William Gaddis on his teaching at Bard College:"My friend William Burroughs used to say that he didn't teach creative writing, he taught creative reading. That was my idea in the Bard Courses I taught, especially "The Theme of Failure in American Literature," where we read everything from Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People to William James' Pragmatism to Diary of a Mad Housewife. What I was trying to do was raise questions for which there are not distinct answers. The problems remain with us because there are no absolutes." Gaddis originally wrote two additional sentences: "Keeping the questions open, as I did at Bard, is a difficult way to teach; it's not like teaching mathematics. This puts a great deal of responsibility directly on the teacher's shoulders."-- from the Bard College Bulletin, November 1984, quoted by Steven Moore in his William Gaddis (Twayne United States Authors Series), pp. 112 and 151.

He also includes a list of some of Gaddis's assigned reading for his courses on p. 10:

Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy
Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis
"Provide, Provide," Robert Frost
Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion
Diary of a Mad Housewife, Sue Kaufman
A Fan's Notes, Frederick Exley
Pragmatism, William James
How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie
Social Darwinism in American Thought, Richard Hofstadter
The Lonely Crowd, David Riesman
How Children Fail, John Holt