The Power of Literature

A Practical and Philosophical Defense

Essay by Ann Hood ’78
Illustrations by Anthony Russo ’74

Everyone should, of course, be an English major. Let me explain.

I started at the University of Rhode Island in the fall of 1974, a 17-year-old girl who knew exactly nothing, except one thing: literature can save our lives. This I had figured out on my own when I was seven. I grew up in West Warwick, 24 miles and a world away from Kingston, the odd kid in thick glasses who liked to raise her hand too much and started reading Hints From Heloise and Dear Abby in first grade. My elementary school, Providence Street Grammar School, was the same one where my mother and her nine siblings had gone and, before that, where my grandmother had gone until third grade when she had to go to work at the Natick Mill.

We were Italian-American immigrants who worked hard—some still in the mills—and cooked a lot and talked around the kitchen table over black coffee and cigarettes well into the night. Reading? Not so much.

It’s hard for me to discern how I came to love reading as much as I did. Oh, I know what I loved about it: how it took me to places I never thought I’d see, like London or Alaska or Prince Edward Island; how it showed me people so different from the ones I knew, like orphans and explorers and teenage sleuths; how when I read, the world around me disappeared and hours passed in a gentle fog of words and emotions. For the least popular kid in my class, the one who didn’t get invited to birthday parties or to practice the twist after school in Michelle Kincaid’s rec room, getting transported into Nancy Drew’s roadster or to the March family’s dinner table kept me from feeling lonely.

But how I came to pick up my older brother’s reading book one day when I was four and actually read it, no one can explain. Yet somehow I did. I opened that book and the letters on the page formed a word and I could read that word. “LOOK! LOOK!” I turned the page and read that one too, and the next and the next. “UP! UP!,” I read, and I had one thought: “I want to live in a book.”

It’s easy to think that of course I should have been an English major. I loved to read from an early age and I went on to become a writer. In fact, writers from Stephen King to Toni Morrison were English majors. But so were Harold Varmus, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine; Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas; former CEOs of Xerox, Avon, MTV, Disney, and NBC; Stephen Spielberg; Conan O’Brien; Garrison Keillor; Mitt Romney; Mario Cuomo; Sting—all of them English majors. So there is something more than a love of reading that propels people with such varied interests and talents to study English.

The summer of 1974, I spent most days at Scarborough Beach slathering myself with Coppertone and adding Sun-In to my hair. I worked at Jordan Marsh at the Warwick Mall and was in love with a boy entering his junior year at URI. The last thing I thought about was what I would major in or what I would do when I graduated in four years. One evening after dinner, my father sat me down and explained to me why I should major in Business. A woman majoring in Business at this point in time could write her own ticket, he told me. I probably smiled and nodded at him, even though the one thing I was certain of was that I would not major in Business. I loved poetry and Russian novels and thinking about Man vs. Nature and Man vs. Man. I loved staring out the window and daydreaming about the big world outside. Business? An office in a high rise somewhere? A suit and floppy bow tie? Not for me.

At freshman orientation that July, we were walked through the overwhelming and complicated process of registration, including how many credits in each division we needed. When my orientation leader asked me what I wanted to major in, I told him I wanted to be a writer. “Okay,” he said. “Journalism.” Before I knew it, I was enrolled in Journalism 101 as a journalism major. (How was he to know that the two greatest journalists of that time, Barbara Walters and Bob Woodward, were both English majors?)

But it took only one journalism class to send me down to the registrar to change my major to English. As soon as the professor told us that in journalism you can’t make things up, I knew I was in the wrong place. I wanted to tell stories. I wanted to transport people to places they’d never been with characters they’d never met, the way books did for me. When the professor of my American literature class handed out the syllabus, I felt like she’d given me a great gift: an entire semester’s worth of books to read and think about and discuss. That semester I was introduced to the work of Willa Cather and William Carlos Williams and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the effects of which have never faded.

In my junior year, I took my first Shakespeare class. One day, after our discussion on King Lear, I went to the teacher in tears. “This play speaks to me,” I told him. “To my whole generation! How could Shakespeare have known this so many hundreds of years ago?”

“Ah,” Dr. Smith answered, “that is why we still read Shakespeare. Why we read at all. To figure out who we are and why.” This idea made me dizzy with possibility and understanding.

Not long ago I read about a man who asked his friend, a Shakespeare scholar, how much she knew about Shakespeare. “Not as much as he knows about me,” she said.

This is at the heart of the value of majoring in English. By studying literature we don’t learn data points or increase our productivity. Instead we learn to understand human nature, to write sentences that are clear and sometimes beautiful, to weigh moral dilemmas, to use critical thinking and abstract reasoning.