THE NINETY-SIXTH PAGE

I found that the best way of handling the problem was in a literary history kind of way. The founding fathers of fiction, Cooper and Irving are fine together, but should be kept away from Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau. Hawthorne might have been happily placed next to Poe, but he seemed happier with fellow New Yorker, Melville. The later arrival of Charles Brockton Brown made a nice segue between the founding fathers of New York and the New England philosophers. Later the wild celebrity seeking men of letters, Twain and London could be paired. The James brothers had to be separated. Mrs. Wharton seemed a likely divider; she had no way of knowing how books might furnish a room, did she? Gay people should have a home together on the shelves, but the thought of Willa Cather and James Baldwin and Nora Hurston and Gertrude Stein in the same quarters boggled the mind. Merry old Walt Whitman would have been at home with anyone except his fellow poets. Whitman and Frost? Whitman and Stevens? Howells, Norris, Dreiser, and Steinbeck made a kind of dull sense, but the gathering perked up a bit when West and DosPassos got involved. Out of sheet spite, it was fun to put Faulkner and Nabokov together. The gentler Jewett and O’Connor and Welty made a nice grouping. The peculiar collections of noir fiction and the debate on the constitution could be placed sans family on the floor.