The Great American Novel

Reading The Great Gatsby, I wondered why this book was regularly referred to as The Great American Novel.

Is it because it chronicles a period of American history? In Gatsby's case this is the Jazz Age, the era between the two world wars of Prohibition and bootlegging. But other American novels also chronicle key moments in American history.

Contenders for the title of The Great American Novel, with reasons why they might be eligible for consideration.

Novels by American Nobel Laureates who are also novelists:
  • 1930 – Sinclair Lewis (1885 – 1951)
    • Main Street (1920),
    • Babbitt (1922),
    • Arrowsmith (1925),
    • Elmer Gantry (1927),
    • Dodsworth (1929),
    • It Can't Happen Here (1935).
  • 1938 – Pearl Buck (1892 – 1973) but her novels were predominantly set in China, which the Nobel Committee mentioned in their citation
  • 1949 – William Faulkner (1897 – 1962) wrote many novels of which the most prominent are:
  • 1954 – Ernest Miller Hemingway (1899 – 1961)
    • (1926) The Sun Also Rises
    • (1929) A Farewell to Arms
    • (1932) Death in the Afternoon
    • (1933) Winner Take Nothing
    • (1935) Green Hills of Africa
    • (1937) To Have and Have Not
    • (1940) For Whom the Bell Tolls
    • (1950) Across the River and into the Trees
    • (1952) The Old Man and the Sea
  • 1962 – John Steinbeck (1902 – 1968)Of Mice and Men (1937)
    • The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is set in the 1930s dust-bowl depression era. It's a big book. This is surely one of the most likely contenders for TGAN.
    • Cannery Row (1945)
    • East of Eden (1952)
  • 1976 – Saul Bellow (1915 – 2005)The Victim
  • 1993 – Toni Morrison (1931 – 2019) Beloved


Before Nobel days:
  • Moby-Dick by Herman Melville: the classic whaling epic, whose "Call me Ishmael" is my favourite first line in literature. But its a bit of a structural mess. The early narrator seems to disappear for the bulk of the book, only to reappear at the end. The book utilises a variety of narrative styles, seemingly without a reason (unlike, for example, Ulysses by James Joyce, in which the narrative styles are part of the point of the book). And there are so many chapters when the reader is instructed about whales and whaling.
  • The Scarlet Letter by Nathanael Hawthorne, a laughably bad historical novel. But it does, I suppose, 'chronicle' pre-revolutionary Puritan New England.
Other contenders:
  • The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton examines upper class New York society around the time of the money-making boom of the 1880s and 1890s, the era of the later Vanderbilts. But you'd never describe this book as The Great American Novel.
  • The Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger is the most famous exploration of teenage angst, although to my mind Ordinary People by Judith Guest and Good Times Bad Times by James Kirkwood are better.
  • Breakfast at Tiffanys by Truman Capote
  • Everyone's favourite To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
  • Something by Brett Easton Ellis? The most famous book is American Psycho, closely followed by The Rules of Attraction but I think my favourite is Less Than Zero.
  • The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
  • Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson
  • The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
  • Rabbit Redux by John Updike. Set in 1969 the protagonist, Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom embodies an America that, despite landing men on the moon, has lost its way, at war both in Vietnam and with itself. In fact the whole Rabbit tetralogy might qualify as a GAN.
  • Something by Gore Vidal? My favourite is Burr
  • Butcher's Crossing by John Edward Williams
  • Something by James Baldwin such as Go Tell It On the Mountain, If Beale Street Could Talk, Another Country, or Giovanni's Room (the latter is set in Paris so is probably disqualified).Something by Thomas Wolfe such as Look, Homeward Angel
  • Henry Miller? Tropic of Capricorn







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