Anthologies Help Bring Us the Best of the Bunch

On the anthology shelves of any good bookstore, you can observe the silent shaping of history.

“Letters of the Century.”

“The Best American Short Stories of the Century.”

“Black American Short Stories: A Century of the Best.”

“War With the Robots: 28 of the Best Short Stories by the Greatest Names in 20th Century Science Fiction.”

Whatever your passion or background, an anthologist has likely compiled it. Dog stories. Golf stories. War stories. Bicycles. Boats. Cars.

“Charlie Chan Is Dead” (Asian American stories).

“Mae West Is Dead” (gay and lesbian fiction).

“Tropical Synagogue” (Jewish Latin American stories).

“Scarlet Riders” (pulp fiction about Canadian Mounties).

At century’s end, a time when you could hardly make a list of all the top-something lists, anthologies have a special place. Whether silly or solemn, political or literary, they’re documents of social taste and struggle, search engines that reflect, discover and even inspire. Decisions by today’s anthologists will help establish the way future readers think of the past.

“Anthologies are one way to cope with the terrible overload of written materials,” said John Updike, who edited “The Best American Short Stories of the Century,” a surprise bestseller. “It’s nice for people to know that at least there’s somebody putting together a version of what’s the best.”

Though anthologies are a growing breed--in the last five years, titles available through Barnes & Noble have increased 25%, from 20,000 to 25,000--their origins are in ancient Greece. Compilations of editors’ selected works appeared in English in the 16th century. With the expansion of literacy and technology, they proliferated in the 19th century.

“These anthologies were sort of middle-class possessions,” said Anne Ferry, author of an upcoming history about poetry anthologies. “A review in a journal from 1912 said that no one was ever married who didn’t receive at least some copy of English verse as a wedding present.”

Celebrated writers have assembled anthologies, from Updike to Jonathan Swift to Ernest Hemingway, who compiled a book of war reporting. Anthologies can be boasts of canonical greatness or statements of popular tastes, like a collection of poems recently put together by Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, who based his selections on letters from readers.

“We still tend to revere universities, and it’s in the nature of universities to codify and arrange,” Pinsky said. “ . . . But there may be too powerful regard for the canons of experts.”

His collection, “Americans’ Favorite Poems,” includes T.S. Eliot, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath and other familiar names. But the “reviews” in Pinsky’s book are by everyday readers. A high school student praises John Donne’s “The Flea” as the “best argument for sex I’ve ever heard.” A middle-age retailer credits a passage from “The Iliad” with helping him recover from depression.

“Americans are far more passionate about poems than they’re made out to be,” Pinsky said.

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While he hopes to attract general readers, the primary market for anthologies is the classroom. They’ve been used by teachers throughout this century, but especially since the 1960s. The man most responsible is M.H. Abrams, then a professor of English at Cornell University and editor of all seven editions of the “Norton Anthology of English Literature,” first published in 1962.

At that time, each book a student read in many English departments “was treated as an object in itself, to be read and interpreted and admired independently of its historical setting,” he said. “The course I taught was quite different.”

He and the scholars he assembled to prepare the anthology for Norton had another approach. “We believed that to understand literature you had to understand its place in history and culture.”

Abrams experimented both with content and form. When he was an undergraduate at Harvard in the ‘30s, anthologies were grim, square volumes with double-column printing on each page--printed as if the verses of Homer were no different from a table of prime numbers.

Abrams innovated with single columns and the kind of fine, thin paper used for high-priced Bibles, making the anthology portable. Including what became a widely quoted phrase, the preface of the first edition offered a volume that “can not only be carried everywhere, but read anywhere, in one’s own private room, in the classroom, or under a tree.”

Norton’s English anthology was an immediate success. For decades it has had a virtual monopoly in the academic market, read by millions of undergraduates in “survey” courses that for many are the last extensive exposure to poetry and literary fiction.

For each new edition of Norton, professors are asked to propose changes. The anthology now includes dozens of works by women and several “post-colonial” authors, including Salman Rushdie, Chinua Achebe and V.S. Naipaul.

Selections of older texts also have changed. In the previous edition, Shakespeare was represented with “King Lear.” The new one substitutes the cross-dressing comedy “Twelfth Night.”

“We felt it was important to address gender issues,” said associate editor Stephen Greenblatt, a professor of literature at Harvard.

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Just as anthologies have the power to make canons, so Norton has become canonical, with a small but significant number of detractors. A leading critic is David Damrosch, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and general editor for the rival “Longman Anthology of English Literature.”

“I felt very dissatisfied with the Norton anthology,” Damrosch said. “There had been a whole revolution in literature, and there was a need for much more cultural context and for a much greater range of ethnic writing and women’s writing.”

The Longman collection came out in early 1998, more than a year before the current Norton anthology, and is now being used by more than 400 teachers (compared with at least 2,000 who use Norton). It offers more context than earlier editions of Norton and also includes a variety of women and post-colonial authors

Like students peeking at each other’s exams, the two publishers carefully study their rivals, perhaps too carefully. Damrosch believes that the changes in Norton’s latest anthology are a rip-off of the Longman book. Abrams responds that Damrosch himself was building on the old Norton model.

“He’s not in a good position to throw stones,” Abrams said. “He copied the Norton book. It’s obvious what he did. The format followed ours. The use of ancillary materials followed us slavishly. But I don’t object. We have a very good thing going, and it’s his privilege to try and beat us at our own game.”

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As courses have become more varied, and more political, so have anthologies. In the last 30 years, anthologists have published books about single mothers, human rights, class differences and interracial relationships. Ideas can arise just by turning on the television; O.J. Simpson’s car chase inspired anthologist Susan Koppelman to compile “Women in the Trees,” a book of stories about wife battering and resistance.

“I tend to talk back to the television, and as one commentator after another talked about what had been going on I kept saying, ‘This reminds me of a story,’ ‘That reminds me of a story,’ ” said Koppelman, who included Sandra Cisneros, Zora Neale Hurston and others in her book.

“A lot of women read the anthology at stores, in bits at a time, because if they’re being abused it’s very dangerous for them to have a book about abuse around the house. The book is taught in a whole variety of courses, from women’s studies to criminal justice programs.”

The politics of anthologies can be likened to a declaration of statehood, the waving of a flag. Just publishing a collection about lesbians or Asian Americans is a way of saying such a community deserves to be recognized.

Among blacks, anthologies have helped define such artistic movements as the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and the protest writings of the 1960s. They’ve preserved works that might have gone out of print and constructed a counter-narrative to the prevailing white history.

“They’re a way of getting people to notice us,” said novelist Terry McMillan, who in 1990 published “Breaking Ice,” an anthology of contemporary black writers that has sold nearly 200,000 copies.

“In the 1980s, I was teaching in Wyoming, and for some writers, if I wanted to teach them, I had to go Xerox their work. It had been years since there had been a real anthology of African American writers, and it kind of angered me because there were so many writers who deserved attention.”

The anthologist’s job--and burden--is not only to identify a genre, but to establish rules of entry. Ilan Stavans, a professor of Spanish literature at Amherst College and general editor for an upcoming anthology of Latino literature, said he and his fellow editors debated the meaning of “Latino.” Should the writer live in the United States? Must the writer be a U.S. citizen? Must the story take place in the United States?

“You are establishing what the future is going to see, and it’s an awesome responsibility,” he said.