Posted on 07/07/2025 7:33:00 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Not to disappoint Philip Roth, but the fact that you title your book, The Great American Novel, does not make it a great American novel. My definition of Great American Novel is pretty straightforward: a first rate fiction, by an American, that tells us something large and expansive about the American experience. One other condition—it has to be readable.
A caveat upfront for the sensitive: seven of the ten novels listed below use the word “nigger,” not the infantile “n-word,” but the actual word itself. For the last many years, we have collectively refrained from using “nigger,” even in an explanatory context, as a form of dhimmitude to our woke overlords. By censoring books that use the word, we deny blacks their central role in the American experience. Time to get off our knees.
Here goes, starting from 10. Feel free to tell me what I got right and what I got wrong.
10—No Country for Old Men
Although many critics think Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian the more likely candidate for Great American novel, I thought it too dark and cynical, not to mention bloody, to qualify. McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men has more heart. Those who have seen the Academy Award-winning film, know the book. The Coen brothers adapted the 2005 novel almost word for word. The book is not exactly a stroll in the park, but it gives the reader someone to root for.
9—Gone With The Wind
A huge bestseller when published in 1936. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind has never fallen out of popularity. This sprawling, arguably feminist, epic of the Civil War-era South was ranked second only to the Bible in popularity as late as 2014. Readers have gone underground in the woke era, but the tale is too powerful to suppress. As the ever hopeful Scarlett reminds us at the end of the book and movie, “After all, tomorrow is another day.”
8—Grapes of Wrath
While hitchhiking one January long ago through the pre-homogenized South, I caught a ride out of New Orleans with some Mexican migrants of dubious legality. Soon after, they stopped for three runaway Texas girls who joined me in the back of the flatbed. Thinking I was having too good a time, the driver insisted we trade places. Later that might, while I was driving, a back tire fell completely off, and the spares all bounced out of the truck. After about two hours searching for the spares and replacing the missing tire, we warmed up around a huge bonfire. Said one of the girls to no one in particular, “Kiss my ass if this ain’t the Grapes of Wrath,” That’s how universal was the truth that Steinbeck captured in his 1939 novel, and thirty-some years later it still rang true even to teenage runaways.
7—Confessions of Nat Turner
William Styron deservedly won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for this sympathetic, fictional recreation of the confessions of the real Nat Turner, the man who led a bloody slave insurrection in 1831 Virginia. No sooner did Styron win the Pulitzer, however, than critics countered with “William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond. The arguments boiled down to—how dare a white writer try to imagine how a black slave might have thought. The book has been largely memory holed ever since.
6—Absalom, Absalom
Although much of William Faulkner’s opus is unreadable or nearly so, Faulkner’s 1936 novel, Absalom, Absalom!, is not. It chronciles the hair-rising tale of an up-from- nothing plantation owner in Civil War-era Mississippi. Imagine a sweaty Gone With the Wind without a hint of glamor.
5—The Bonfire of the Vanities
Distressed by the failure of contemporary novelists to capture the great carnival of American life, “Right Stuff” journalist Tom Wolfe decided to fill the void. He did so masterfully in this prophetic epic of life gone haywire in 1980s New York City. Although comic in tone, The Bonfire of the Vanities captures the emerging racial dynamic that would paralyze urban America for years to come. Skip the movie version, the worst botch of a good book in memory.
4—Moby Dick
For years, I quietly concealed the darkest possible stain on the soul of any American studies Ph.D.—I had never read Moby Dick. A few years ago, as a form of bucket list atonement, I dove into this 1851 classic. I speed read through the whale particulars but otherwise a worthy read. What no one had told me was the book was comic. Maybe, I thought, no one had actually ever read it. To put the plot in contemporary context, imagine Donald Trump as the white whale and the Democratic leadership as Captain Ahab. Spoiler alert: the whale wins.
3—American Pastoral
Set In Newark, NJ—the setting for my 2023 non-fiction book Untenable—the 1997 American Pastoral is the late Philip Roth’s best candidate for Great American novel. I confess to being partial in that we tell much the same story, namely how the political and racial upheavals of the 1960s derailed the American dream. Roth would never admit it, but his Newark experience turned him, like multiple thousands of us, conservative.
