Top Five 'American' Novels?

[pinto]

Just an open ended query. What are your choices for the top 5 American novels?

i.e., those that reflect the American experience, whatever that may be, as a primary focus, not necessarily great novels by American writers.

Mine follow, by date:

Moby Dick........................Melville, 1851
The Great Gatsby..............Fitzgerald, 1925
Grapes of Wrath...............Steinbeck, 1939
You Can't Go Home Again.....Wolfe, 1940
To Kill a Mockingbird............Lee, 1960

[begin_within]

1. My choices

The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck)
On the Road (Kerouac)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Kesey)

[pinto]

3. Road and Finn were in the running for my choices, as well.

[mitchum]

14. Self-delete (sorry, replied to wrong post)

[EFerrari]

2. That's a toughie but I'd go with these.

The Scarlet Letter - Hawthorne
Sister Carrie - Dreiser
The Great Gatsby -- Fitzgerald
Beloved -- Morrison
The Poisonwood Bible -- Kingsolver

[pinto]

4. Scarlet Letter's a good one, especially in it's context as an 18th century response of sorts

to the previous Puritan history.

(aside) Hawthorne's home is maintained as an historical site in MA.

[EFerrari]

6. I guess I like rule breakers and this was a subversive work at the time.

I don't really like FSFitz but Gatsby was very beautiful at the level of sentence and economy of plot.

Morrison was the outcome of two generations of black women writers that the critics didn't know what the hell to do with, lol. And Kingsolver takes it to the next level. :)

[pinto]

8. And, the neat thing about Fitzgerald and Morrison both was their ability to portray

a slice of American life so well.

[EFerrari]

25. If we could have six, I'd throw in "Their Eyes Were Watching God"

for the same reason.

[idgiehkt]

5. yes, Beloved is a great choice

also

Main Street, by Sinclair Lewis
Bright Lights, Big City, by Jay McInerney
Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier
Inventing the Abbots, by Sue Miller

[pinto]

10. Main Street's a good one.

[Mz Pip]

29. Loved Main Street

Very few books stay with me. That one did.

Mz Pip
:dem:

[fishwax]

7. hmm ... today I'll say

The Surrounded, by D'Arcy McNickle (1936)
Bless Me, Ultima, by Rudolfo Anaya (1972)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey (1962)
To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee (1960)
The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)

[Zomby Woof]

9. This is subject to change

1. "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" - Ken Kesey
2. "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" - Mark Twain
3. "All The King's Men" - Robert Penn Warren
4. "Moby Dick" - Herman Melville
5. "Rabbit Redux" - John Updike

[pinto]

11. Forgot about Updike.

:thumbsup:

[Momgonepostal]

12. I think A Tree Grows in Brooklyn should be...

in there somewhere.

[saltpoint]

13. That is a great question.

I love a lot of people's choices here so far, too.

'Would reiterate Melville's MOBY-DICK.

And maybe toss in some contemporary titles, too:

Joan Didion's DEMOCRACY

Gore Vidal's LINCOLN

Larry McMurtry's LONESONE DOVE (or THE LAST PICTURE SHOW)

John Irving's A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY

Philip Roth's THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA

Reynolds Price's THE SURFACE OF EARTH

Edmund White's FORGETTING ELENA

Don DeLillo's LIBRA

and

Paul Horgan's WHITEWATER

[jobycom]

64. I almost went with Lonesome Dove, but didn't, because it's mostly about

the white perspective. While it's a vivid and realistic portrait of what settlers experienced, I think his portrayal of Native Americans, while not without some understanding of their situation, was a bit too Euro-centric. Just my taste. His imagining of the West is vivid and believable, and relentlessly harsh--a stunning novel.

But I erased it and included Native Son.

[saltpoint]

66. I sure won't be arguing against NATIVE SON. On this thread is a list

of books that every U.S. high school student should have committed in theme and scope in their hearts and minds if they wish to be handed a diploma at commencement time.

