There would also be poetry, funny stories, mythology, and biography. "The Jumblies," "Andy and Polly," "The Winged Horse, Pegasus," "Napoleon, the Corsican Boy"--I could never list them all. The illustrators (who were young and just starting out and unfortunately often not credited) included Andy Warhol, Maurice Sendak, Don Freeman, and Ezra Jack Keats. Each volume also contained a piece on a foreign country, complete with color photographs: "This is Australia"; "Let's Visit Japan." Put books like these in a child's hands, and you introduce him or her to Robert Louis Stevenson, Edward Lear, Kipling, Aesop, Hans Christian Andersen, Clement Moore, and Marjorie Flack. Simply put, you widen the world.

"Best-in-children's" became an adjective in our house. Each volume was a best-in-children's book. Ours didn't survive, I'm sad to say. Three children came along after my brother and me, and five frequent readers wore the books out. But I own a couple of volumes. I found them at yard sales, also without dust jackets and also well used.

Two hundred years ago, a book entered the world quietly and anonymously. Unlike most popular novels of the day, it featured no shipwrecks, haunted castles, sword fights, or journeys to exotic lands. Instead it followed two English sisters as they mingled with their social set. One sister learned a painful life lesson, and both married happily. The book was Jane Austen's first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, and it has continued to find loyal readers since 1811.

Austen began this novel in her youth and called it Elinor and Marianne, after the Dashwood sisters, its principal characters. They are Elinor, who masks her emotions, and Marianne, who is "eager in every thing," who lets the world see her joy, sorrow, and affection. Austen allowed the story to be told through a series of letters that offered a cynical view of a society that dealt unkindly with anyone foolish enough to betray his or her feelings, a world in which greed and ambition made up the formula for success.

Sometime later, Austen rejected the epistolary, novel-in-letters form and rewrote this book as a traditional third-person narrative. In doing so she made a crucial, and very wise, choice, one that allowed her to broaden her scope. Letters, you see, are limiting; they can reveal nothing more than the correspondents know or wish to relate. But an onmicient narrator can go anywhere. She can be present at events the main characters may not yet know about, and she can peer inside people's heads to reveal hopes and worries that letter writers might not express. Best of all in Jane Austen's case, an onmicient narrator can insert observations of her own. Austen perfected the art of the wry comment, precisely understated; no one has ever done it better:

On every formal visit a child ought to be of the party, by way of provision for discourse.

A fond mother ... in pursuit of praise for her children, the most rapacious of human beings, is likewise the most credulous; her demands are exorbitant; but she will swallow anything.

Marianne Dashwood was born to an extraordinary fate.  She was born to discover the falsehood of her own opinions, and to counteract by her conduct her most favorite maxims. 

Austen's manuscripts of Elinor and Marianne and Sense and Sensibility have been lost, so we cannot compare one version with the other. But we can get some inkling of what the earlier version might have been like by reading one of Austen's minor works, the novella Lady Susan. Composed of letters, it is a clever, entertaining farce, but it lacks the depth of Austen's six novels. It shows us that by exercising her own voice in Sense and Sensibility rather than letting her characters do all the talking, Austen likely turned an amusing bit of writing into a significant work of literature.

The cynicism remained in the mature work, but characters who had been flat figures sketched on a page emerged as if carved in relief. They became three-dimensional people with well-developed personalities. Because of Austen's artistry, countless young women--beginning with England's Princess Charlotte in 1811--have likened themselves to open-hearted, impulsive Marianne, and readers of both sexes and every age have found in Sense and Sensibility an enlightening reflection of human nature. What is more, they have discovered in its author a friend to whom they can return repeatedly and always be rewarded for their effort.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS, MY READERS, MY FRIENDS.