Authors' Favorite Books, 1939

Books that Changed Our Minds

Malcolm Cowley & Bernard Smith, 1939

This book, dedicated to the historian Charles Beard, consisted of a series of essays about authors or books deemed especially influential by American intellectuals responding to a New Republic inquiry. While it does not provide first-hand information about the books that influenced regular people (or even women, since all the respondents were apparently male), many of the people they polled were intellectuals who had written books that did influence large groups of Americans. Carl Becker, for instance, nominated William Graham Sumner’s Folkways, which he said “impressed me with the relativity of custom and ideas,” and Hans Vaihinger’s The Philosophy of ‘As if’: A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind, which “confirmed me in the notion that social thinking is shaped by certain unexamined preconceptions current at the time.” Charles Beard said “Brooks Adams’s two books are thumping,” which the editors identified as The Law of Civilization and Decay and Theory of Social Revolutions. Both Becker and Beard recommended Benedetto Croce’s History, Its Theory and Practice.

Charles Beard himself was the second-most widely recommended author, just behind Thorstein Veblen (really!), and Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution and Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class received an equal number of votes. Authors popular with the surveyed intellectuals for the total body of their work rather than a particular title included Sinclair Lewis, H. L. Mencken, George Bernard Shaw, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. Autobiographies included Henry Adams’, Theodore Dreiser’s, Joseph Freeman’s, Robert M. La Follette’s, and The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, which was called “the key book of the depression...[that] came at exactly the right moment.”

Several of the books listed seem to be present in other lists of titles popular with the general public, so it’s helpful to corroborate that the judgment of intellectuals and general readers did not seem to be that divergent in 1939.