Reading Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved, about survivors of the World War II death camps, gave the author Daniel Genis humility: “The fact that much worse than I experienced was suffered by innocent people in The Drowned and the Saved made my flicker of self-pity laughable.”

In his fascinating book Sentence: Ten Years and a Thousand Books in Prison , Genis describes how reading novels helped him survive prison. “I learned as much about modern prison from Solzhenitsyn and Dostoyevsky as I did when trying to make sense of what I experienced directly,” Genis writes. “Those many books enabled me to understand my fellow man and my own corrupted self. … Reading may have been the very thing that made me return from inside whole.”

PROGRESSIVE PETRI DISH: MINNESOTA GOP HITS RESET AFTER RECENT SHELLACKING

Genis had been sent away for robbery, a crime that was the result of a drug habit. His father is Alexander Genis, a critic and the author of more than a dozen books who emigrated to New York from Russia in 1977.

The fact that reading fiction helped the younger Genis survive his time in prison points to an important truth: novels can so profoundly change and shape us that they allow us to survive a lot of hard things in life. They alter our psyche and give us psychological and spiritual ballast. They change us.

When I hear about the mental health crisis afflicting the public, most notably younger people, I’m reminded of how reading great books enabled me, like Genis, to survive a lot of challenges. Our country’s children would be doing better if they were on their phones less and buried in the pages of books more.

In his new book The Novel, Who Needs It? , Joseph Epstein, who taught English for 30 years at Northwestern University, beautifully makes the case for reading long fiction. Reading superior novels — Cervantes, Jane Austen, Balzac, Tolstoy, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, George Eliot, Stendhal, Proust, Robert Musil, Willa Cather, and others — arouses the mind in a way that nothing else quite does. To Epstein, the novel “provides truth of an important kind unavailable elsewhere in literature or anywhere else.” Fiction expands our hearts and minds while leaving a “deposit” of experience and wisdom that helps us navigate life. Epstein then offers this: “In skillful hands, the novel can give us greater insight into history than history itself does.”

Novels can prepare us for experiences we’ve never had. Growing up, the three works of fiction that all of the four children in our family had to read were The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Rings, and The Earthsea Cycle. In high school, the syllabus had The Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, and Brave New World, among other classics. In college, we read Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Conrad, Alice Walker, and Willa Cather, as well as outsider stuff we’d sneak between classes: William S. Burroughs, Jim Thompson, Jack Kerouac, and anti-communist classics such as The Captive Mind and Darkness at Noon. William Gibson’s science fiction classic Neuromancer accurately predicted the future.

These books enriched one’s imagination and helped one deal with life in a way that seems elusive to young people today. They are on medication for anxiety and depression, whereas when we were their age, we would have compared our plight to the trauma of Holden Caulfield or the longing of Jay Gatsby.

In 2008, I had a health scare that was quite serious, and at the time it was going on, it wasn’t just the blood tests and X-ray charts that opened understanding into what was going on. It was also The Wizard of Earthsea, the great fantasy novel by Ursula K. Le Guin. I had read the book as a child, and I never forgot the scene where the wizard Ged has to retrieve the soul of a person who almost died. Ged has to literally travel to a dark field where the man’s soul is rapidly traveling to the next world. Ged barely captures the man before he gets to the point of no return.

As much as any doctor’s visit, the imagery from Le Guin’s masterpiece gave me a concept of what was going on. Today, of course, they probably would have prescribed me antidepressants. It would not have been the same experience. I would not have faced my experience as well — or recovered as strongly.

In his memoir Sentence, Genis says he read to mentally escape while in prison, keeping a long list of books on his wall. There was Ulysses, Sartre’s No Exit, whose observation that “hell is other people” found immediate expression behind bars. Books allowed Genis to avoid the plague that stops many young people today: self-pity.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM RESTORING AMERICA

Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of  The Devil's Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.