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Every year or so, various publishers and booksellers come out with their "Top 100" lists of the best novels ever written. These lists provide great fodder for literary discussion since no one agrees on the criteria by which books should be judged much less ranked in numerical order.
Undaunted by the impossibility of such a task, Lorianne offers the following list of her favorite 15 American novels. This list is by no means representative of “all” American literature; it merely gives a tip of the hat to works that Lorianne has particularly enjoyed. So if you’re looking for an interesting read (or a thoughtful gift), consider these novels, which are listed alphabetically by author’s last name.
A collection of short stories about the inhabitants of a fictional town in Ohio, Sherwood
Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio is the American equivalent of James Joyce's Dubliners. In his
preface, "The Book of the Grotesque," Anderson describes the one trait that all his characters
share: each one has singled out a single truth about their existence, slavishly attached themselves to
that truth, and in the process perverted that truth (and themselves). As each of Anderson's characters
opens up to George Willard, the young newspaper reporter who serves as a window into the
town's soul, Anderson demonstrates a perceptive psychological understanding of the human heart.
The opening story in Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, "Hands," is perhaps the
finest short story by an American. Whether you see Wing Biddlebaum as being a sexual predator or simply
a misunderstood and lonely old man, you won't soon forget Anderson's masterful telling of his story.
The story of Alexandra Bergson's struggle to make a living on the Nebraskan prairie, O Pioneers!
offers a stunning portrait of the Western frontier and the human characters who find physical and
spiritual sustenance there. Having been instructed by her dying father never to let go of the land,
Alexandra finds a way to succeed where others have failed (or simply given up). By novel's end she has
material riches and many friends among her hard-working neighbors; she also discovers, however, that
such abundance does not fend off heart-break and loneliness.
The Library of America edition of Cather's Early Novels and Stories has the benefit of
containing O Pioneers! along with two other Cather classics: My Antonia and The Song
of the Lark (the latter being a must-read for any woman artist).
Kate Chopin’s 1899 novella tells the story of Edna Pontellier, the bored wife of a Creole businessman
living in New Orleans. During a summer vacation at an oceanside resort, Edna falls in love with a
younger man and realizes how unsatisfied she is with her duties as a conventional wife and mother.
Inspired by an unmarried friend, pianist Mademoiselle Reisz, Edna decides to take up painting as a way
of expressing her unsatisfied urges. When her husband goes out of town on a business trip, however,
Edna is left to decide how she can survive as a awakened and independent woman in a society that seems
determined to keep her caged.
The Signet edition of The Awakening also contains several of Chopin's short stories, including
“The Storm,” which was too sexually provocative for publication during her lifetime.
Although best known for works of nature writing such as Pilgrim at
Tinker Creek, Annie
Dillard often refers to herself as a fiction writer who writes nonfiction. Her first and only novel,
The Living highlights Dillard’s knack for descriptive veracity. Set in the 19th century Pacific
Northwest, Dillard’s novel captures the haunting beauty of a semi-tamed landscape
and the poignant stories of the rough-and-ready individuals who make their homes there. Echoing the
novels of Willa Cather, The Living also bears curious resemblance to James Joyces’ “The Dead”
in that it chronicles the lives and passing of characters who embody the human condition of being
caught between this world and the next. The simple finality of the novel’s last page is, in itself,
worth the purchase price.
Published the same year as Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, William Faulkner's
Absalom, Absalom! delineates the dark side of the gallant American South. Thomas Sutpen is a
seemingly self-made man whose magnificent plantation rests on the toil of exploited slaves and the tears
of displaced Indians. Through the themes of incest, miscegenation, and murder, Faulkner reveals the
racist, sexist, and classist underbelly of the Southern plantation system. By the time that Quentin
Compson, one of several narrators, exclaims to his Northern college roommate that he "does not hate the
South," readers both Northern and Southern have come to understand the true reason behind the fall of
the Sutpen dynasty and the exploitative social systems it represents.
