Shortly before he published Walden; or Life in the Woods, Henry David Thoreau called "The library a wilderness of books." He also noted that while Americans were "clearing the forest in our westward progress, we are accumulating a forest of books in our rear, as wild and unexplored as any of nature's primitive wildernesses." In A Terrible Beauty: The Wilderness of American Literature, Jonah Raskin takes a long close look at the forest of books that...