I am truly in favor of asking more of our students in general and in reading especially.

NATIVE SON is a masterpiece, no question. I would even put Baldwin's GIOVANNI'S ROOM on that list, although the Far Right would squawk like hens over the selection. And it's imbued with Paris energy. But still, it's by a U.S writer, even if he was an expatriot writer. He was more courageous and talented than he was expatriated, and he was very expatriated.

[jobycom]

69. Yeah, I think I'll bookmark this one. Judging by the quality of most

of the books I have read on the list, I know that the ones I've missed must be worth reading. :)

I'll start with Giovanni's Room. :)

[mitchum]

15. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain), The Red Badge of Courage (Crane)...

Absalom, Absalom (Faulkner), Last Exit To Brooklyn (Selby), Ladies Man (Price)

Hemingway's brilliant short stories are better than any of his novels.
I also enjoy The Great Gatsby (althought I think that Fitzgerald was just a little girl)

[EFerrari]

31. I have a suspicion that all the modernist novelists were -

both the Americans and the Brits. Their poetry was much better than their novels, imho. More developed, less brittle, less screamingly macho.

[mitchum]

74. I think a lot of the screamingly macho themes and personal behaviors...

were due to the odd status of the writer/artist in both American and British culture. There is a discomfort with the role. Something a bit unseemly? Perhaps "not quite proper work for a man"? For a long time, I have thought this may explain a lot of the drinking, fighting, whoring, domestic abuse, and other destructive behaviors.

[EFerrari]

76. I've never thought of it that way but you may be right.

If you weren't shooting at someone or buying them out, maybe your masculinity was at risk?

:shrug:

Do you notice how the poetry of that period is so very different? I wonder what is was about the different form that allowed guys to stretch a little.

[mitchum]

80. Maybe because poetry had a diminished role by that time...

and was intended for an unfortunately smaller audience. More could be risked because there was less to be lost?
When I was a very young kid, I was identified as allegedly having writing talent. I quickly realized that this, along with my love of reading, music, etc would make me a target for my peers. I quickly offset these "defects" by also becoming a foul-mouthed scrapper. As I got older, I proceeded to drink, drug, engage in petty criminality, etc... and continued to be accepted as "one of the guys" despite my peculiarities.
When I talk to bookish friends about their childhoods, I find that many of them did not adopt this type of camouflage. And their childhoods were miserable and filled with teasing and beatings.

[EFerrari]

85. It's impossible for me to be objective about the role of poetry

although I hear what you're saying about "bookishness". It made girls unfeminine and emasculated men in a certain mindset.

But, at this same time, Pound was composing perhaps the best verses of the century. Yeats was retiring and Stevens was coming up. Eliot was being bailed out of his banker's job by a group of patrons.

The oldest lit I've read makes fun of poets. But, that was before the novel was invented. Also before playgrounds. Bullies without a venue. lol

[jobycom]

65. On Hemingway, I think many of his short stories were better than all but one of his novels.

The Sun Also Rises being better than any of his short stories, IMHO. I didn't include it because it isn't much about America, except in its absence.

[EFerrari]

78. Agree. And America is remarkable in its absent presence. n/t

[yellowdogintexas]

16. I would add "Ragtime" by E L Doctorow that is one

amazing book.

And what about The Godfather...not a literary classic but what an American Experience story!

[DarkTirade]

17. Being a geek, I'm tempted to suggest...

Timothy Zahn's first five Star Wars books... :)
Maybe that's just my personal American Experience though.

[WritingIsMyReligion]

18. GATSBY is the supreme novel about the American experience.

Still holds perfectly believable today in our age of excess.

[mitchum]

22. It's the supreme novel about the contemporary American experience...

status, consumerism, pretensions, and appearance.
Sad that our "national identity" now dovetails with the obsessions of that shopgirl Fitzgerald.

[EFerrari]

23. Gatsby's frame is male. It's only

supremely American if you're a guy.

[WritingIsMyReligion]

24. I am most definitely female, and I still enjoy the novel thoroughly and get its point.

Funny, that. It works just fine for me.

