Off the beaten track... a still from a Norwegian film version of Growth of the Soil, Knut Hamsun's Nobel prize-winning novel
I'm by nature a bit of an iconoclast. As a reader, this has often led me to recoil from books others tell me I "should" read. With more famous writers, I sometimes bypass their better-known books for the more obscure parts of their output. This might account for some of my unusual views about many of these authors, but I have also made some wonderful discoveries.
Among the first famous writers whose less well-known books I searched out was John Steinbeck. Growing up in the United States, it seemed that every school year ushered in another boring round of The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men. I liked the way Steinbeck wrote, though, so I eventually found myself gravitating towards his other works. Soon I found Cup of Gold, his first book, a largely ignored historical novel loosely based on the life of the Welsh pirate Henry Morgan. For an adventurous young straight boy this book has everything: exotic Caribbean locales, romantic violence, beautiful women, implied sex, and a plausible enough story to hold it all together. In other words, Cup of Gold showed me that there was far more to literature than my teachers were telling me.
As I grew older, I continued to rifle through the closets of my literary gods. Forced essays on Leaves of Grass caused me to flee for succour to Walt Whitman's criminally under-read Specimen Days, a wide-ranging prose collection that includes nature writing, a Civil War memoir, autobiographical sketches, and literary and philosophical discussions; it grabbed my attention from page one. From Whitman it was an easy side step to Henry David Thoreau. Now, I loved Walden, but I was confused: why was it the only book by the man that anyone seemed to care about? This state of affairs confused me even more once I'd read A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, a strange, often mesmerising book where Thoreau uses the chronicling of a short trip through New England as an excuse to philosophise and become rapturous about virtually everything under the sun.
As my tastes moved towards more current literature, Jack Kerouac briefly became my favorite author. Like most of his fans, I fell easily under the spell of classics such as On the Road and The Dharma Bums. However, I quickly gravitated towards two more obscure works: Tristessa - short tender tales of a beautiful morphine-doomed young woman in Mexico City - and Visions of Gerard, a memoir of the short, saintly life of the author's brother.
I've continued to travel the same path ever since. The hard-boiled John Fante's signature work, Ask the Dust, is no more important to me than Dreams from Bunker Hill or Brotherhood of the Grape. For DH Lawrence, it's his short stories which move me the most, rather than his novels. For Knut Hamsun, a little-known (in English-speaking countries anyway) late period tour de force, The Ring is Closed, trumped other long-canonised novels such as Hunger or Pan.
Looking back on what I've written, I see what amounts to a very idiosyncratic (and largely American) little collection. This doesn't bother me; you see, I have a selfish motive in writing this piece. I'm sure I'm far from the only one here who likes to sing the praises of the overlooked literary gems he's discovered - and I'm hoping this little essay will inspire you to tell me about all the obscure wonders you've found that I've missed. What other undervalued books by the famous and the less famous should I be reading? As a lover of forgotten and strange literature, I avidly await your answers.
