The Atlantic has just published a list of 'Great American Novels' naming 100 titles published in the past 100 years. I love a book list and was intrigued by this list which The Atlantic claims 'represent the best of what novels can do: challenge us, delight is, pull us in and then release us, a little smarter and more alive than we were before.' Let's check out this exciting list )novels in bold I have read, linked where there is a review on this blog):
- F Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby (1925)
- Theodore Dreiser - An American Tragedy (1925)
- Gertrude Stein - The Making of Americans (1925)
- Willa Cather - Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)
- Ernset Hemingway - A Farewell to Arms (1929)
- Nella Larsen - Passing (1929)
- William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury (1929)
- William Faulkner - Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
- Djuna Barnes - Nightwood (1936)
- Younghill Kang - East Goes West (1937)
- Zora Neale Hurston - Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
- John Dos Passos - U.S.A. (1937)
- John Fante - Ask the Dust (1939)
- Raymond Chandler - The Big Sleep (1939)
- Nathanael West - The Day of the Locust (1939)
- John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
- Richard Wright - Native Son (1940)
- Carson McCullers - The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)
- Dawn Powell - A Time to Be Born (1942)
- Robert Penn Warren - All the King's Men (1946)
- Ann Petry - The Street (1946)
- Dorothy B Hughes - In A Lonely Place (1947)
- Jean Stafford - The Mountain Lion (1947)
- JD Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
- EB White - Charlotte's Web (1952)
- Ralph Ellison - Invisible Man (1952)
- Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
- Gwendolyn Brooks - Maud Martha (1953)
- Saul Bellow - The Adventures of Augie March (1953)
- Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita (1955)
- James Baldwin - Giovanni's Room (1956)
- Grace Metalious - Peyton Place (1956)
- Patricia Highsmith - Deep Water (1957)
- John Okada - No-No Boy (1957)
- Jack Kerouac - On the Road (1957)
- Shirley Jackson - The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
- Joseph Heller - Catch-22 (1961)
- Madeline L'Engle - A Wrinkle in Time (1962)
- James Baldwin - Another Country (1962)
- Ken Kesey - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962)
- Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire (1962)
- Ross MacDonald - The Zebra-Striped House (1962)
- Sylvia Plath - The Bell Jar (1963)
- Mary McCarthy - The Group 1963)
- Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
- James Salter - A Sport and a Pastime (1967)
- John Updike - Couples (1968)
- Philip K Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
- Susan Taubes - Divorcing (1969)
- Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint (1969)
- Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
- Judy Blume - Are you there God? It's Me, Margaret (1970)
- Paula Fox - Desperate Characters (1970)
- Joan Didion - Play it as it Lays (1970)
- Stanley Crawford - Log of the SS The Mrs Unguentine (1972)
- Ishmael Reed - Mumbo Jumbo (1972)
- Toni Morrison - Sula (1973)
- Oscar Zeta Acosta - The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973)
- Fran Ross - Oreo (1974)
- Urula K Le Guin - The Dispossessed (1974)
- James Welch - Winter in the Blood (1974)
- Gail Jones - Corregidora (1975)
- Renata Adler - Speedboat (1976)
- Leslie Marion Silko - Ceremony (1977)
- Toni Morrison - Song of Solomon (1977)
- Will Eisner - A Contract with God (1979)
- Andrew Holleran - Dancer from the Dance (1978)
- Stephen King - The Stand (1978)
- Octavia E Butler - Kindred (1979)
- Charles Portis - The Dog of the South (1979)
- Marilynne Robinson - Housekeeping (1980)
- Toni Cade Bambara - The Salt Eaters (1980)
- John Crowley - Little, Big: Or, the Fairies' Parliament (1981)
- Charles Johnson - Oxherding Tale (1982)
- Jayne Anne Phillips - Machine Dreams (1984)
- Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian (1985)