Jay Gatsby is the quintessential self-made man, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is the
quintessential story of the American dream. In the aftermath of World War I, Gatsby amasses great
wealth and lives an exuberant lifestyle that embodies the excesses of America's Jazz Age. Having lost
his sweetheart Daisy while he was fighting overseas, however, Gatsby is obsessed with a desire to win her
back from her oafish husband, Tom Buchanan. In true tragic form, Gatsby's great wealth cannot protect
him from the unfortunate events that ensue as Daisy is reconciled with Tom and a freak
accident causes him to seek vengeance against Gatsby. Narrated by a Midwestern newcomer, Gatsby's
neighbor Nick Carraway, The Great Gatsby concludes with an oft-quoted rhapsody on America's
doomed promise: the "fresh, green breast of the new world" represents both the richness of the American
dream and the nightmare that dream can become if pursued to excess.
Although published in the middle of the 19th century, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet
Letter is set some 200 years earlier in Puritan Boston. After her husband is delayed in his
arrival to the New World, Hester Prynne incurs public shame by becoming pregnant. Refusing to name the
father of her child, Hester bears the stigma of her infidelity while raising her child, Pearl, entirely
on her own. When Hester’s husband arrives and finds his wife has borne another’s child, he makes
Hester promise not to reveal his true identity so he can secretly ingratiate himself into the life of
the child’s father. A moral parable that suggests that the desire for vengeance is as destructive as
the hypocrisy of hidden sin, The Scarlet Letter packs as much of a narrative punch today as it
did in the 19th century.
The Norton Critical Edition of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter contains additional background
material and interpretive essays to aid your enjoyment of the novel.
Hemingway's classic novel of expatriate Americans in France and Spain in the aftermath of World War I,
The Sun Also Rises recounts the doomed love affair between narrator Jake Barnes and the
glamorous and sexually liberated Lady Brett Ashley. Rendered impotent by an unfortunate war wound,
Barnes watches as Brett loves and then leaves a series of men, including a dashing Spanish bull-fighter
named Pedro Romero. Hemingway's descriptions of the artistry of Romero's bullfighting, the running of
the bulls in Pamplona, and a manly fishing trip in the mountains are tersely vivid. Critics have argued
that Hemingway was the first American novelist to write how Americans actually speak, and The Sun
Also Rises is a prime example of Hemingways strikingly memorable prose style.
If you've never read Herman Melville's Moby-Dick outside of a high school or college
literature class, you need to re-visit this classic. Yes, it's long; yes, it's challenging.
But if you allow Melville to woo you with his encyclopedic knowledge of whales and whaling, you'll soon
be swept away by this epic story of obsession, revenge, and (ultimately) redemption. Ishmael's
friendship with the "savage" harpooner Queequeg is one of the most memorable relationships in
American literature, and it serves as the perfect foil to Captain Ahab's madness. Ultimately brought
down not by Moby-Dick but by his own self-isolating rage, Ahab is the
quintessential tragic hero, in the same league as Homer's Achilles or Shakespeare's Lear. Our great
American epic, Moby-Dick is well worth your time and effort.
The Norton Critical Edition of Melville's Moby-Dick contains additional background materials and
scholarly criticism to help you get the most out of the novel.
You might love this book; you might hate it; you might even do both simultaneously. In any case,
you’ve probably never read a book quite like Pirsig’s novel, a blend of road-trip narrative,
father-son bonding, and philosophical treatise all rolled into one. Traveling across the country
on a motorcycle with his son, the nameless narrator struggles to come to terms with the ghosts of his
past while trying to reconcile the great dichotomies of Western philosophy. A book that some have
hailed as the most widely-read philosophy book ever written, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance is a challenging read; if you accept that challenge, you’re in for a ride you’ll never
forget.
