I was in the third grade when I got introduced to the children’s section of the small public library in Greensboro, Alabama.  That’s it in the photo above, the pale yellow building with City Hall and the County Courthouse behind. The books I found there were definitely an improvement over the school readers where “See Jack run” seemed to pass for excitement. At the library I found the Bobbsey Twins, the Hardy Boys, animal stories, and books about the childhoods of such as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln that tended to be filled with lessons suitable for the young. And then I stumbled across a book called The Biography of a Grizzly by Ernest Thompson Seton. It was serious. It was sad. It didn’t speak down to the young reader. For the first time I found myself totally involved in what I was reading. Transported to another realm.
          But as much as the individual books I encountered there and devoured before moving surprisingly quickly to the adult section up front, it was the fact that there were a whole bunch of books arranged in a manner that you could use to find more of what you liked. On top of that, you could find check them out and take them home. I immediately started my own library at home. All my comic books, Superman in one stack, Captain Marvel in another, Donald Duck in his own stack, each stack then ordered by date of publication. Big Little Books had their own shelf. (Remember them? Sort of a bridge between comic books and the later graphic novels, in a way.) Hard-cover books, the few I had, didn’t need much in the way of arrangement since you could see all 3 or 4 of them at a glance.
          I even set up a way to sign out books or issues and showed my library to friends in the community. They looked and marveled but never actually signed out anything.

​We who read widely have our great loves over our lifetimes, writers and books that somehow form the basis of our lives. Mine would include the Tarzan novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ernest Thompson Seton’s “Biography of a Grizzly,” “The Little Prince,” “The Once and Future King,” “The Lord of the Rings,” Olaf Stapledon’s “Last and First Men” and “Star Maker,” the writings of William Faulkner, Emily Bronte, J.D. Salinger, Arthur C. Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, Patrick White, Iris Murdoch, Ross Macdonald, Neal Stephenson, Michael Wehunt, Adam Nevill, John Langan, and oh so many more. Some of these may be merely childhood romances, if such love affairs can be considered mere. Some are lifelong friends who have sustained me and continue to do so. Some are new loves, and as with all such one doesn’t yet know exactly how time will sort them out and how they will fit into one’s life, which is of course one reason they are so exciting.
          And then there are those few works that stand apart, whose magnificence break through the canopy of greatness and soar to amazing heights, works that ravish me, amaze me, terrify me, thrill me to the depths of my soul. You probably have a few like that as well. For me they would be “Moby-Dick” by Herman Melville, “Absalom, Absalom!” by William Faulkner, “Gravity’s Rainbow” by Thomas Pynchon, and “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez. The first two grew out of my high school and college years, and the latter two I encountered as a somewhat mature adult. Each one could be considered the Great American Novel, as long as we let that label embrace the Southern Hemisphere as well as the Northern.
          It is no accident, I think, that all are American.