'Books That Shaped America' form a fascinating exhibit at Library of Congress - Washington DC Art Travel

The Library of Congress' new exhibit "Books That Shaped America", displays 88 titles -- unknown as well as famous -- from its Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

The selections, all by American writers, span more than 250 years and range from "Common Sense" and "The Federalist" to Moby, Huck, Oz, Tarzan, Gatsby, etc. to "Alcoholics Anonymous" (Anonymous), How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, Alfred Kinsey's "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male", Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique", Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring", "Our Bodies, Ourselves" by the Boston Women's Health Collective, and Randy Shilts' "And The Band Played On", about the AIDS epidemic.

The volumes in the free exhibit are not all first editions. Some are selected for their beauty, like "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", Washington Irving's classic first published in 1820. The volume displayed is an 1899 cloth edition decorated with red and yellow flowers whose green stems wind around gold lettering, designed by Margaret Armstrong.

William Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury" cover illustration shows an abstract white human figure entwined by a black possibly human figure, under the title and author in blood red.

More traditional but also compelling art is on covers of Jack London's "The Call of the Wild", Zane Grey's "Riders of the Purple Sage", Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God", and J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye", among many other beautifully illustrated selections.

The illuminating exhibit, which opened June 25 and continues through September 29, begins the Library's ongoing "Celebration of the Book". It includes the hugely popular National Book Festival, September 22-23, on the National Mall.

Everyone is encouraged to comment on the 88 selections in a survey on the Library's National Book Festival website, www.loc.gov/bookfest, and to nominate other titles for eventual additions to "Books That Shaped America".

The survey's likely to get comments about whether some of these blockbuster potboilers really shaped America. "Gone With the Wind" is hardly "The Grapes of Wrath" or "Howl". One might shrug at "Atlas Shrugged".

The selections by curators and experts throughout the Library caused much debate, and is not intended as a definitive list, but as the beginning of a discussion, the Library says.

Here is a sampling of other "Books that Shaped America", as described by the Library.

• "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn". Ernest Hemingway famously said, "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called 'Huckleberry Finn.'"
• "Beloved". Toni Morrison won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for this post-Civil War novel based on the true story of an escaped slave. The author also won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993, and in 2006 "The New York Times" named "Beloved" "the best work of American fiction of the past 25 years."
• "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee". Until librarian Dee Brown wrote his history of Native Americans in the West, few Americans knew the details of the unjust treatment of Indians.
• "The Double Helix". James D. Watson's personal account of the discovery of DNA changed the way Americans regarded the genre of the scientific memoir and set a new standard for first-person accounts.
• "Family Limitation". Margaret Sanger, a nurse in NYC slums, explained in her 1914 pamphlet how women could prevent pregnancy.
• "A Grammatical Institute of the English Language". Noah Webster's 1783 book predates his first dictionary, published in 1828. That first edition can be seen at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery exhibit "1812: A Nation Emerges".
• "The History of Standard Oil". The breakup of Standard Oil in 1911 into 34 "baby Standards" can be attributed in large part to Ida Tarbell's masterly muckraking.
• "Leaves of Grass". The first slim edition of Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" in 1855 was the debut of a masterpiece that shifted the course of American literary history.
• "The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass". His first autobiography is one of the best-written and most widely read slave narratives. It was boldly published less than seven years after Douglass had escaped and before his freedom was purchased.
• "Poor Richard Improved and The Way to Wealth". One of three Benjamin Franklin books selected for the exhibit.
• "Their Eyes Were Watching God". Zora Neale Hurston's masterwork was underrated for four decades until Alice Walker wrote about it in "Ms." Magazine.
• "Walden; or Life in the Woods" by Henry David Thoreau, "The Weary Blues" by Langston Hughes, and "The Words of César Chávez", close the list.

Remember to nominate the book(s) that you think shaped America.

For more info: "Books That Shaped America", Library of Congress, www.loc.gov, Thomas Jefferson Building, Southwest Gallery, second floor, 10 First Street, SE, Washington, DC. The free exhibition is made possible through the support of the National Book Festival Fund. National Book Festival, www.loc.gov/bookfest, September 22-23, on the National Mall.