The Stars Are Still Shining: Book Life, Education, Culture, and Ideas That Endure

Scores of writers produced best-selling novels and exciting stories now buried by time in the out-of-print boneyard. (Amy Johansson/Shutterstock)

Out of print. Can there be three sadder words for a living author?

In 1975, Farrar Straus & Giroux published Larry Woiwode’s “Beyond the Bedroom Wall.” Here was an extraordinary novel over 600 pages long, a tale of heartbreaking beauty written by a young man about a mid-20th-century American family. Novelist John Gardner, a writer who set high standards for fiction, called it “simply brilliant” and “an enormous intelligent novel,” adding that “nothing more beautiful and moving has been written in years.” Esteemed literary critic Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post ranked “Beyond the Bedroom Wall” as one of the great American novels of the 20th century.

Larry Woiwode’s “Beyond the Bedroom Wall,” a novel about a South Dakota family, is now out of print. (Ajholgard/CC BY-SA 4.0)

Today, “Beyond the Bedroom Wall” is years out of print and is likely unknown to most American readers. Mr. Woiwode, who took 10 years to write his novel, died in 2022.

So why is so magnificent a work no longer available from a publisher and unrecognized by so many readers? Perhaps critics like Gardner and Yardley were simply overenthusiastic in their appraisal.

Perhaps, too, a tome as thick as “Beyond the Bedroom Wall” simply can’t appeal in an age of texting, Twitter, and TikTok. Then, too, a novel about a large family living in North Dakota and the death of a young mother may lack resonance with today’s audience.

It helps to remember as well that in any decade of the past century, scores of writers produced bestselling novels and exciting stories now buried by time in the out-of-print boneyard.

On the other hand, in that cemetery are sleeping books whose resurrection might benefit our broken culture. Here, for example, are three out-of-print works—a memoir and two novels—plus a collection of essays undeservedly ignored, all of them concerned in one way or another with education, which might prove invaluable to parents, teachers, and students.

A Meditation on Culture, Learning, and Decline

“Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber” is less a book about learning and more about the culture, including the demise of education.

In 1993, Yale University professor David Gelernter, computer scientist and artist, opened a package which then exploded in his hands, permanently crippling him. The then-infamous technophobe, the Unabomber, had struck again. Gelernter opens “Drawing Life” by describing his recovery from this assassination attempt. He then offers readers a personal meditation on such topics as the modern university, the importance of marriage and family, religious faith, and a disintegrating culture.

Yale University professor David Gelernter was crippled by a bomb delivered by the Unabomber in 1993. (Repdan/CC BY-SA 3.0)

Critical of the political correctness then rearing its head, Gelernter drew the ire of some pundits. And no wonder, for as a description on the book’s jacket puts it, here was “a thought-provoking analysis of our culture and where it’s headed,” which by Gelernter’s lights was decidedly downward.

Published 26 years ago, “Drawing Life” now seems prophetic in its analysis of the negative impact of technology, our ailing system of education, and the undermining of traditional institutions and American ideals by today’s radicals.

If we wish to see where we’re going, it helps to know where we’ve been. In “Drawing Life,” Gelernter gives us some missing pieces of that map. Reading him, we realize how deep the damage to our culture extends.

A Model for Character and Classroom

In “Good Morning, Miss Dove,” Frances Gray Patton creates a fictional teacher and classroom of the Great Depression era. “The terrible Miss Dove,” as the townspeople call her—many of them were children in her elementary school geography classes—is a disciplinarian who teaches morality along with the oceans and mountain ranges of the world. Though some critics thought the book idealistic in its portrait of a teacher, for many who once sat in such elementary school classrooms and knew such teachers, as I did, Patton’s story hits home. The novel underscores the importance of classroom discipline to learning.

“Good Morning, Miss Dove,” with Jennifer Jones, is a film set during the Great Depression and based on the novel by Frances Gray Patton, which is now out of print. (20th Century Fox Film Corporation)

“Good Morning, Miss Dove” also reminds us of the vital interplay between school and community. In this little town of Liberty Hill, the school is a central feature of life, much more than a building of classrooms and teachers. It plays a vital role in the community as a conveyor of culture and traditional morality, and Miss Dove is its prime exemplar. From her, the children—and some of the adults as well—take lessons in character-building that will remain with them for the rest of their lives.

Discipline in the classroom, parental involvement, and the disappearance of fundamentals and memory work from the curricula are all hot topics in today’s educational debates. In addition to telling a delightful story, “Good Morning, Miss Dove” demonstrates the success of the old, traditional techniques of teaching.

A College Like No Other

Josiah Bunting III devoted much of his life—and still does—to education, serving, for example, as the superintendent of the Virginia Military Academy. His 1998 novel “An Education for Our Time” is a fictional account of billionaire and high-tech pioneer John Adams who, dying of cancer, writes out his plans to found and endow a college. He envisions a school with a rigorous program, academic and physical, aimed at producing leaders “whose bent is to command not to chatter, to lead not to criticize, to serve not to whine, and to give rather than calculate the cost.”

Using examples from history, philosophy, literature, and his own experiences, Adams delineates in detail how the carefully selected students of his college should live and learn, and who should lead them. This vision of instilling endeavor, excellence, and a sense of service in students stands in stark contrast to nearly all of the practices of our current institutions of higher learning.

Here is a book that can give high schoolers ideas about what college should be, even if they themselves have to shape that experience.

Hidden Treasures

Some excellent books fall through the cracks. A small publisher may lack the budget to promote them, or they may not fit the needs or interests of major reviewers. They’re not out of print, but they’re out of sight.

"With Love and Prayers: A Headmaster Speaks to the Next Generation," by F. Washington Jarvis, was once out of print, but it was republished in 2010. (David R. Godine, Publisher)

From 1974 to 2004, Episcopalian priest F. Washington Jarvis served as headmaster at Boston’s Roxbury Latin School, the oldest continuous school in North America. During Jarvis’s years at Roxbury, a series of his addresses to his students appeared in the school’s newsletters. In 2010, the David R. Godine Publishing Company collected the best of these essays in “With Love and Prayers: A Headmaster Speaks to the Next Generation.” In all of these exhortations is a common sense blend of philosophy, religion, history, literature, and anecdote, with the topics centered on such virtues as courage, perseverance, and faith.

If ever there was a time in our nation’s history when teenagers needed such wise, practical guidance, that time is surely now. “With Love and Prayers” allows them to learn from a man sympathetic to their stage of life and its attendant confusions, but who never patronizes them. Instead, Jarvis recognizes their deep desires to get at truths and fundamentals so often overlooked in their own classrooms while constantly encouraging his young audience, as Tennyson would have it, “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

“With Love and Prayers” makes a perfect gift for young people and, for that matter, for their parents and teachers as well.

The Stars Are Still Shining

With some hunting, all of these out-of-print books and others may be found and ordered online, or tucked away on the shelves of a public library or a secondhand bookshop.

And if you can’t get your hands on these specific works, here’s some good news. These books may be out of print, but the ranks they once marched in receive a steady stream of replacements, heirs to their thoughts. Publishing houses like Regnery Publishing and Encounter Books continue to issue excellent books on education, and writers continue to put out books advocating and celebrating traditional learning.

In his 1998 review of “Drawing Life,” John Attarian mentions Gelernter’s call for a return of truth-telling to education, and then adds this sentence from the author’s book: “Only when the basics of culture and morality are under attack do we have the privilege of seeing their beauty (like stars when the city lights go dim) as clearly as we do today.”

The authors reviewed here saw that beauty, and others will continue to step forward to share that same vision with us.