One of the Heritage American’s secret sources is a 1937 textbook
and anthology entitled Our Literary Heritage: American
Literature, edited by Russell Blankenship et al. (1) Collections
like this are precious because they introduce the whole range of
our tradition as it stood before it was ravaged by the anti-
racism, anti-sexism, anti-military, multicultural, and – well,
anti-American movements. It is not that we can’t get hold of our
pre-PC literature if we look for it, and quite a bit of it is
still in print, but it’s hard to know where to begin when no one
alive teaches our history or literature as a tradition. Groups
like the Conservative Book Club can help, but I prefer to start
with older collections like American Literature, which are more
than adequate to set one on an unending journey of reading and
discovery. American Literature seems to be aimed at male high
school students, and one point that it emphasizes is the concept
of citizenship. The idea seems to be that American literature
can help to inst