:shrug:

[EFerrari]

26. In order for it to "work" you have to be willing to celebrate

the same patriarchal values that kill Gatsby. There's nothing "wrong" with that.

[Rabrrrrrr]

32. No, you don't have to be willing to celebrate them at all.

You only have to be willing to admit that they were there at the time, that the characters are very much a product of that social order, and that the people in the story are very much reflecting the America of the time, good and bad stuff both.

Geez.

I suppose you have to support slavery to enjoy Huck Finn? Or whale hunting to enjoy Moby Dick? Must I celebrate tobacco-based throat cancer or class-based social order or the industrial revolution and coal burning in order to enjoy Sherlock Holmes?

[EFerrari]

34. I'm not talking about the content, silly!

Or I'd have to celebrate flooding in Sula and murder In Cold Blood!

lol

Edit: I don't have a copy of Gatsby here. But if you comb through the representation of women, people of color, "lower class" people, (the metaphors and that kind of stuff), they're not fully human. The novel is sort of weirdly nostalgic for a time before Eve -- and everyone else. :)

[Rabrrrrrr]

36. If you're not talking about content, then what are you talking about?

The cover?

:shrug:

[WritingIsMyReligion]

37. *snort*

You make me laugh like hell, Rabrrrrrr.

[EFerrari]

38. The writing. See me edit above.

:)

[Rabrrrrrr]

41. Yes, but it was written in the early part of the 20th century

Do you also malign Mary Shelley for not having the monster decry the plight of women in Edwardian England? Or do you accept it as a novel written in a specific time and place, without judging for not having the sensibilities of modern time?

Do you shun Shakespeare for writing about kings, and not offering stories about democracies?

I still don't get your argument. Yes, the characters in Gatsby aren't raging feminists - but why should we expect them to be? Fitzgerald was writing about a specific time and place in history, not inventing a new world in his fiction. Why can't the writing and the story be in tune with that society? The lower-class characters, and some women, come off thin and 1 dimensional in the book - well, the book is written from, for all intents and purposes, the viewpoint of a rich person - a fairly accurate portrayal of the worldview of the rich at the time. It would be a WORSE book if it were otherwise.

I think sometimes that liberals, in their pursuit of justice and equality, judge things far too unfairly and expect too much, especially from stuff from the past.

Sure, Wagner doesn't have any lesbians in his operas - that doesn't make him an asshole, nor does it deny the artistic value of his music.

On the other hand, maybe I should go ahead and rage at Shakespeare for not including trains. I love trains! But the bastard never put any in his plays.

[WritingIsMyReligion]

43. Again, Rabrrrrrr, you are the voice of reason.

Said it much better than I did, I believe.

:thumbsup:

[Rabrrrrrr]

44. I was just reading your post, and I thought, "Wish I had said that".

Perhaps the two together...

[WritingIsMyReligion]

47. LOL.

When taken together, two medicines/drugs can create an effect greater than the mere sum of the parts. Perhaps we too have an additive effect...

:D

:hi:

[bridgit]

98. pfftttttt!!!

:spray: Yeah, both being stuck on yourselves then a wondrous combo of water & water :rofl: :hi:

[EFerrari]

46. There were plenty of writers in that era that wrote as if others

had interiority. Faulkner and Hurston (roughly contemporaries) come to mind and they wrote about an even earlier period. :shrug:

[Rabrrrrrr]

49. Yes, but those people were intentionally writing about the poor and underclass.

Fitzgerald was writing about the emptiness of the upper class and the self-destructiveness of the roaring 20s.

I don't mind if you don't like the book on literary merits - all our tastes are different. But I think you are dismissing the book entirely just by judging it by criteria that are completely irrelevant to the book.

Tennessee Williams also wrote about the poor and downtrodden, and often in an unfriendly light - is he also wrong for pointing out the stupid things that the southern poor did to themselves?

