How books change us and are changed
Books change. They change us individually and collectively. Tom Paine’s direct style convinced countless colonists that it was Common Sense to become an independent nation. Henry David Thoreau lectured New England college students that they were better off hand-crafting knives than they were sitting in stuffy classrooms. He influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Not long after Walden, Harriet Beecher Stowe ingeniously combined sentimentalism and the gothic to compel Americans to pick sides in the great slavery debate. Her world of good slaveholders undone by economic disaster, of heroic families pursuing freedom, of loving little white girls, of horrible older white men, and ultimately of a martyr named Tom, helped start a civil war. Before the Civil War, Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold more copies than any other book except for the Bible. In fact, Stowe’s story was so morally powerful that it generated sales of the Bible.
Books are also changed. In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois pricked the conscience of white Americans with his Souls of Black Folk. In an age of Jim Crow segregation and spectacle lynching, his literary effort to unveil those behind the veil was beautiful and tragic. One black Presbyterian minister wrote to him, “God has raised you up at this juncture in our history, as a race, to speak to the intelligence of the country in our behalf.” But Souls of Black Folk also contained several lines that demeaned Jews as “shrewd and unscrupulous.” Jacob Schiff, a financier, wrote to Du Bois that these phrases “gave an impression of anti-Semitism.” By 1953, Du Bois agreed and had eight references to Jews altered or removed. Those who have read Souls since would have no idea of the change.
Other books get new forewords, new covers, and sometimes new chapters. Randall Balmer’s Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory, for instance, is now in its fifth edition. The soon-to-be-released 25th anniversary edition has a new chapter and afterward.
