Skip to main content

Behind The White Suit

March 2023
1min read

A Pair of Distinguished Contemporary Authors Weigh In On A Nineteenth-Century Genius

Every successful musician sooner or later makes an album of standards, the familiar pieces he or she has loved and learned from over the years. Writers, too, love paying homage to their forebears, as can be seen from a pair of recent books: Creators: From Chaucer and Dürer to Picasso and Disney , by Paul Johnson (HarperCollins, 320 pages, $25.95), and Creationists: Selected Essays, 1993–2006 , by E. L. Doctorow (Random House, 192 pages, $24.95).

Johnson is a British journalist and critic, best known for sweeping historical works such as Modern Times and Intellectuals . Doctorow is an American novelist, the author of Ragtime , Billy Bathgate , and, most recently, The March , about William Tecumseh Sherman’s 1864 march to the sea. In politics, Johnson generally sympathizes with the right, while Doctorow is a committed leftist. Unsurprisingly, they take disparate approaches in their books, with Johnson’s longish articles minutely examining the subjects’ craftsmanship and personal histories, while Doctorow’s briefer essays are more concerned with philosophy, psychology, politics, and morals.

This contrast may be seen in their divergent treatments of the only person covered in both books, Mark Twain. Johnson spends much time comparing Twain’s writing with his lecture performances and praising his creative recycling of material and his astute management of the business side of literature. He goes wild over Huckleberry Finn , attributing to that one novel “such institutions as Disney , Time magazine, Reader’s Digest , [and] the New Yorker ,” as well as “all of James Thurber’s work,” the Marx Brothers, Raymond Chandler, Theodore Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan.

Doctorow delves into the creative tension behind the writing of Tom Sawyer , teases out the novel’s moral subtexts, and places it in the context of myths from various cultures. He is theoretical where Johnson is practical, seeing the character of Huckleberry Finn not merely as a vehicle for Twain’s ample stock of anecdotes, dialect, and local color but as “a true outsider, the real unrepentant thing, a boy who would never conform.” Johnson calls Huckleberry Finn “the basic fact of American literature”; Doctorow admires its moral spirit but thinks that “something terrible happens … for American literature” when the action shifts away from the river and the antislavery theme is downplayed.

This same pattern recurs throughout the rest of both collections. Johnson presents a historical march of geniuses and master artisans and shows them at the writing desk or in the studio, creating things whose beauty and originality have become part of a great Western tradition. Doctorow gives us a series of rebels and reformers, mostly American (Poe, Melville, Hemingway, Harpo Marx), who dream of new and better worlds even as they struggle with disillusionment and self-doubt. It is a measure of Twain’s achievement that he can garner effusive praise even when considered from these two very different standpoints, showing that true greatness cannot be confined in a box—or, perhaps, that it can be made to fit in any box you want.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "October 2006"

Authored by: The Editors

A Pair of Distinguished Contemporary Authors Weigh In On A Nineteenth-Century Genius

Authored by: David Lander

America’s best-known chair is on the brink of extinction

Authored by: The Editors

Now on DVD: A Brand-New Classic Western

Authored by: The Editors

Baseball’s Ultimate Act

Authored by: Hugh Rawson

Bunk

Authored by: Joshua Zeitz

Viewing a transformation that still affects all of us—through the prism of a single year

Authored by: Nathan Ward

One of the half-dozen most famous Americans of the twentieth century steps into full daylight

Authored by: Karen Hornick

On what they still called their “home screens,” Americans got to watch the future

Authored by: Phil Patton

The Ford Mustang changed the industry when its creator realized “people want economy so badly they don’t care what they pay for it”

Authored by: Phil Patton

What we spent to get through 1964

Featured Articles

Famous writers including Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and the Alcotts turned Sleepy Hollow Cemetery into our country’s first conservation project.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.

Roast pig, boiled rockfish, and apple pie were among the dishes George and Martha enjoyed during the holiday in 1797. Here are some actual recipes.

Born during Jim Crow, Belle da Costa Greene perfected the art of "passing" while working for one of the most powerful men in America.