Most-Influential Books

Compiled by SUSANNAH TULLY

An Analysis of 'Myth and Symbol'

C. Wyatt Evans, assistant professor of history at Drew University and author of The Legend of John Wilkes Booth: Myth, Memory, and a Mummy (University Press of Kansas, 2004):

As a historian specializing in American intellectual and cultural history, my choice, for reasons both scholarly and practical, would be Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. First published in 1950, Smith's study remains a remarkably fresh