"These books created a climate of opinion, a debate with many other books growing around it," Parini said. "These books changed America's idea of itself as a democracy or had some powerful lasting influence on the culture."
While Parini examined the significance of these texts within the context of their time period, he also explained that these works remain relevant to shaping American identity today.
"We are a people of the book and these texts have been and will continue to be at the center of our experience," he said. "These books are a lens through which I examine the progress of the American character our hopes, our dreams and our failures."
Parini's first selection was William Bradford's "Of Plymouth Plantation," which he said was the first immigrant memoir. The piece was written during the settlement of Plymouth colony and rediscovered hundreds of years later.
After reading the manuscript, President Abraham Lincoln decided to make Thanksgiving a national holiday honoring the story's message of "how we can all get along," Parini said.
Another selection, the Federalist Papers, written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, demonstrate that America is not a Christian country, but a nation founded by fairly secular deists, Parini said.
These papers, while calling for the ratification of the Constitution, contain foreboding suggestions of what may happen if Americans are not aware of their own "aggressive instincts," he said. The awareness applies to historic events, like the "genocide committed against Native Americans" during westward expansion, and to current events like the war in Iraq, he said.
"Hamilton worried about allowing the president to choose people on the Supreme Court," Parini said. "He predicted that down the road we would have a situation where the Supreme Court would be politicized and there would be no objective justices, which is exactly what we have now."
Parini selected "The Journals of Lewis and Clark" as the emblematic discourse on westward expansion. The journals also described the natural scenery in a "very beautiful way," he said, and the "can-do" American character shines through the text.
Another selection, "The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin" by Benjamin Franklin not only serves as the foundation of the American autobiography but also introduced the myth of the common man and the idea of a "self-made character" to American culture, Parini said.
In "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain which Parini said he reads every year Twain took an archetypal character, Huckleberry Finn, and showed writers how to make literature out of the American language, Parini said.
In this book, Twain approached American ideas that are essential to democracy, like freedom and equality, with a "wry sense of humor that was very American," though still suggesting the need to end prejudice, he said.
The quintessential book about American freedom, "Walden" by Henry David Thoreau, expounds the ideas of simplicity, closeness to nature, contemplativeness and inner peace, Parini said.
Parini described selected author W.E.B. Du Bois as a "sociologist, scholar, poet and fiction writer" whose ideas in "The Souls of Black Folk" fought racism, inequality and the problem of the color line in the United States. Du Bois used his training in classic literature to "invigorate the present to reinforce his argument," Parini said.
Parini drew parallels between the racial debate today in the "age of Obama" and the identity struggles of being both American and black in the United States.
"People say we've come to a turning point racism is over in America what a joke that is," he said.
