The Conservative Virtue of Appreciating Literature
A Short List of Canonical and Non-Canonical Works
It used to be taken for granted among conservatives that one of the duties of conservatism was the appreciation for and celebration of high art: symphony orchestra, opera, sculpture, great portraits, landscape paintings, and dusty old books. In our populist era, anything that smacks of elitism is derided as left-wing, which is a shame because know-nothingism will only corrupt the right, and conservatives can learn a great deal from classic literature (and recent novels).
Christopher Scalia – son of the late, great Antonin Scalia – has a new book out, 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven't Read), in which he draws connections between a series of known and lesser-known novels and various conservative themes about human nature. In a recent promotional piece for the book, he quoted Russell Kirk, “every major form of literary art has taken for its deeper themes the norms of human nature. … [Authors] assumed that the writer is under a moral obligation to normality—that is, explicitly or implicitly, to certain enduring standards of private and public conduct.” Literature contains within it conservative themes, because literature deals with human nature and the tragic reality we inhabit, both of which are foundational to conservative philosophy.
There are two other reasons why conservatives should appreciate literature. One is the belief, rooted in hierarchy and a celebration of civilizational patrimony, in a Canon of Great Works of Western Civilization, works which define our culture and our societies and which stand head and shoulders above the rest. Many of these works are in conversation with one another across the centuries.
The other is that even literature which is not a part of the canon nonetheless lies upon a Burkean foundation of gradual evolution. The forms it takes. The symbols it uses. The themes and settings and underlying meanings and allusions. I wrote about this in an essay many years ago, but the short version is that most writers inherently draw on symbols and tropes which have become so deeply ingrained in our culture that we do not realize they are symbols and tropes, and that all works exist in some sense on a foundation of those works which have come before. Without living in a hermetic bubble, it is impossible for a writer to avoid this.
With all of that out of the way, I wanted to give a partial list of novels and authors conservatives should read. I would love for readers to offer their own additions. This list is not in any particular order. You will note that other than Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn, everyone on this list falls into the Anglo-American tradition, and that I didn’t include any fiction from classical Greece or Rome, or from Asia or Africa or even Germany. I don’t read much fiction outside of the Russian and Anglo-American traditions, so I didn’t feel competent to comment on it. I do read classical works from Rome, but it seemed appropriate to restrict the list to more recent works.
Perhaps in the future I will come up with a list of nonfiction works. I’ve included in this list a number of genre fiction authors whose work may not be canonical Western literature, but who nonetheless merit a read.
William Shakespeare. Not a novelist, but the most important author of fiction in all of Western Civilization (and probably human history). His plays reflect a deep understanding of human nature, and he is the most quoted single author in all of Western literature (only the Bible is more quoted). A short list of important plays (to read and watch) includes King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Measure for Measure, Othello, As You Like It, Henry V, Richard III, and The Tempest.
Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The latter is in my view the Great American Novel. Twain set the mold for much of the American literature which came after him. There is a temperamental conservatism throughout his work, and a love of America (even as he loathed some areas of American culture).
Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Billy Budd. The former is profound and difficult to grasp upon first reading. There is much going on beneath the surface. Melville’s worldview is bleak and tragic. His prose is remarkably perceptive. The latter novel is quick to read and quite easy. It’s a wonderful tale about sailing and the rule of law which draws on the Bible, history, and English common law.
Flannery O’Connor. Wise Blood and the short stories, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” and “The Displaced Persons.” These three, in my opinion, constitute her best work, but I never read The Violent Bear It Away (I’ve read all of the rest of her fiction), so I can’t comment on it.
Jane Austen. I confess I have never read Austen. But there is an abiding conservatism to her work and a celebration of English society. Henry Oliver has written eloquently on Austen, who was highly literate, and versed in the contemporary thinkers of her day (and those who immediately preceded her day, like David Hume and Adam Smith). Austen’s most important novels are Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persuasion, and Sense and Sensibility.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I’ve only read his Nobel Lecture and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, but I plan to read The Gulag Archipelago someday.
Jack London. No writer better captures the struggle between civilization and barbarism than London. Conservatism is premised on an acceptance of the harsh reality of the world (there is no free lunch). His best novel and most profound novel is The Sea Wolf, which engages Nietzsche head on. The Call of the Wild, though, is the one that made him famous and the one which most people read. I’ve read six novels by London, and those two are the best, followed by Martin Eden.
Speaking of engaging Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment is worth reading for any conservative. As is The Brothers Karamazov. I’ve only listened to The Brothers Karamazov, and understood perhaps ten percent of it, but I read Crime and Punishment three times and found deeper levels to it every time.
The more recent authors conservatives should read include Tom Wolfe and Cormac McCarthy. I’ve only read I Am Charlotte Simmons from Wolfe, but I’ve read most of McCarthy’s corpus. The Border Trilogy, Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, The Road, and Stella Maris are all worth reading. The title of this Substack is, of course, taken from The Road.
I’m sure I will be criticized for this, but I think conservatives should read Ayn Rand. Anthem will only take a few hours at most. We The Living isn’t very good, but it was the first novel to show what life in the Soviet Union was really like (and Rand had trouble publishing it because of that). The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are foundational texts for libertarians and small-government types everywhere, even if you have issues (as I do) with some of Ayn Rand’s personal behavior, or with some of her philosophy on the virtue of selfishness (although most people don’t really know what she meant by that). Whittaker Chambers was highly unfair to Rand in his review of Atlas Shrugged, but many at National Review were unhappy with her at the time for understandable reasons.
Dune. Frank Herbert was a small government guy skeptical of predictions about the future, who wrote a novel warning about the follies of following charismatic visionaries and centralizing power in the hands of a single person, whose novel did so well people thought he was a champion of prophecy, charismatic visionaries, and one-man-rule, so he had to write a whole series to prove his original point. Everything through God-Emperor of Dune is worth reading, but you can also stop at the first one.
C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. These almost go without saying.
Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. The latter is about the Moon declaring independence from Earth on July 4th, 2076 after the heroine gives an impassioned speech about how the lunar colony doesn’t “have a free market.” The former is sometimes derided as a fascist tract, but it’s about an all-volunteer military during an existential war of survival, and it was written at a time when an all-volunteer army was a crazy libertarian fantasy. It’s a fantastic story of war and manhood.
I would be remiss if I didn’t add, for fun, a few novels by Bill Buckley’s son, Christopher. Make Russia Great Again is one of the funniest books I have ever read. Supreme Courtship is very good. Thank You For Smoking is probably his most famous, although I haven’t read it.
William Faulkner. The Sound and the Fury (the title of which is taken from Macbeth).
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. I’ve only seen the movie for this one, but I include it because of the importance the French Revolution plays in conservative thought from Edmund Burke to the modern day.
That list ought to start us out. As I think of worthy additions, I’ll add them in the comments.
As a coda, I’ll offer a brief, nonexhaustive list of poets. Shakespeare (again) and Milton (whom I haven’t read) top the list. Walt Whitman wasn’t exactly a conservative, but “O Captain, My Captain,” is perhaps the most important poem in American history. Tennyson should go without saying. Kipling, too.1 I only know one poem by John Keats well, but he should probably be on the list, too. Perhaps Dylan Thomas, Yeats, Burns, and Frost as well.
“The Stranger” and “White Man’s Burden,” are controversial, but if we were to comb through this list and throw out every poet or author who harbored some prejudice or committed some misdeed, we would have a much shorter list. Conservatives understand that human beings are fallen creatures capable of sin and error.