Jonathan Franzen occupies the cover of this week's
Time, and, as the magazine will happily point out, he's the first novelist to do so in "more than a decade." The Franzen cover---and the Franzen headline: "Great American Novelist"---is a pretty transparent bit of attention-mongering. After all, Franzen's predecessor,
Stephen King, got only one paragraph in his
cover story, and
Time profiled Franzen
only four years ago. (Both Franzen stories include lots of bird watching and
Lev Grossman.)
Still,
Time could use a boost as much as literature, and it's hard to fault the magazine. In fact, its choice of Franzen provides an opportunity to look back at
Time's long history as literary arbiter and evangelist.
In
The Powers That Be,
David Halberstam writes that
Time impresario
Henry Luce
had a powerful sense of what people should read, what was good for them to read, and an essential belief worthy of the best journalist, that any subject of importance could be made interesting. Thus the cover story, the personalizing of issues so that a lay reader could become more interested and more involved in serious reading matter.
This same impulse seems to be at work in
Time's Franzen cover. (Under the headline it reads: "His characters don't solve mysteries, have magical powers or live in the future.") Franzen himself has remarked on it. In his famous
Harper's essay "
Perchance to Dream," he writes that "my father, who was not a reader, nevertheless had some acquaintance with James Baldwin and John Cheever, because
Time magazine put them on its cover."
Franzen ends up arguing that a shift in
Time's cover choices—from
James Joyce to
Scott Turow—offers more proof of America's cultural decline. But just about every interaction between
Time and a literary type has been characterized by a waffling between reaching out and selling out that, today, we'd describe as Franzean. Two favorite examples: When
Bennett Cerf tried to convince
William Faulkner to do a second
Time cover, 15 years after his first, Faulkner asked for an estimate on how much it would add to Random House's bottom line so that he could simply reimburse the publisher. In
The Prisoner of Sex,
Norman Mailer---who seems to have married
Jeanne Campbell, Luce's former mistress, for revenge as much as for love---recalls
Time's offer of "a cover story on the author's reactions to the most prominent phenomenon of the summer season: the extraordinary surge of interest in Women's Liberation." Despite having a movie to promote, Mailer decides that "only a fool would throw serious remarks into the hopper at
Time."
In 1923,
Joseph Conrad appeared on
Time's
first bookish cover and its sixth overall. The story began:
Joseph Conrad, rover of the seven seas, has never set foot in the United States. Now he is coming. At about the end of this month the man who holds probably the most exalted position in contemporary English letters is to arrive here for a visit which it is hoped will last through May.
And that's about it. Conrad's entire cover story ran only 425 words, a standard length for early
Time articles, and this first batch of literary covers were mostly linked to reviews. Thanks to the magazine's short and punchy house style, these reviews always managed to include some biographical information. (The section on "The Author" came right after the one on "The Significance.")
By the 1930s, though, you could see a formula beginning to set -- a personalized opening, a capsule biography, some detailed description (
Willa Cather "
looks and talks like a kindly, sensible Middle-Western housewife, stout, low-heeled, good at marketing and mending"), and, above all, a few kind words about the author's latest. Given
Time's practice of deploying multiple reporters, these profiles were often the most thorough or invasive of their time. (The
J. D. Salinger cover story is a good example of this.) Given
Time's goal of reaching the broadest possible audience, these profiles also turned their subjects into rather flat characters: Cather the housewife,
Hemingway the hunter, and so on.
The other thing to say about
Time's audience is that, from the beginning, the magazine has paid attention to lowbrow lit. Its
cover story on
E. Phillips Oppenheim praises his "light fiction" and opens with a mutually flattering comparison to Henry Ford, and this is one of many such examples. In fact, after surveying its literary history, I'm more surprised that
Time hasn't put
Dan Brown or
Stephanie Meyer on its cover than that Jonathan Franzen made the cut. (
Time did put Harry Potter on
its cover for what was essentially
a profile of
J. K. Rowling.)
Below, you too can survey this history through links to the covers and cover stories for each of
Time's literary stars. Read them to chuckle at the magazine's weakness for hype (
Robinson Jeffers is someone "
a considerable public now considers the most impressive poet the U. S. has yet produced"). Read them to get a contemporary perspective on some historical figures (though don't expect the best and the brightest:
Lillian Ross's
New Yorker profile of Hemingway, for example, is much better than
Time's). Read them to marvel at
Time's uncanny ability to feature the best writers' worst books. Most of all, read them to watch how this red-bordered cultural institution ferries between the high and the low. The
Virginia Woolf cover story is especially good at this, but all of them do it to one degree or another. Even Jonathan Franzen's.
