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The windowless room
In New York he stayed with a friend whose windowless room was lined floor to ceiling with books. He would open a book to the middle, read a few pages, and go back to the beginning only if he liked it. He was looking for the part of his education he had never gotten, and he read pages aloud because he liked the sound of the language.
The shelves
The shelves held Balzac, Hugo, Dickens, and Machiavelli's The Prince with a note scribbled inside about the spirit of the hustler. They held The Athenian General, written 400 years before Christ, about how human nature is always the enemy of anything superior. He read about Alexander the Great, Robert E. Lee, Thaddeus Stevens, and Teddy Roosevelt, each time pulling out what mattered to him.
Reading as a craft
He read everything with his craft in mind. Folk singers could sing songs like an entire book in a few verses, and he dug through the books like an archaeologist. A figure like Stevens, Roosevelt, or J.P. Morgan could have stepped out of a folk song. He packed in as much as he could and left it alone in his mind until he needed it.
How did Thaddeus Stevens shape Reconstruction?
Stevens was a Pennsylvania congressman and a leader of the Radical Republicans in the House. He pushed for equal rights for freed slaves and for harsh terms for the defeated South. He helped drive the Fourteenth Amendment and the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 through Congress. He died in 1868 and was buried in an integrated cemetery in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Why do people still argue over The Prince?
Niccolo Machiavelli wrote The Prince in 1513, and it circulated in manuscript before it was printed in 1532, five years after his death. It advises rulers on gaining and keeping power, and it argues that a ruler must sometimes act against conventional morality to protect the state. Readers have debated for centuries whether it is a cold manual, a satire, or a work of realism. The Catholic Church put it on its Index of Prohibited Books in 1559.
Why did folk songs pack so much into verses?
Traditional ballads were passed down by ear, so they used short verses, repeated phrases, and rhyme to make long stories easy to remember. Many cut straight to the key moment of a story, such as a murder or a hanging, and left out the rest. In the late 1800s, Harvard professor Francis James Child collected 305 English and Scottish ballads in a standard edition. Many of those ballads crossed the Atlantic and survived in the Appalachians.
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