2—Huckleberry Finn
I was halfway through Ron Chernow’s newest blockbuster Mark Twain when I decided to call it quits. Writing through the George Floyd era, the skittish Chernow was exactly the wrong biographer for the job. Instead of letting Huck and Jim float down the Mississippi, Chernow continually stops the voyage to dissect their understanding of race and class. For the record, Ron, calling a “slave” an “enslaved person” adds nothing to the conversation but syllables. Twain was a great observer of human nature, but he was first and foremost a humorist. By the way, gas in Hannibal two weeks ago was $2.49 a gallon. I recommend the Becky Thatcher diner. To the generations coming up forbidden to read Huckleberry Finn, don’t expect to see Becky working the register.
1—Lonesome Dove
When you are sad to see the book end after 800 or so pages, you know you have read one hell of book. Larry McMurtry’s 1985 classic has it all: great chacters, epic setting, brilliant diaolgue, high drama, ample humor, and a little romance. Unlike many rcent westerns, it resepects the characters, their vision, and the country that gave them free play. The mini-series is excellent too.
So many good novels. Certainly a treasured replacement for the ethereal trash that is popular today. Does anybody read anymore? Point, click, and vegetate.
Loved Bonfire. The movie needs to be seen after reading the book to see how Hollywood handles controversial subjects and their need to make a profit. They destroyed the characters, slopped up the plot, dulled the slashing satire ...perfect example of how not to make a screen adaptation of a book.
He's a very good storyteller, and a keen observer of life in mid-century northeastern America.
Agree with all four, but the tree still grows.
I’ve always read at an elevated rate. But trying to read Moby Dick was a waste of time. I picked it up again and again but never finished it.
That could have been a good novel if it were half as many words.
Although born in Wyoming, I have spent most of my life in the Midwest hence my screen name Biblebelter.
Therefore I am very partial to midwestern writers.
Mark Twain is a must.
So is Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street although likely considered “boring” by most is a great American novel although Lewis certainly became a “lefty” but not as “lefty” as Steinbeck.
Main Street nails small town midwestern America.
Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie is a great American Novel as well.
Although not really a novel, I have to put Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters up among great works of literature by Midwesterners.
As far as throwing Absalom, Absalom on the list, it would appear to be a bit of intellectual snobbery.
Kinda like calling James Joyce’s Ulysses a great work of fiction which I have read but which was unreadable.
Absalom, Absalom was not unreadable but it did not achieve what other works of Faulkner did.
Star Trek IV quote:
Kirk: You mean the profanity? That’s simply the way they talk here. Nobody pays attention to you unless you swear every other word. You’ll find it in all the literature of the period.
Spock: For example?
Kirk: Oh the collected works of Jacqueline Susann. The novels of Harold Robbins...
Spock: Ah, the “Giants”.
Really good novels about American politics are hard to find, and “All the King’s Men” was an attempt to write a serious novel about politics. I didn’t much care for it, though. Warren was too obsessed with the idea of original sin. As ideas go, it’s not a bad one or a false one, but a novelist has to know when to let his ideas have a rest and let the characters take over. They have to be convincing in themselves and not just part of the author’s plan.
There was a lot of discussion about whether the novel was a warning about fascism. There is some of that, but I think Warren’s attitude towards Huey Long (and his character, Willie Stark) was more complicated and conflicted than that. Whether he liked Long and Long’s way of doing things, a job at Long’s LSU saw Warren through the Depression.
Yes on Moby Dick, although many of us hated it b/c we were forced to read it.
Glad to see Tom Wolfe included on the list, one of my personal favorites.
Also these favorites:
I have not read anything by Phillip Roth either.
Agree 100% with “The Godfather.”
I received a load of reader’s digest style books during my last years of teaching high school. All were classics - and included “The Godfather” - the excerpt was before and after the horse scene in the bedroom. Kids loved it.
Agreed - and I am familiar with every other book on that list.
His writing never appealed to me...
Excellent book.
“What? Nothing by Harold Robbins??”
Or Earnest Hemmingway?
most ridiculous list of putative “great american novels” i’ve ever seen ... hard to believe “Lonesome Dove” and “Huck Finn” are in any list together
and ALL of Cormac McCarthy’s book are grimly the same: the main protagonist overcomes great odds throughout the story to reach his goal, and then BAM! get killed on the last page: THE END ...
here’s a somewhat better list:
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/730.The_Great_American_Novel
Lonesome Dove stands so far above the related books I would read it first.
The problem with history is much of it is colored by the author’s viewpoints and bias. Ditto, biography. I believe it has gotten worse over time. I have read that U S Grant’s biography is one of the most honest.
If you take a broad view of America, the original Robin Crusoe is really good.
The Oceans and the Stars by Mark Helprin is my favorite from last year.
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