[EFerrari]

50. No, I'm not dismissing it -- notice I included it on my short list?

And the argument could be made that FSF was also writing about the poor and the downtrodden -- it's hard to write about privilege without invoking disempowerment. In fact, it's probably close to impossible to do that.

/oops

[WritingIsMyReligion]

35. Bull-fucking-shit.

The whole point of the novel is that those values are what kill Gatsby, just as you say. Gatsby does not celebrate any of the values of that time period; if anything, it condemns them. In order for the novel to work as it does, you have to be willing to look at how Fitzgerald damns the entire grasping, reaching, elitist society to hell. I'm not suggesting that Gatsby is a prized feminist piece of work, but neither is it particularly misogynist.

[EFerrari]

39. I think we read two different novels. n/t

[WritingIsMyReligion]

40. No, I don't think so.

Looking at your edit, I see what you mean. However, rather than seeing the shallowness of all other characters as some oversight of a drunken man, I think the undeveloped female/minority/etc. characters have a proscribed place in the book. The book, as everyone knows, is told from the perspective of "Nick," the newcomer to the Eggs who meets and remarks upon the strangeness of upper-class life, specifically as it relates to the complex Gatsby, who builds his world of richness and fantasy for the sole purpose of winning back his teenage love Daisy Buchanan, with no respect for his own soul and life--there are many allusions to Gatsby's involvement in the rigging of a World Series, bootlegging, and other illicit activities. I've heard Gatsby described, ultimately, as nothing more than an actor who sees life as a theater in which he makes his dreams come true, without realizing that in this particular case, his dream is unworthy of him--Daisy is easily shown as a shallow woman with a laugh/voice "like the sound of faling money," I think the description from the book holds. Of course, Gastby fails miserably and ends up dead at the hands of a jilted, bitter, bereaved husband who believes that Gatsby (though it was actually Daisy) ran over the man's wife.

The point of the book is that "the American Dream"--the pursuit of money, wealth, and everything you could ever want--is often corrupt, immoral, and unsatisfying, while American society at the time was becoming increasingly shallow and without much worth. The rest of the characters in the book are washed out so well because 1) Gatsby did not care at all about them, only about Daisy, and 2) because, ironically, even Nick, allegedly wiser and less materialistic than any of the other characters, did not, while in the company of the upper class, care much about women, the minorities, etc. That other types of characters are not treated in a nice light is rather Fizgerald's point, and part of his critique of the upper classes and American society at the time.

Remember, Daisy's husband, Tom, makes a comment at some get-together about reading a book about how the white culture is being destroyed by the black race, and how the black race needs to be exterminated--a view Tom entirely sympathizes with. Tom's attitude towards women is similarly foul--it becomes clear that he cares for his mistress, Myrtle, only as a sort of sexual toy, and is enraged at the idea that "his" Daisy is being toyed around with by Gatsby, as if Daisy was his toy as well. Fitzgerald does not support Tom's views at all; indeed, he paints the hapless Myrtle in a very sympathetic manner indeed, at times. The fact that the story is told from a white male perspctive enhances the racism and sexism of the time and does not diminish the story's power as an economical expose and damnation of American society and the American experience.

[EFerrari]

42. You give Fitzgerald a lot more credit than I do -- maybe

that's were we disagree. I don't think he wrote a critique of that culture but more of a culture that excluded him.

[WritingIsMyReligion]

45. I'm sorry to say I'm not sure I get what you mean when you say

"I don't think he wrote a critique of that culture but more of a culture that excluded him."

Is the inference there that Fitzgerald, a well-known drunk and friend of drunks, was being hypocritical in calling out people who behaved similarly to him? Not trying to be snarky, just asking for clarification.

[EFerrari]

48. Oh, that's all right. I just mean I don't think Fitzgerald was as

critical of the culture as you seem to think he was if I'm reading you right. He seemed to want "in" to that culture, fought hard to be included. His public life was an ad for it, wasn't it?

