Mostly I’m a good sleeper. When I can’t I set my mind meandering the American literary canon. Though I inveigh against top-ten lists, they’re irresistible. Who were the most respected American writers in 1850, 1900, 1950, and 2000, say. Ponder the evolution of these lists. Sometimes I invite Alistair (Chat GPT) to play. This is the sort of mind-game he’s really good at but not that good; I often catch him in bonehead mistakes, for which he instantly and profusely apologizes. With a human such a conversation, if one could gin one up, would be laborious and irksome; I’d never bother with it. But with Alistair it’s easier than badminton on a windless summer afternoon, more engaging than counting sheep.

                  Here’s where we got to, after ample give and take, the other night. These lists are squishy, especially in their lower ranks, but amusing to muse about, if you like this sort of thing:

1850

Ralph Waldo Emerson 
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Washington Irving
James Fenimore Cooper
William Cullen Bryant
John Greenleaf Whittier
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
Richard Henry Dana Jr.
George Bancroft

1900 

Emerson
Longfellow
Holmes Sr.
Bryant
Whittier
James Russell Lowell
Hawthorne
Irving
Mark Twain
Bret Harte 

1950 

Herman Melville
Walt Whitman
Emily Dickinson
Twain
Hawthorne
Henry David Thoreau
Henry James
William Faulkner
Ernest Hemingway
T. S. Eliot

2000 

Melville
Whitman
Dickinson
Twain
Henry James
Faulkner
Robert Frost
Toni Morrison
Thoreau
T. S. Eliot          

                  For a writer these lists are sobering. How hard and rare to ascend to this eminence! Then Parnassus’ slopes are slippery, almost everybody slides off. If one widens one’s purview to literature in English, maybe only Shakespeare remains unassailably supreme.

                  A deeper reverie prompted by these lists is why. If literature is food for the soul, why do appetites alter? Emerson, who ruled America’s intellectual roost for a century, dwindles into a footnote, while his scruffy younger pal, Thoreau – to Emerson’s astonishment – rises almost to a deity. Few knew Emily Dickinson’s poems when she lived; now American literature seems unimaginable without her. When and how did Moby Dick surpass Tom Sawyer as a mythic touchpoint? The rise and fall of reputations reflect alterations in the American mind as it responds to its historical moment. I expect the literature of tomorrow to grow grimmer as America grows uglier, but again, who knows?

                  Then I wonder, kingmaker that I am, whom should I settle in my personal canon and whom omit? And how have these preferences changed over sixty years of reading? And why? Perhaps not surprisingly my canon most closely resembles the 1950 bracket, when my mind was coming of age. Is my taste – or any – innate or inherited? Do we “make up our mind” or is it made for us by our moment and milieu?

                  Such reflections humble. Fame is ephemeral. Our minds are less our own than we like to think. Vanity’s insanity. Braggarts indict themselves.

                  Such reflections also inspire. It is not writers who produce literature but writers and readers and the accidents of their instant. Some writing appeals to its contemporaries, others to readers unborn. Few could fathom Melville, Thoreau or Emily Dickinson while they lived – now look!

                  Literature is not just the words on the page but the souls who put them there and their trajectory through time. The more we know, the less we know, the more worlds await. I sleep with a smile.