For the thirtieth-anniversary issue of the American Scholar, its editors asked a number of distinguished scholars, writers, and critics to select what were for them the outstanding books of the past thirty years (1931–61)—books notable for originality or enduring significance or for changes in thoughts and attitudes. What follows is Frye’s reply. From The American Scholar, 30, 4 (Autumn 1961), 606. Copyright © 1961 by The Phi Beta Kappa Society. Reprinted with permission.
Thirty years would include the publication of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in 1939. This is the only twentieth-century book that I find myself living with, in the way that I live with Tristram Shandy, Burton’s Anatomy, Dickens, and the greater poets. It is an inexhaustible word-hoard of humour, wit, erudition, and symbolism; it never, for me, degenerates into a mere puzzle, but always has on every page something to astonish and delight.