Methods
Time put 14 authors on its cover in the 1920s, 23 in the 1930s, seven in the 1940s, 11 in the 1950s, 10 in the 1960s, eight in the 1970s, four in the 1980s, four in the 1990s, one in the 2000s, and, now, Franzen in 2010. That adds up to an objective-sounding 83, but I should explain my principles in compiling this list. While
Time also likes to revive dead authors---Faulkner, for example, submitted to
that second cover in 1964, two years after his death---I included only living authors who wrote primarily imaginative work: novels, plays, or poetry. These criteria still left room for some judgment calls---
William Allen White did not make the list because he's better known for his politics and his newspapering (and because
White's cover story focuses on his Kansas gubernatorial campaign), but I kept
Upton Sinclair and
the cover story on his California gubernatorial campaign. Feel free to dispute my choices or to add anyone I missed in the comments.
Each entry includes the author's name and, where applicable, the name of the work that prompted the profile. There are also links to a print-friendly version of the cover story and to an image of the cover itself. In fact, thanks to
Time's
new paywall, the Franzen cover story is the only one you
can't read online.
The List
1920-1929
Joseph Conrad. "
A Great Novelist to Visit the United States." April 7, 1923.
Cover image.
Israel Zangwill. "
Imaginary Interviews: Israel Zangwill, Englishman of Letters." September 17, 1923.
Cover image.
George Bernard Shaw /
Saint Joan. "
Saint Joan." December 24, 1923.
Cover image.
Eugene O'Neill /
All God's Chillun Got Wings. "
All God's Chillun." March 17, 1924.
Cover image.
Amy Lowell /
John Keats. "
Miss Lowell Eulogizes, Analyzes, Forgives the Poet." March 2, 1925.
Cover image.
Booth Tarkington /
Women. "
Mr. Tarkington's Ladies." December 21, 1925.
Cover image.
H. G. Wells /
The World of William Clissold. "
Wells, Wells, Wells." September 20, 1926.
Cover image.
Rudyard Kipling /
Debits and Credits. "
Loud Kipling." September 27, 1926.
Cover image.
Sinclair Lewis /
Elmer Gantry. "
Bible Boar." March 14, 1927.
Cover image.
Michael Arlen /
Young Men in Love. "
Mayfairian." May 2, 1927.
Cover image.
E. Phillips Oppenheim /
Miss Brown of X. Y. O.. "
Number 100." September 12, 1927.
Cover image.
Eugene O'Neill /
Strange Interlude. "
New Plays in Manhattan." February 13, 1928.
Cover image.
Edgar Wallace /
People. "
Master of Mass." April 15, 1929.
Cover image.
Robert Bridges /
The Testament of Beauty. "
Laureate Testifies." December 2, 1929.
Cover image.
1930-1939
Willa Cather /
Shadows on the Rock. "
Amen, Sinner." August 3, 1931.
Cover image.
Eugene O'Neill /
Mourning Becomes Electra. "
Greece in New England." November 2, 1931.
Cover image.
Philip Barry /
The Animal Kingdom. "
Angel Like Lindbergh." January 25, 1932.
Cover image.
Robinson Jeffers /
Thurso's Landing and Other Poems. "
Harrowed Marrow." April 4, 1932.
Cover image.
T. E. Lawrence /
The Odyssey [trans.]. "
Scholar-Warrior." November 28, 1932.
Cover image.
Noel Coward /
Design for Living. "
First Englishman." January 30, 1933.
Cover image.
