10 Books Every Hoosier Should Have Read by Now

Today on the 199th anniversary of Indiana becoming a state, we are pleased to announce a new blog series to celebrate our state's literary heritage for the bicentennial next year. The Indiana Bicentennial Bookshelf series will feature our regional authors blogging about their favorite Indiana writers and books.

This series was inspired in part by the Next Indiana Bookshelf, a program created by the Indiana Humanities and the Indiana Center for the Book. The Bookshelf is a collection of 13 titles (including three from IU Press, Earth Works: Selected Essays by Scott Russell Sanders, What This River Keeps by Greg Schwipps, and Sailing the Inland Sea: On Writing, Literature, and Land by Susan Neville) that encourage Hoosiers to think, read, and talk about the present and future of their state. The Bookshelf is just a fraction of the great writing with strong Indiana connections, so we hope that our blog series will help expand upon this initiative and get even more Hoosiers reading and talking about their state during the bicentennial.

The other inspiration for the Indiana Bicentennial Bookshelf series was a Facebook post by our author Ray E. Boomhower about his top 10 Indiana books. He graciously agreed to expand upon it for the first installment of our series:

By Ray E. Boomhower

As a devotee of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites, I am always on the lookout for items that might spark discussion among other users. In July 2015 I came across an online article with the intriguing title “10 Books Every Minnesotan Should Have Read by Now.” The piece touted Minnesota’s “historically rich literature community,” and included in its listing works by a diverse group of authors, including Laura Ingalls Wilder, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tim O’Brien, and Carol Bly.

Intrigued, I wondered, if I was asked, what ten books might I select for a “10 Books Every Hoosier Should Have Read by Now.” After all, Indiana has just a rich literary tradition as the Land of 10,000 Lakes—something shown in great detail in a new Literary Map of Indiana developed by the Indiana Center for the Book in time for the upcoming bicentennial. The hardest part in compiling such a list would be to keep it to just ten books. Leaving out some worthy choices, here are my selections, in no particular order:

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ by Lew Wallace: One of the best-selling books of all time, and one of the best researched. Wallace could not have written such a classic without his experiences in battle during the Civil War.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut: Another book forged from a Hoosier’s experience during wartime, this time Vonnegut’s capture by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge in Word War II. Harrowing and extremely funny.

The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington: Winner of the 1919 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and set in a fictionalized Indianapolis. Tarkington captures the wholesale changes in American society during the beginning of the twentieth century.

Fort Wayne is Seventh on Hitler's List by Michael Martone: Short, sharp vignettes of Indiana lore told with affection and regret by a Fort Wayne native who has left the state, but is not forgotten.

In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash by Jean Shepherd: Yes, Indiana, the Calumet Region is part of us. The quintessential Hoosier coming-of-age story. Quirky fun with a leg lamp, a Red Ryder air rifle, and a Fourth of July firework for the ages.

The Old Northwest: Pioneer Period, 1815–1850 by R. Carlyle Buley: Winner of the 1951 Pulitzer Prize for history, the book, written by the son of a Hoosier schoolteacher, portrays in vivid detail the “beliefs, struggles and way of life” of those who settled what became the nineteenth state.

The Negro in Indiana before 1900: A Study of a Minority by Emma Lou Thornbrough: A groundbreaking work still relevant today by one of the preeminent historians of the state and a dedicated teacher at Butler University.

Brave Men by Ernie Pyle: Nobody wrote about war and the strange and awful things it does to those trapped in it than Pyle, who witnessed at firsthand “wholesale death and vile destruction” as he reported from North Africa, Sicily, Italy, France, and the Pacific.

Indiana: An Interpretation by John Bartlow Martin: A bracing anecdote to feel-good histories that came before, Martin’s work offers not comfort, but challenge to the enduring myth of the average Hoosier. Not for the faint-hearted.

A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America by James H. Madison: The noted chronicler of Indiana pours onto the page all of the horror of the state’s most terrible nights, when two African American teenagers were lynched in Marion. A sobering look at America’s struggles with race.

Ray E. Boomhower is author of John Bartlow Martin: A Voice for the Underdog (IUP, 2015), The People’s Choice: Congressman Jim Jontz of Indiana, and Robert F. Kennedy and the 1968 Indiana Primary (IUP, 2008). He is Senior Editor of Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History, the quarterly magazine of the Indiana Historical Society. Follow him on Twitter: @RayBoomhower.

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Our Indiana Bicentennial Bookshelf series will continue every month as we count down to 200th anniversary of the state on December 11, 2016. Upcoming posts include a piece by Larry Lockridge, who will co-blog for us and the Next Indiana Bookshelf about his father Ross Lockridge, Jr.'s novel Raintree County, which is a Bookshelf selection. Larry Lockridge is author of his father's biography Shade of the Raintree, reissued last year by IU Press.