What are you rebelling against? Celebrate America's literary heritage

Young students should study America's literary heritage for our nation's 250th anniversary, along with our great civic texts, writes Mark Bauerlein in the Epoch Times.

For example, Ben Franklin’s Autobiography "is an archetypal rags-to-riches American plot" that's echoed in the Horatio Alger stories, The Great Gatsby, Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Washington’s Up From Slavery, and many more, writes Bauerlein, an emeritus professor of English at Emory.

As a teenager, Franklin was "a runaway and a criminal, landing in Philadelphia with no money or prospects, nothing but some experience as a printer," he writes. He works hard, "reads a lot and finds friends with whom he can discuss ideas and works. Fame and fortune follow."

Ralph Waldo Emerson's Self-Reliance, brings "Don't tread on me!" to the individual level, writes Bauerlein. “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist,” Emerson declares. Also, “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”

"When Marlon Brando, the motorcycle gang leader in The Wild One, is asked, 'Hey, Johnny what ‘er you rebelling against?' and he replies, 'Whad'ya got?' he’s a pure Emersonian," he writes.

Bauerlein passes over Walden, Dickinson and Hawthorne's preface to The Scarlet Letter to choose Walt Whitman, Song of Myself as his next quintessentially American entry.

Grand works of the Old World celebrate great heroes such as Odysseus and King Arthur. Here, the opening line is “I celebrate myself.” . . . Whitman opts to ride the buses on Broadway and listen to “the blab of the pave.”

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass introduces students to "one of the superb rhetoricians in American literary history," writes Bauerlein. When he’s a boy, his mistress starts to teach him to read, but her husband "insists that she stop, telling her that literacy would unfit him to be a good slave," and make him miserable.

Douglass concludes: “I must learn to read —if I don’t, I shall never be free.” He learns to read from white boys, and he is miserable about his life. So he escapes. "As young Americans log ever fewer hours of book time, Douglass’s risky pursuit is an inspiration," writes the professor.

Bauerlein and Stanley Kurtz have proposed that Congress pass the "BOOKS Act," which would call on the state to require students read two books per semester in English class in grades six through 12.

Books must be of literary merit, and half must be originally published before 1900, they propose. High school students should read books published for general readers, while middle schoolers may read books published for young readers, if they have "well-established critical reputations for central or foundational relevance to the subject matter of the course." In short, no "young-adult slop."

Douglass leads their "whereas" section: “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”

There's also Ray Bradbury: “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

And W.E.B. DuBois: "I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not, across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas … I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension."