Out of the following twenty-five great American books, for example, which ten or twelve shall I suggest for reading: _The history of Plimouth Plantation_; the _Autobiography_ of Jefferson; the _Autobiography_ of Franklin; Lodge’s _Life of George Washington_; Tarbell’s _Life of Abraham Lincoln_; _The sketch book_; _Walden_; _Essays_ of Emerson; _The scarlet letter_; _The pit_; _The rise of Silas Lapham_; _The gentle reader_ by Dr. Crothers; _Our national parks_ by John Muir; _Wake-robin_ by John Burroughs; Parkman’s _Oregon trail_; Dana’s _Two years before the mast_; _Tom Sawyer_; _The Americanization of Edward Bok_; _Uncle Tom’s cabin_; _The life and letters of Walter H. Page_; _Uncle Remus_; Bradford’s _Lee the American_; _The last of the Mohicans_; _Poems_ of Longfellow; Wharton’s _Ethan Frome_. Barely glancing at such a list you will instantly ask: “Why don’t you include Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Anna Howard Shaw, Bryant, Whittier, Zane Grey?”—but I must stop you! There are so many! Yet if this list I am making for you stirs you to make a better one for yourself—then that is exactly the best thing it can do for you. Styles in writing change as do styles in dress, and in order to be sympathetic with books not of our own day it is necessary often to know something of the times in which they were written. So a book on the history of American literature, such as W. C. Bronson’s, is a good thing to study along with the reading. And this book is delightful to read, as is also, _What can literature do for me_, by C. Alphonso Smith. A convenient way to handle the history of American literature is to divide it as the textbooks do into three periods: The Colonial from 1607 to 1765; the Revolutionary, from 1765 to 1789; and the Period of the Republic, from 1789 to the present. Each of these periods has its own peculiar literature, for books reflect not only their writers, but also their times. So true is this, that you will find out about a nation more accurately from reading its stories, poetry and plays, than by studying its records and histories. And so, because we are Americans with a peculiar history, and a peculiar and a great destiny, and because our American books best interpret us to ourselves, every American ought to know the outstanding books of each of these periods. The writing of the Colonial Period was for the most part crude and imitative. The Pilgrims and Puritans were not book-loving people. They were deeply religious folk, deeply daring, and masterful, fighting with such odds as few men in all history have met and conquered. They did original things, but not in books with their pens. Yet the famous Mayflower Compact and Bradford’s _History of Plimouth Plantation_ are enough to glorify any time or people.