Gertrude Stein /
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. "
Stem's Way." September 11, 1933.
Cover image.
James Joyce /
Ulysses. "
Ulysses Lands." January 29, 1934.
Cover image.
Thomas Mann /
Joseph and his Brothers. "
Great Mann." June 11, 1934.
Cover image.
Upton Sinclair. "
California Climax." October 24, 1934.
Cover image.
Maxwell Anderson /
Valley Forge. "
Washington, by Anderson." December 10, 1934.
Cover image.
Kathleen Norris /
Woman in Love. "
Golden Honeymoon." January 28, 1935.
Cover image.
John Buchan. "
Canada's New Governor General." October 21, 1935.
Cover image.
George Santayana /
The Last Puritan. "
Philosophic Footballer." February 3, 1936.
Cover image.
John Dos Passos /
U.S.A. trilogy. "
Private Historian." August 10, 1936.
Cover image.
Virginia Woolf /
The Years. "
How Time Passes." April 12, 1937.
Cover image.
Sidney Howard. "
Meat Show Meeting." June 7, 1937.
Cover image.
Ernest Hemingway /
To Have and To Have Not. "
All Stones End . . . ." October 18, 1937.
Cover image.
Holger Cahill. "
In the Business District." September 5, 1938.
Cover image.
Andre Malraux /
Man's Hope. "
News From Spain." November 7, 1938.
Cover image.
William Faulkner /
The Wild Palms. "
When the Dam Breaks." January 23, 1939.
Cover image.
James Joyce /
Finnegans Wake. "
Night Thoughts." May 8, 1939.
Cover image.
Carl Sandburg /
Abraham Lincoln: The War Years. "
Your Obt. Servt." December 4, 1939.
Cover image.
1940-1949
Kenneth Roberts /
Oliver Wiswell. "
Angry Man's Romance." November 25, 1940.
Cover image.
Sinclair Lewis /
Cass Timberlane. "
Laureate of the Booboisie." October 8, 1945.
Cover image.
Craig Rice. "
Mulled Murder, with Spice." January 28, 1946.
Cover image.
Eugene O'Neill /
The Iceman Cometh. "
The Ordeal of Eugene O'Neill." October 21, 1946.
Cover image.
C. S. Lewis /
The Screwtape Letters. "
Don v. Devil." September 8, 1947.
Cover image.
Rebecca West /
The Meaning of Treason. "
Circles of Perdition." December 8, 1947.
Cover image.
John P. Marquand /
Point of No Return. "
Spruce Street Boy." March 7, 1949.
Cover image.
1950-1959
T. S. Eliot /
The Cocktail Party. "
Mr. Eliot." March 6, 1950.
Cover image.
Robert Frost. "
Pawky Poet." October 9, 1950.
Cover image.
James Thurber. "
Priceless Gift of Laughter." July 9, 1951.
Cover image.
Graham Greene /
The End of the Affair. "
Shocker." October 29, 1951.
Cover image.
Joyce Carey /
Prisoner of Grace. "
Cheerful Protestant." October 20, 1952.
Cover image.
Thorton Wilder. "
An Obliging Man." January 12, 1953.
Cover image.
Ernest Hemingway. "
An American Storyteller." December 13, 1954.
Cover image.
Andre Malraux. "
Man's Quest." July 18, 1955.
Cover image.
Herman Wouk /
Marjorie Morningstar. "
The Wouk Mutiny." September 5, 1955.
Cover image.
James Gould Cozzens /
By Love Possessed. "
The Hermit of Lambertville." September 2, 1957.
Cover image.
Boris Pasternak /
Doctor Zhivago. "
The Passion of Yurii Zhivago." December 15, 1958.
Cover image.
1960-1969
J. D. Salinger /
Franny and Zooey. "
Sonny." September 15, 1961.
Cover image.
Tennessee Williams /
The Night of the Iguana. "
The Angel of the Odd." March 9, 1962.
Cover image.
Evgeny Evtushenko. "
A Longing for Truth." April 13, 1962.
Cover image.
James Baldwin /
The Fire Next Time. "
The Root of the Negro Problem." May 7, 1963.
