“Comments on Neglected Books of the Past 25 Years,” published in American Scholar, Spring 1970 (follow-up letters in Summer 1970 issue)
Fifteen years after its first feature on neglected books, The American Scholar marked its first issue of the 1970s by asking “a number of distinguished men and women to name that book published in the last quarter of a century that they believed to have been the most undeservedly neglected.”
• Aleck Maury, Sportsman, Caroline Gordon — selected by Peter Taylor
• Attitudes Toward History, Kenneth Burke — selected by Herbert J. Muller
• The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, Lincoln Steffens — selected by John R. Silber
• The Awakening, Kate Chopin — selected by Stanley Kauffmann
• The Awakening Land (Trees, Fields, Town), Conrad Richter — selected by Carlos Baker
• Biology and Man, George Gaylord Simpson — selected by George Gaylord Simpson
• The Blind Owl, Sadegh Hedayat — selected by
• Blood from the Sky, Piotr Rawicz — selected by Stanley Kauffmann
• The Boatman, Jay Mcpherson — selected by Harold Bloom
• A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr. — selected by Harry Levin
• Capitalism and the Historians, T.S. Ashton et al. — selected by Leo Rosten
• Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Joseph Schumpeter — selected by Leo Rosten
• The Choir Invisible, Marianne Hauser — selected by Anais Nin
• Class, Caste, and Race, Oliver C. Cox — selected by Kenneth B. Clark
• Cold–The Record of an Antartic Sledge Journey, Laurence Gould — selected by Paul B. Sears
• Cosmicomics, Italo Calvino — selected by Dwight Macdonald
• Crossroads, James McConkey — selected by Joyce Carol Oates
• Dark Dominions, Marianne Hauser — selected by Anais Nin
• The Defense of Gracchus Babeuf before the High Court of Vendome, Francois Noel Babeuf — selected by Anthony Hecht
• The Displaced Person’s Almanac, John Pairman Brown — selected by Marston Bates
• Divided Loyalties, Janet Teissier du Cros — selected by Robert Motherwell
• The Encounter, Crawford Powers — selected by James Dickey
• The Ethics of Redistribution, Bertrand de Jouvenel — selected by Nathan Glazer
• Fact of Crystal, Abbie Huston Evans — selected by Louis Bogan
• A Free and Responsible Press: Report of the Commission on Freedom of the Press, Commission on Freedom of the Press — selected by Harry S. Ashmore
• French Ecclesiastical Society Under the Ancien Regime: A Study of Angers in the Eighteenth Century, — selected by Peter Gay
• Futility, William Gerhardie — selected by C.P. Snow
• Gates of Hell, Calder Willingham — selected by Tom Wolfe
• The Ghost and Flesh, William Goyen — selected by Anais Nin
• God Speaks, Charles Peguy — selected by Michael Novak
• The Hands of Esau, Hiram Haydn — selected by Anais Nin
• A Harlot’s Hire, Allen Grossman — selected by Harold Bloom
• A Haunted Woman, Sanford Friedman — selected by Mark Strand
• The Hedgehog and the Fox, Isaiah Berlin — selected by Erwin D. Canham
• Historical Consciousness, John Lukacs — selected by Jacques Barzun
• The Home Place, Wright Morris — selected by Martin E. Marty
• Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga — selected by Harvey Cox
• A House in Bryanstone Square, Algernon Cecil — selected by G. B. Harrison
• The House of Breath, William Goyen — selected by Anais Nin
• Human Action, Ludwig von Mises — selected by L. Stanford Altpeter
• The Image of the Future, Fred Polak — selected by Kenneth Boulding
• In a Farther Country, William Goyen — selected by Anais Nin
• In Solitary Witness: The Life and Death of Franz Jagerstatter, Gordon Zahn — selected by Theodore Roszak
• Last and First Men, Olaf Stapledon — selected by Susan Sontag
• The Last of the Just, Andre Schwartz-Bart — selected by Henry A. Murray
• Le Probleme de L’incroyance au XVIe Siecle, Lucien Febvre — selected by Daniel Bell
• A Lesson in Music, Marianne Hauser — selected by Anais Nin
• The Long Old Road, Horace Clayton — selected by David Riesman
• Loquitur, Basil Bunting — selected by John Fowles
• Madame Solario, Anonymous (Constance Huntington) — selected by Mary Renault
• Man and Boy, Wright Morris — selected by Kenneth S. Lynn
• Many Mansions, Isabel Bolton — selected by Babette Deutsch
• The Maurizius Case, Jakob Wassermann — selected by Robert Brustein
• Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, Marguerite Young — selected by R. Gordon Holcombe
• Mojo Hand, Jane Phillips — selected by Nat Hentoff
• The Nature of Sympathy, Max Scheler — selected by Robert Coles
• New Science, Vico — selected by Norman O. Brown
• On Not Being Able to Paint, Joanna Field (pseudonym of Marion Milner) — selected by Robert Motherwell
• On the Marble Cliffs, Ernst Junger — selected by W.S. Merwin
• The Ordeal of the Animals, Mel Morse — selected by Joseph Wood Krutch
• The Origins of European Thought, Richard Broxton Onians — selected by Norman O. Brown
• The Perception of the Visual World, J.J. Gibson — selected by Susanne K. Langer
• The Polyglots, William Gerhardie — selected by C.P. Snow
• Prater Violet, Christopher Isherwood — selected by Brian Glanville
• Preambles and Other Poems, Alvin Feinman — selected by Harold Bloom
• Prison Notes, Barbara Deming — selected by Dwight Macdonald
• The Problem of Boston, Martin Green — selected by Irving Kristol
• The Progress of Stories, Laura Riding — selected by Susan Sontag
• Reason and Nature, Morris Raphael Cohen — selected by John Herman Randall, Jr.
• The Relevance of Physics, Stanley L. Jaki — selected by L. Stanford Altpeter
• Rhymes of a Pfc, Lincoln Kirstein — selected by W.H. Auden
• Richer by Asia, Edmund Fuller — selected by Time
• Selected Poems, A.R. Ammonds — selected by Harold Bloom
• The Sexual Cycle of Human Warfare, Major Norman Walter — selected by Anthony Burgess
• Something of a Hero, I.J. Kapstein — selected by J.H. Plumb
• Sufis, Idries Shah — selected by Doris Lessing
• Taos, Irwin R. Blacker — selected by L. Stanford Altpeter
• Two Serious Ladies, Jane Bowles — selected by Ned Rorem
• Was ist richtiges Sehen mit Umkehrbrillen und in welchem Sinne stellt sich das Sehen um? (What is right seeing with inverting spectacles and in what sense is sight reinverted?), Psychologia Universalis Vol. 5, Verlag Anton Hain K.G. Meisenheim am Glan — selected by Michael Polanyi