A whiff of American literature

And how, how, could Foster have missed “All the King’s Men’’ by Robert Penn Warren - the best book on American politics ever written? Heartbreaking, vivid, and true, it’s a morality tale about power and a reminder that actions have consequences. Does it count for nothing that it won the Pulitzer Prize and the author was the nation’s first poet laureate? Clearly, it’s hard to contain a literary tradition that is so rich and varied, and that arouses such passion. Foster himself laments the impossibility of the task, and adds an appendix of 15 other books, just to be safe.

More frustrating is Foster’s slapdash approach to the promise of his book: that he will prove how these tomes forged America’s identity. It’s a bit of a chicken-egg dilemma. The themes many of the books share - rags-to-riches, self-invention, lonely seekers, a tradition of dissent - could be termed peculiarly American. But did these books create our national character or just reflect it?

The earliest authors certainly tried, giving advice on the right way for the inchoate nation to behave. “The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin’’ features his famous “thirteen virtues,’’ including industry, justice, frugality, and self-reliance. “What old Ben is really interested in is shaping a version of the American master-story,’’ Foster writes, “…to use the myth of himself as a template for the myth of all of us.’’ Henry David Thoreau in “Walden’’ and Walt Whitman in “Leaves of Grass’’ enumerate American virtues almost 100 years later, and there is plenty of overlap.