Cover image.
John Cheever /
The Wapshot Scandal. "
Ovid in Ossining." March 27, 1964.
Cover image.
Phyllis McGinley. "
The Telltale Heart." June 18, 1965.
Cover image.
Robert Lowell. "
The Second Chance." June 2, 1967.
Cover image.
John Updike /
Couples. "
View from the Catacombs." April 26, 1968.
Cover image.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn /
In The First Circle. "
The Writer as Russia's Conscience
Headline." September 27, 1968.
Cover image.
Vladimir Nabokov /
Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. "
Prospero's Progress." May 23, 1969.
Cover image.
1970-1979
Gunter Grass /
Local Anaesthetic. "
The Dentist's Chair as an Allegory in Life." April 13, 1970.
Cover image.
Richard Bach /
Jonathan Livingston Seagull. "
It's a Bird! It's a Dream! It's Supergull!" November 13, 1972.
Cover image.
Norman Mailer /
Marilyn. "
Two Myths Converge: NM Discovers MM." July 16, 1973.
Cover image.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn /
The Gulag Archipelago. "
An Artist Becomes an Exile." February 25, 1974.
Cover image.
Gore Vidal /
1876. "
Laughing Cassandra." March 1, 1976.
Cover image.
Alex Haley /
Roots. "
Why 'Roots' Hit Home." February 14, 1977.
Cover image.
John Le Carre /
The Honourable Schoolboy. "
The Spy Who Came in for the Gold." October 3, 1977.
Cover image.
Mario Puzo /
Fools Die. "
Paperback Godfather." August 28, 1978.
Cover image.
1980-1989
John Irving /
The Hotel New Hampshire. "
Life Into Art." August 31, 1981.
Cover image.
John Updike /
Bech is Back. "
Perennial Promises Kept." October 18, 1982.
Cover image.
Garrison Keillor /
Lake Wobegon Days. "
Lonesome Whistle Blowing." November 4, 1985.
Cover image.
Stephen King /
It. "
King of Horror." October 6, 1986.
Cover image.
1990-1999
Scott Turow /
Burden of Proof. "
Burden of Success." June 11, 1990.
Cover image.
Michael Crichton /
The Lost World. "
Meet Mr. Wizard." September 25, 1995.
Cover image.
Toni Morrison /
Paradise. "
Paradise Found." January 19, 1998.
Cover image.
Tom Wolfe /
A Man in Full. "
Tom Wolfe Writes Again." November 2, 1998.
Cover image.
2000-2009
Stephen King / "Riding the Bullet." "
Everyone's A Star.com." March 27, 2000.
Cover image.
2010
Jonathan Franzen /
Freedom. "
Great American Novelist." August 23, 2010.
Cover image.
Thanks for the first really good list of read in quite some time.
This was fabulous! Thank you.
Nicely done.
LOVE this – except I’ve never found a book whose main character shares my first name!
Marcia Muller writes a series of mystery novels about a private investigator named Sharon McCone. They’re pretty good, too.
Stylish and intimate at the same time. You captured the adventure of how we each discover the books we love in our individual ways.
“You should read books mentioned in other books.”
I did that. I’ve started reading classic Russian literature after Hemingway recommended it in his books. Once I got there I never went back to Hemingway, and that I do not regret.
Maybe it should be books to think about rather than books to read.
Of course you can’t think much about a book if you haven’t read it.
But I have read many books that I decided weren’t worth thinking about and therefore were not worth reading. The trouble is I didn’t know until after I had read them.
Lord of the Rings was not worth reading. The Door into Summer by Robert Heinlein is worth thinking about.
The only book i have come across where the main character shares my name is Rape, A love story by Joyce Carol Oates. It was actually quite a disconcerting experience,maybe not shared by people with common names who see their name in books all the time.
p.s. Interestingly Esquire does not think men should bother reading any books by women.
Martine, Flannery O’Connor was a woman (but now I kind of suspect Esquire doesn’t know that).
I cherish the book with my first name, Flora, and you’ve just reminded me to read it again.
