In fall 1980, Mark Bauerlein declared an English major at UCLA and bought the two green volumes of the Norton Anthology of English Literature — “2,500 flimsy pages in each,” the only visuals being maps of England and London. The required yearlong survey ran from Beowulf to Auden for three hundred sophomores at a time. He still has the books, fifty years on.

The essay is a memoir of what that curriculum gave a drifting, nihilistic nineteen-year-old who bounced between math, film, psychology, and philosophy, hawked newspapers at Del Mar, and read Nietzsche and Freud “on my own”:

  • The Norton functioned as “the Periodic Table” of English — a distinct domain of objects to be learned, with a coherent grand narrative behind them
  • Close reading was the core skill: “Stay close to the language… explain the metaphor, mark alliteration and rhythm, catch the irony”
  • The books were a “silent promise” of order and destiny — “It was a form of submission,” he writes, “and I liked that”
  • His father, an adjunct math teacher, modeled the same reverence for structure: Galois’s last night, “Why can’t you divide a number by zero?”, counting to 50 in base 5

The elegy arrives in the final pages. “During the ’80s canon became a bad word, a dead-white-male artifact,” Bauerlein writes — and English collapsed from one in thirteen four-year degrees in 1970 to one in sixty today. At Chicago, he notes, the “Standard Track” requires just two pre-1900 courses, fulfilled by offerings like “Body Problems: Theorizing Fat and Thin in Early Modern Literature.”

Bauerlein’s diagnosis — that the canon wars left young people “a spiritual thirst… unmet by a curriculum without order and greatness and charm” — is a contested one; the humanities’ collapse also tracks tuition costs, credentialism, and a job market that prices out the bookish. But as a portrait of what a shared literary inheritance once felt like from the inside, the essay captures something real, and its closing inventory of touchstones — Keats, Arnold, Hardy, Conrad, Yeats — is a small anthology of its own.