The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I

In Short

This volume curates a wide-ranging selection of American writing, gathering journals, letters, essays, and narrative excerpts that define the country’s early development. It begins with the raw accounts of colonial survival and transitions into the sharp, revolutionary rhetoric of the Founding Fathers. Later sections feature the philosophical rigor of the Enlightenment and the imaginative flowering of nineteenth-century literature. By assembling these foundational texts, the collection offers an essential map of the American spirit, capturing how its settlers, statesmen, and dreamers wrestled with identity, governance, and the wild landscape.

The Story

The narrative of this collection begins in the harsh realities of the seventeenth-century wilderness. John Smith and William Bradford describe a land of precarious survival, where the English settlers navigate complex, often violent, relationships with Indigenous peoples and the brutal demands of a new environment. This era of survival soon gives way to the rigid, contemplative life of Puritan New England. Samuel Sewall’s diary entry regarding his awkward, unsuccessful courtship of a widow provides a rare, humanizing glimpse into the domestic social codes of the period, while Cotton Mather’s writing reflects the era’s intense preoccupation with religious devotion and moral order.

As the colonies grow, the focus shifts toward the intellectual and political structures that would eventually break away from British rule. The collection tracks the ascent of Benjamin Franklin, whose pragmatic, industrious voice dominates the mid-eighteenth century. We see the transition from colonial subject to revolutionary through the eyes of George Washington, who expresses his profound reluctance to leave his home for military command, and Thomas Paine, whose fiery prose demands total separation from Britain. The narrative arc then enters the high-stakes world of the early Republic, featuring the foundational debates of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s writing reveals the profound contradictions of the time, as he oscillates between revolutionary idealism and the grim, dehumanizing realities of slavery.

The trajectory of the book then moves into the nineteenth century, where American literature begins to forge its own distinct identity, separate from European traditions. The excerpts highlight the shift toward nature and individual philosophy, particularly through the eyes of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Thoreau is portrayed not as a recluse, but as an acute, patient observer of the natural world, while Emerson is presented as a philosophical titan whose presence in Concord drew seekers and bores alike. The collection concludes by showcasing the fully realized American voice, shifting from the historical and political to the highly literary. We see the myth-making of Fenimore Cooper, the observational humor of Washington Irving, and the atmospheric, symbolic storytelling of Nathaniel Hawthorne. By the time the reader reaches the final scenes—where the cold, moral judgment of Judge Pyncheon is met by the indifferent persistence of a common house-fly—the collection has traversed the full distance from the settler’s axe to the novelist’s pen.

How It Unfolds

The foundations are laid The collection opens with the rugged, often desperate accounts of John Smith and the Pilgrims, establishing the theme of survival in an alien land. These voices are utilitarian and cautious, documenting the struggle to build a foothold against both nature and the unfamiliar inhabitants of the continent.

The moral and domestic life Focus shifts to the introspective world of the Puritans, where life is governed by strict religious codes and social expectations. Samuel Sewall’s diary provides a humorous contrast to these rigors, showing that even a judge’s life is filled with the mundane anxieties of courtship and social status.

The call to revolution The tone becomes urgently political as Franklin, Washington, and Paine emerge to define the American character through industry, duty, and defiance. These figures move the reader away from colonial subservience and toward the birth of a nation forged by debate and conflict.

The philosophical awakening The narrative turns toward the thinkers of the nineteenth century, where writers like Thoreau and Emerson reflect on the relationship between the individual and the American landscape. These sections emphasize intellectual independence, patience, and a deep, presque religious reverence for the natural world.

The birth of American myth The final movement centers on the emergence of a mature literary culture, using the works of Irving, Cooper, and Hawthorne to explore the soul of the country. Through these stories, the collection captures how American writers began to weave history, folklore, and moral allegory into a lasting national mythology.

The People

The figures gathered here represent a spectrum of the American experience. John Smith stands as the archetype of the colonial adventurer, concerned with the immediate logistics of survival and the defense of his people. Benjamin Franklin embodies the pragmatic self-made man, whose advice on wealth and lightning rods reveals a mind obsessed with efficiency and progress. George Washington appears as a man weighed down by duty, his letters revealing a private individual who sacrifices personal happiness for the sake of a destiny he did not seek.

Thomas Jefferson acts as the collection’s most complex figure, a man of soaring rhetoric who is simultaneously trapped by the moral rot of the slave system he occupies. Henry David Thoreau is presented as a master of observation, a man who finds more authority in the woods than in any college or institution. Finally, Judge Pyncheon serves as the cautionary figure of the collection, a man whose public power and worldly schemes ultimately collapse into a static, hollow morality, left to the mercy of time and the most trivial of nature's creatures.

In Its Own Voice

"The eye of a master will do more work than both his hands."

Benjamin Franklin offers this piece of pithy advice in his Poor Richard's Almanac, emphasizing the necessity of personal oversight in the pursuit of wealth.

"The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions--the most unremitting despotism on the one part and degrading submissions on the other."

Thomas Jefferson writes this sharp critique of slavery in his Notes on the State of Virginia, acknowledging the corrosive effect the system has on both the oppressor and the oppressed.

"A moral agent is a being that is capable of those actions that have a moral quality, and which can properly be denominated good or evil in a moral sense."

Jonathan Edwards provides this precise philosophical definition in Freedom of the Will, setting the stage for his rigorous argument regarding human accountability.

What It's Really About

This book is fundamentally an exploration of the American transition from dependency to self-determination. It asks what it means to build a society from the ground up, balancing the practical needs of survival against the lofty ideals of liberty and moral agency. It grapples with the tension between the individual and the state, the observer and nature, and the past and the future. Underlying the various excerpts is a persistent, gnawing question: Can a nation built on both high-minded principle and deep, systemic contradiction ever truly reconcile its own heart? It is a study of how a people define their values, their duties, and their myths across shifting centuries.

Why Read It Today

Readers who enjoy history told through the raw, unfiltered voices of those who shaped it will find this volume deeply rewarding. It offers the rare pleasure of seeing the "Founding Fathers" and their predecessors not as statues, but as men writing letters, keeping diaries, and arguing in the heat of the moment. Because the book draws from primary sources, the prose is remarkably immediate; you feel the weight of Washington’s duty and the eccentricity of Thoreau’s daily routine.

However, a modern reader must be prepared for the period attitudes present in these texts. The seventeenth and eighteenth-century language can be dense, and the perspectives on race, Indigenous peoples, and gender reflect the prejudices of their respective eras. The book does not smooth these rough edges away, and it does not try to present a unified, sanitized history. Instead, it offers a fragmented, honest look at the development of a nation. It is best read in small sittings, allowing each voice to settle before moving to the next. What remains after reading is a profound sense of how the American character was forged—not in a single moment, but through a long, often messy, and intensely intellectual process of becoming.