Diving into a book from the library I came across the previous reader’s return ticket for several books. Feeling the karma I checked out two and that’s how I found Geek Love and The Dinner. Good reads I had not heard of before. You never know how inspiration hits
I’m so happy to read your view on lists which is exactly how I feel. The parameters you’ve given are fabulous ! :)
Good list!!! And also the first list that doesn’t make you feel that if you haven’t read a certain book then you have not read anything. Of course to add to it the books you dhould read that you haven’t heard about before but two of your friends just keep arguing about it. :-D
I do read ALL the time……when we go on a trip I buy paperbacks, I read them and then leave them wherever I am. Love them.
Best List Ever. Thank you.
(Discovered Scott Turow as I was sitting across from a woman on a train who was reading the last few pp. of Presumed Innocent faster and faster the closer we got to the terminal and then whispered, “Ooh . . . shit!!”)
Definitely read the one where the main character has your own name, in fact I was named after Bronwyn in How Green Was My Valley
Yes! Some of my favorite books are the ones I’ve stumbled upon. I love stopping into a small bookshop and asking for a recommendation. Also, when I go to someone’s house for the first time, I always check out their shelves.
I found one of my favorite books because it had been reserved at the library for someone with the same name. I picked up the four books I reserved and when I got home, I saw this other book, “St. Dale” by Sharyn McCrumb. It had just come out and I’m sure the other “Gigs” was anxious to have it, but I read the jacket and thought, “Well, that sounds right up my alley!” I read it in two days and returned it to the library with a note to the other “Gigs” both apologizing for picking up her book and thanking her for her excellent taste.
Finally! A list where I’ve actually read most of the books :)
Yes, yes. It’s all about discovery. Not only the story within the pages but what might fall out. I wrote a column this week about such discoveries — and found new treasures. I told readers I have a 1936 edition of “The Complete Works of O. Henry” that I bought from a pile of books on a picnic table. I later found a four-leaf clover within the pages. After writing this column, I flipped through the thin, fragile pages again last night. I was surprised to discover a total of 28 clovers, pressed and saved. All had four leaves except a few with two. Amazing, yes?
What a marvelous list! Reading should be about freedom and this list encapsulates just that.
You should read books of short stories created by Deborah Eisenberg. The woman is a screaming genius.
I once bought a leather-bound, gold-embossed Dickens from the late 1800s for $10, just for its look and feel. It was Dombey & Son, which I’d never heard of. A couple of years later, I thought it would be so cool to hold it in my hands and read it. Whoa! Amazing! Dickens! The happiest of accidents!
Flora: Is it Cold Comfort Farm? Love that book.
Speaking of what books we do and do not hear about: thanks for posting VIDA’s new findings about “Dudesville” magazines that mostly hire male reviewers and mostly publish male books.
Makes me mad.
Great list, notice that most of them can not be Kindle, Ereader books. Long live paper.
Just read ! When I was bored as a child, I would read the ingredients on the ketchup bottle! My mum used to tell me, “Don’t Read ! You’ll get Ideas!'” Just read ! :) It is a gift !
Love this list.
Would you mind if I turned your words into a poster to put up in my school library? This year’s Book Week Theme in Australia is “Connect to Reading” and (most of) your list would be perfect to support that theme in a school with girls from 3 to 17 years of age. What doesn’t suit the girls should speak volumes to the staff.
Obviously, I’ll cite the source (currently trying to really reinforce the whole “plagarism is not okay” message with best practise examples) but I understand if your answer is no.
Either way – fantastic list!
Some of my favorite books that I suggest are ones that get discarded from the local library and get put in the book sale. Just because no one has borrowed them doesn’t mean they aren’t good books, or if they’re falling apart they’ve been read many times and show promise of being loved.
I read Watership Downs because Stephen King mention it in The Stand. Still one of my favs!! (Both actually are).
The Gutenberg project has just about everything turned into digital. Ot however one would phrase that process. I think that is where I got that Chretian deTroyes Arthurian thing.
ok! this is a very unique kind of book list i have ever seen !
i love to read books my fouvryt book is aboat love