The books that The Atlantic loved – and hated

Working on the books section of a 167-year-old publication offers incredible opportunities – and also brings with it some uncertainties. Will our judgment stand up to the evaluations of future readers? Is the work we publish worthy of the magazine’s glorious tradition? Over the years The Atlantic‘s literary coverage has taken on both the task of criticism—that is, placing a work in its era, evaluating its ideas, and considering its symbols—and that of checking which titles are worth readers’ time and why. Today, my job involves editing book recommendations and essays on new releases, and collaborating on overtly ambitious projects like our current list of great American novels. That includes listening to the opinions and disagreements of our contemporary readers. But there’s also an entire archive full of people responding, disagreeing, and giving their opinions.

This catalogue is full of curiosities. Sometimes the first reviews of works that have since been included in the canon are shockingly short, taking up only a few centimeters of space in the printed magazine. The glass bell received about 150 words in 1971, when it first appeared in the United States—though “the author hoped that would never happen, understandably so, since it is not a really good novel, though it is extremely promising for a first novel,” wrote Phoebe Lou Adams. (This last comment is particularly grim, since Sylvia Plath was already dead by the time the review was published.) In 1945, DC Russell reviewed Raymond Chandler, tempering his praise with a warning that Chandler’s hard-hitting formula could put him in “a rut.” Some pieces are impossibly long, much longer than we would today—and, unfortunately, not always to their improvement. Others passionately extol the virtues of books now all but forgotten: for example, in 1934 we printed a glowing review for Men against the seathe second part of a historical trilogy about the consequences of the famous mutiny on HMS Bounty.

I am always surprised by how many articles in the archive seem to be forward-looking and understandable. In 1957, Alfred A. Knopf commented on the changes he had experienced in the publishing industry. “It is becoming increasingly difficult to find a reasonable audience for a book that is simply Good– not a world-shattering masterpiece, not the choice of a major book club, not for a super-major movie, but simply a good book,” he wrote, an opinion I could have expressed yesterday. In 1873, Arthur George Sedgwick reviewed Middle Marchand tried to evaluate the novel in the context of George Eliot’s career, to analyze its theme of fate, and to engage comprehensively with English literature – but in the end he ruefully abandoned the whole project. “In trying to play the role of critic of such works, one cannot help but feel that one needs another George Eliot to be able to analyze and explain George Eliot properly,” he wrote. It is a feeling that probably every practicing critic can understand. And in 1922 Carl S. Patton published a long article on another familiar dilemma: buying new books when one has at home “more and more books that one has not yet read.” (Same.)

Seeing how many people have been thinking and grappling with the same things as me over many years is encouraging, reassuring and humbling. It reminds me that the work we do today may be re-read and re-evaluated in similar ways in the future, and that initial reviews are merely the first draft of a book’s reception. Styles and methods have changed over time, but we are doing the same thing that authors of the past did: adding our voices to the archive.