- Peter Taylor - A Summons to Memphis (1986)
- Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons - Watchmen (1986)
- Toni Morrison - Beloved (1987)
- Octavia E Butler - Dawn (1987)
- Katherine Dunn - Geek Love (1989)
- Maxine Hong Kingston - Tripmaster Monkey (1989)
- Jessica Hagedorn - Dogeaters (1990)
- Bret Easton Ellis - American Psycho (1991)
- Julia Alvarez - How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991)
- Norman Rush - Mating (1991)
- Dorothy Allison - Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)
- Donna Tartt - The Secret History (1992)
- Ana Castillo - So Far From God (1993)
- Leslie Feinberg - Stone Butch Blues (1993)
- Annie Proulx - The Shipping News (1993)
- Chang-Rae Lee - Native Speaker (1995)
- Philip Roth - Sabbath's Theatre (1995)
- Helen Maria Viramontes - Under the Feet of Jesus (1995)
- David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest (1996)
- Chris Kraus - I Love Dick (1997)
- Don Delillo - Underworld (1997)
- Colson Whitehead - The Intuitionist (1999)
- Joyce Carol Oates - Blonde (2000)
- Mark Z Danielewski - House of Leaves (2000)
- Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay (2000)
- Helen Dewitt - The Last Samurai (2000)
- Joy Williams - The Quick and the Dead (2000)
- Percival Everett - Erasure (2001)
- Rabih Alameddine - I, the Divine (2001)
- Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections (2001)
- Sandra Cisneros - Caramelo (2002)
- Debra Magpie Earling - Perma Red (2002)
- Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook (2002)
- Jhumpa Lahiri - The Namesake (2003)
- Mary Gaitskill - Veronica (2005)
- Junot Diaz - The Wonderous Life of Oscar Woo (2007)
- Jennifer Egan - A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010)
- Karen Tei Yamashita - I Hotel (2010)
- Teju Cole - Open City (2011)
- Jesmyn Ward - Salvage the Bones (2011)
- Louise Erdrich - The Round House (2012)
- Chimamanda Negozi Adichie - Americanah (2013)
- Imogen Binnie - Nevada (2013)
- Marlon James - A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014)
- Awhile Sharma - Family Life (2014)
- Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies (2015)
- NK Jemison - The Fifth Season (2015)
- Paul Beatty - The Sellout (2015)
- Việt Thanh Nguyễn - The Sympathizer (2015)
- Claude McKay - Amiable with Big Teeth (2017)
- George Saunders - Lincoln in the Bardo (2017)
- Nick Drnaso - Sabrina (2018)
- Ling Ma - Severance (2018)
- Tommy Orange - There There (2018)
- Valeria Luiselli - Lost Children Archive (2019)
- Kevin Wilson - Nothing to See Here (2019)
- Namwali Serpell - The Old Drift (2019)
- Patricia Lockwood - No One Is Talking About This (2021)
- Honoree Fanonne Jeffers - The Love Songs of W E B Du Bois (2021)
- Catherine Lacey - Biography of X (2023)
What an exciting list. Many of the novels here are among my favourites - Grapes of Wrath, The Bell Jar, The Group, Fahrenheit 451, The Shipping News, Visit from the Goon Squad - and I am glad they included many of the beloved books of my childhood like Charlotte's Web and Are you there God, it's me Margaret.
I have only read 30 of the titles on the list, and had expected that I would read more. I remember doing an American Literature course when I was at the University of Toronto, which included Twain, Thoreau, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald and others. Many of my favourite American novels are just outside the 100 year window on which this list is based - like Edith Wharton's House of Mirth (possibly my favourite novel ever), Kate Chopin's The Awakening, and novels by Henry James.
The list reminds me that I have started and not finished many of these titles, some of which I meant to return to (A Brief History of Seven Killings) and some which I did not enjoy and gave up on (Housekeeping, A Sports and a Pastime).
Many of the books on my Fifty/five list are listed here, and some which are recent acquisitions like Ann Petry's The Street. But I also love that there are novels and authors I have never heard of, which gives me the opportunity to explore and add more titles to my wish list!