Six American novels, read in the order it happened

Quick answer: Read these six in this order, one a month, and by next spring you'll have walked from the Sons of Liberty to the closing of the frontier. Johnny Tremain, Drums Along the Mohawk, The Killer Angels, True Grit, My Ántonia, Shane. Content notes are under each one.

Why a novel does what the textbook didn't

Little Round Top gets a paragraph in most history books. In The Killer Angels it gets an afternoon, and you finish the chapter gripping the cover.

That's the whole case for historical fiction. A textbook hands you dates and outcomes. A good novel hands you the decision, made by a man who didn't know how it would turn out. You can't un-know that. It sticks.

One honest caution. Novelists invent dialog and compress timelines. Read the novel, then read one plain nonfiction book on the same stretch to check the edges. That's not a flaw in the method. It's the second half of it.

The shelf, in order

**1. Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes (1943).** Boston, 1773 to 1775. Johnny is a silversmith's apprentice whose hand is ruined in an accident, and he drifts into the circle of men who start a revolution. Paul Revere and the Sons of Liberty move through the story as real neighbors, not marble statues. It won the Newbery Medal and it's still the best door into the Revolution for a twelve-year-old, and a surprisingly good one for his father.

Content: none to worry about. A little wartime violence at the end. Read it aloud if the kids are younger. The read-aloud list by age has more like it.

**2. Drums Along the Mohawk by Walter D. Edmonds (1936).** Most Americans know the Revolution as Boston, Philadelphia and Valley Forge. Edmonds takes you to the New York frontier, where a young couple, Gil and Lana Martin, try to build a farm while raids burn the neighbors out. It's a story about what it costs to hold ground. It moves slower than Forbes, and the middle sags a little. Stay with it.

Content: frontier raids, killings and burned cabins, described plainly but not gratuitously. Fine for older teens and adults.

**3. The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara (1974).** Four days at Gettysburg, July 1863, told through Lee, Longstreet, Joshua Chamberlain of the 20th Maine and a handful of others. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. Shaara imagines what the men thought and said, and the broad shape follows the record. What you take away is the weight of command: Lee's confidence, Longstreet's doubts, Chamberlain holding a hillside with men who were out of ammunition.

Read this one slowly. It rewards a second pass.

Content: battle scenes that are honest about what bullets and cannon do to men. Older teens and up.

**4. True Grit by Charles Portis (1968).** Fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross goes after the man who killed her father and hires a one-eyed, whiskey-loving U.S. marshal named Rooster Cogburn to help. She narrates years later in a dry, stubborn, absolutely sure voice, and that voice is the reason to read it. It's short, funny and tough. Mattie is the kind of person who negotiates a horse price like she's closing a bank loan.

Content: gunfights, a hanging, hard language of the period kept mild. Better for sixteen and up. Skip the movie until you've finished the book.

**5. My Ántonia by Willa Cather (1918).** Nebraska, 1880s onward. Jim Burden remembers Ántonia Shimerda, the Bohemian immigrant girl who grew up on the next farm over, and the prairie that shaped both of them. If you want to know what the Homestead Act actually felt like from inside a sod house in January, this is the book. The prose is plain and very beautiful, and it's the best book on the list for a reader who thinks he doesn't like novels.

Content: an early chapter deals with a man's suicide in a brutal winter, handled gravely and without detail. A later storyline involves an unmarried young woman and a child. Nothing graphic. Okay for mature teens and adults.

**6. Shane by Jack Schaefer (1949).** A stranger rides into a Wyoming valley where homesteaders are being squeezed by a big cattle rancher. A boy named Bob Starrett narrates, and Bob's father, Joe, is every bit as important to the story as the gunman. It's short enough for a weekend. It's also the cleanest argument in American fiction that a man's job is to stand between his family and the people who would push them off their land.

Content: a couple of violent confrontations, one fistfight that goes long. Good for twelve and up.

If you want more of the saddle-and-dust country after this, the Westerns for the short days piece picks it up.

What I left off

Lonesome Dove. It's one of the great American novels, a cattle drive from Texas to Montana with two aging Rangers at the center, and it won the Pulitzer in 1986. It's also more than 800 pages with rough language, brutal violence and some scenes that don't belong near your kids. If you're an adult reader and you know what you're getting, go ahead. It's not a clean pick, so it's not on this shelf.

I also skipped Cooper. The Last of the Mohicans is a worthwhile book, and it's a slog. You'll get more from the six above first.

How to make it stick

Pick a pace you can keep. One book a month is plenty, and a reader who finishes six in six months will read twenty over the next three years. A reader who starts all six on the first of the month finishes none.

Pair a book with a place when you can. Read The Killer Angels the month before a trip to Gettysburg, or read Johnny Tremain and then walk the Freedom Trail in Boston. Standing where it happened turns a good read into something permanent.

Borrow before you buy. Every title above is in print, and most libraries carry them. Your library card covers the whole shelf for nothing.

And do the dull part. After each one, spend twenty minutes finding out what was true. What did Chamberlain actually do on that hill? When did the Mohawk Valley raids really peak? You'll remember the novel and the facts, and you'll hold both.

A country you only know from slogans is easy to push around. A country you've walked through, one chapter at a time, belongs to you.