Literary Values

In Literary Values, John Burroughs asks what makes writing endure: not novelty, ornament, or technical display, but sanity, proportion, simplicity, and the writer's essential truthfulness. Across these reflective essays, he argues that lasting literature is marked by sincerity, directness, moral seriousness, and a living personal force that can appear in sermons, memoirs, fiction, poetry, speeches, or even private letters. Burroughs celebrates the elemental honesty of figures like Bunyan, Walton, Defoe, Lincoln, and Grant, while insisting that schools and culture often dull the raw vitality that gives language life. He also explores how style, narration, and imaginative phrasing transform ordinary words into memorable art, and how true literary power depends on the intimate bond between mind and language. The book compares major writers and traditions, from Poe's art-for-art mastery and the style-conscious French and German schools to the more idea-driven energies of Emerson, Carlyle, Taine, Flaubert, and Baudelaire. It ultimately defends literature as a living, personal, and spiritually nourishing force that resists rigid formulas and mechanical criticism. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.