Marilynne Robinson's hauntingly beautiful novel proves that you needn't be a poet to write poetry: had
Emily Dickinson been tutored by Virginia Woolf, she might have written a novel
like Housekeeping. The story of two sisters, Ruth and Lucille, who are repeatedly abandoned by
various family members, Housekeeping introduces readers to the girls' eccentric aunt, a wanderer
named Sylvie. Refusing to be tied down by the demands of housekeeping, Sylvie nevertheless looks after
the girls in her own curious way. Set in the fictional town of Fingerbone, Idaho, Housekeeping
explores issues of family, loss, and remembrance in the shadow of a deadly but beautiful lake that
reflects the deepest longings of Ruth, the novel's narrator. If nothing else, the novel's cryptic
final pages make it worth the read.
After you've read Robinson's novel, be sure to check out Bill Forsyth's 1987 film adaptation. Although
it lacks the lyric intensity of the novel, it definitely holds its own as a film.
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony tells the story of Tayo, a half-white Native American returning
home after fighting in World War II. After seeing his cousin die in combat, Tayo returns to his Indian
reservation--ironically the site of pre-War atom bomb tests--and finds that it has been ravaged
by drought. Shell-shocked by his combat experience, Tayo is also wracked with guilt: after having
prayed that the rain would stop falling on his dying cousin, Tayo believes that he caused the drought
that subsequently ruins his family's meager livelihood. Surrounded by other angry young veterans who
seek solace in drunken revels and excessive violence, Tayo seeks out an
unorthodox medicine man to perform a ceremony to bring both personal solace and ecological healing.
Although the novel's nonlinear narrative and Silko's blurring of prose and poetic styles makes it a
challenging read, ultimately the novel's vision of wholistic healing and spiritual oneness makes it
well worth the effort.
If you've heard the term "Uncle Tom" used only as a racial epithet, you need to read Harriet Beecher
Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin for yourself. Wildly popular in its day, Stowe's novel attracted
readers not because it preached against the evils of slavery (even though it did). Instead, Uncle
Tom's Cabin moved the hearts and changed the minds of hundreds of thousands of 19th century readers
because it put a human face on the "peculiar institution" of slavery. Uncle Tom is no "Uncle Tom":
a devout Christian, Tom ultimately gives his life to save other slaves, thereby proving to pious 19th
century readers that even unlettered slaves could be heroically Christ-like. Although many scholars
criticize Uncle Tom's Cabin novel for being formulaically sentimental, Stowe masterfully uses
the tearjerker genre to forward her anti-slavery agenda. If you read Stowe's novel with an unbiased
mind, you too will be emotionally moved and even brought to tears by the memorable stories of Tom,
Eliza, and little Eva.
Ernest Hemingway claimed that Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn marked the birth of
American literature, and he was right. The story of a boy's moral coming-of-age on the Mississippi River
in the years before the Civil War, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is also an ode to
friendship. Although you'll chuckle at Huck's various mishaps as he tries to escape his abusive Pap, the
true hero of the book is Jim, an uneducated slave who, while seeking his own freedom,
befriends and looks out for Huck. If you read Huck Finn as a child, you'll want to
re-read it as an adult. More than just a tale of adolescent high jinks, Twain's novel offers insightful
social commentary, illustrating (without ever preaching) the hypocrisy of slavery and the society that
tolerated it.
Alice Walker's The Color Purple is a moving (and inspiring) story of human perseverance. Having
been sexually abused as a child, Celie is married against her will to an abusive man who needs a woman
to tend his house and children. Poor and uneducated, Celie believes she is as ugly as everyone around
her says she is; her only joy in life is a sister who patiently teaches her how to read. After Celie's
husband removes even her sister from her life, however, Celie seems doomed to lead a lonely and
desperate life until she finds joy and self-worth in the unlikely example of her husband's life-loving,
blues-singing mistress.
If you enjoyed Walker's novel, be sure to check out Steven Spielberg's 1985 film adaption, which
features landmark performances by Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover, and Oprah Winfrey.
