This dissertation examines a curricular approach at an institution that claims to maintain a liberal arts focus – that of the canon of Great Books as implemented as a formal curriculum at St. John’s College. My research question is: what enabled the Great Books program at St. John’s College to survive for over seventy years? The significance of this question can be seen by noticing that St. John’s College is the only college in the United States to have exclusively adopted reading the Great Books as its four-year curriculum. Other institutions that have experimented with a Great Books program prior to and since its introduction at St. John’s College have continued their existing programs as well, but many have limited their Great Books efforts to an honors course or general core requirement, if their Great Books effort survives at all. My dissertation is historical starting with the influencing factors leading to this curriculum’s introduction at St. John’s College in 1937. I then outline the implementation and document the changes to the list of Great Books comprising the program as it was updated over the subsequent seventy years as documented in St. John’s College’s academic catalogs from 1937 through 2008. I show that the list of Great Books required to be read by every student over the years has contained a consistent core while making slight adjustments.

John Erskine was the leading Evangelical in the Church of Scotland in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Educated in an enlightened setting at Edinburgh University, he learned to appreciate the epistemology of John Locke and other empiricists alongside key Scottish Enlightenment figures such as his ecclesiastical rival, William Robertson. Although groomed to follow in his father’s footsteps as a lawyer, Erskine changed career paths in order to become a minister of the Kirk. He was deeply moved by the endemic revivals in the west of Scotland and determined that his contribution to the burgeoning Evangelical movement on both sides of the Atlantic would be much greater as a clergyman than a lawyer. Yet Erskine was no ‘enthusiast’. He integrated the style and moral teachings of the Enlightenment into his discourses and posited new theories on traditional views of Calvinism in his theological treatises. Erskine’s thought, however, never transgressed the boundaries of orthodoxy. His goal was to update Evangelical Calvinism with the new style and techniques of the Enlightenment without sacrificing the gospel message. While Erskine was widely recognised as an able preacher and theologian, his primary contribution to Evangelicalism was as a disseminator. He sent correspondents like the New England pastor Jonathan Edwards countless religious and philosophical works so that he and others could learn about current ideas, update their writings to conform to the Age of Reason and provide an apologetic against perceived heretical authors. Erskine also was crucial in the publishing of books and pamphlets by some of the best Evangelical theologians in America and Britain. Within his lifetime, Erskine’s main contribution to Evangelicalism was as a propagator of an enlightened form of Calvinism.

ABSTRACT This study focuses on twenty-one particular texts published in 1925 as contemporaries of The Great Gatsby. The manuscript is divided into four categories—The Impressionists, The Experimentalists, The Realists, and The Independents. Among The Impressionists are F. Scott Fitzgerald himself, Willa Cather (The Professor’s House), Sherwood Anderson (Dark Laughter), William Carlos Williams (In the American Grain), Elinor Wylie (The Venetian Glass Nephew), John Dos Passos (Manhattan Transfer), and William Faulkner (New Orleans Sketches). The Experimentalists are Gertrude Stein (The Making of Americans), E. E. Cummings (& aka “Poems 48-96”), Ezra Pound (A Draft of XVI Cantos), T. S. Eliot (“The Hollow Men”), Laura Riding (“Summary for Alastor”), and John Erskine (The Private Life of Helen of Troy). The Realists are Theodore Dreiser (An American Tragedy), Edith Wharton (The Mother’s Recompense), Upton Sinclair (Mammonart), Ellen Glasgow (Barren Ground), Sinclair Lewis (Arrowsmith), James Boyd (Drums), and Ernest Hemingway (In Our Time). The Independents are Archibald MacLeish (The Pot of Earth) and Robert Penn Warren (“To a Face in a Crowd”). Although these twenty-two texts may in some cases represent literary fragmentations, each in its own way also represents a coherent response to the spirit of the times that is in one way or another cognate to The Great Gatsby. The fact that all these works appeared the same year is special because the authors, if not already famous, would become famous, and their works were or would come to represent classic American literature around the world. The twenty-two authors either knew each other personally or knew each other’s works. Naturally, they were also influenced by writings of international authors and philosophers. The greatest common elements among the poets and fiction writers are their uninhibited interest in sex, an absorbing cynicism about life, and the frequent portrayal of disintegration of the family, a trope for what had happened to the countries and to the “family of nations” that experienced the Great War. In 1925, it would seem, Fitzgerald and many of his writing peers—some even considered his betters—channeled a major spirit of the times, and Fitzgerald did it more successfully than almost anyone.