Gerard Jones is the author of Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence (Basic Books, $25) and the forthcoming Men of Tomorrow: The Story of How Super Heroes Were Invented and What They Mean.
The Masks of God by Joseph Campbell (Viking, 4 vols., $18 each). At 20 I thought it was the Truth revealed. Decades later it’s still an intoxicating plunge—the whole mess of human history pulled into one grand romance through myth-drunk fervor and an autodidact’s fearless leaps.
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Exile’s Return by Malcolm Cowley (Penguin, $15). The only literary history that made me cry: personal memories of the lost generation, from high school snottiness to the long, cheap binge of Paris to the deaths and resignations of the Depression, told with a heartbreaking intimacy.
The Sound and the Fury (Random House, $16) and As I Lay Dying (Knopf, $17) by William Faulkner. One a slow, dark, gnarling river of a novel, one a quick-twisting creek of narrative ingenuity and liquored-up fantasy, they were pressed into a single proletarian edition after World War II that became a new book unto itself, at once gruesome and funny, populist and profound.
Romantic Comedy: In Hollywood, from Lubitsch to Sturges by James Harvey (Da Capo, $21). Elegantly, thoroughly, and with a wise infatuation, Harvey leads us through Hollywood’s most exquisite products, bringing us not only to a new understanding of the oblique profundities of mass entertainment but to a sort of ethic of love, a wit that holds the irreconcilable demands of sex and civilization in perfect tension.
Summer Lightning