[WritingIsMyReligion]

51. His public life was, indeed.

Who knows what his private life was like, and whether he ever felt remorse for how he lived, tried to stop himself and found he couldn't? But every review/analysis of Gatsby I've ever read makes it quite clear that Fitzgerald is being critical of his contemporary state of the "American Dream" and the upper class, at the very least.

[EFerrari]

52. I've read a number of analyses using different critical theories.

It's kind of fun to see different readers using different models pick up on different aspects of the work, no matter where you come down on FSF yourself.

[WritingIsMyReligion]

53. Yeah, that sort of comparative stuff is always entertaining.

Fitzgerald the man both amuses me and disgusts me--funny sort of thing, that. ;)

[EFerrari]

54. We've hijacked pinto's thread. What shall our penance be?

:)

[WritingIsMyReligion]

55. No books for a week.

:cry::cry:

[EFerrari]

56. I'm not THAT sorry!

lol

[RetroLounge]

82. NO! No! nO!

You need to buy more books as your penance... :D:D:D:D

RL

[EFerrari]

84. We'd need a link to do that!

:shrug:

[jobycom]

67. I'm not sure I completely agree with your summary, either.

First, I do agree with your original statement that started this whole discussion, even though I understand what sfex is talking about, or at least what I think she is talking about. I think she's objecting not to the book itself--she did include it in her list--but to your comment that it is still just as descriptive today (forgive me for not scrolling back to find exact phrases). I think her objection is more that the book is written by a man and from a man's perspective, which makes it less representative of the American experience today--your original point--than of his time. At least that's how I read it. Overall, though, I agree with you that its protrayals and criticism of wealth and priviledge, and the romance of wealth in our society, is just as accurate today.

But I quibble a little on what you say Fitzgerald was saying, and I think sfex may have nailed why with her comment about Fitzgerald critiquing a culture that excluded him. Gatsby wasn't the supreme bad guy in the novel, he was the victim. While the book criticizes society across the board, including the poor--Myrtle and her husband, who are both destroyed by their own expectations and preconceptions, too--Fitzgerald's main target was the elite society of the East. Gatsby's crime to them was not being good enough--it's why he didn't have Daisy in the first place, and why Daisy didn't really think of him as her equal. In the end, she chooses her elite culture and her disgusting husband because no matter how much Gatsby had achieved, he was not accepted into her world. Gatsby never realized this, even in the end when he willingly took the blame for Myrtle's death, and was killed because of it. He was doing this for Daisy, who didn't hesitate to let him.

Nick--the perpetual observer and constant outsider, even in his own romance with the group--makes his most passionate comment to Gatsby, just before he is killed. "You're better than the lot of them." (Or something like that). Nick--Fitzgerald--was condemning the society that rejected Gatsby, no matter what he had accomplished. Not just rejected, but used his parties and his money and his sacrifice, and then rejected him.

After Gatsby's death, Nick breaks off relations with the group, even refusing to confront them with the truth about Myrtle--a fiction the group maintained even though they all knew the truth. He goes back west, where he opines that his story really was a tale about the West, where everything that happened did so because of his and Gatsby's western standards and mores, and how they clashed with the eastern elitist standards of Tom and Daisy. Everything--Gatsby's rejection, Gatsby's road to wealth, Gatsby's expectations of a romance when Daisy was having a fling, Gatsby's noble acceptance of blame for the accident when Daisy and Tom saw him only as a way out of trouble--a role they expected Gatsby to play because of his lower status--all of it was because of the shallowness of the Eastern culture and its lack of respect for Gatsby's origins.

I think sfex nailed it, that Fitzgerald, while criticizing many aspects of culture, especially involving wealth and its pursuit, was most thorough in condemning the society that rejected him, too. He was Gatsby.

An 82 year old novel barely over a hundred pages, and it's still being debated passionately today. I think that qualifies it as great.

[EFerrari]

72. Definitely.

:)

[jobycom]

81. It's the Bushes versus the Clintons, isn't it? nt

[EFerrari]

102. The word I couldn't find yesterday was "complicity".

Whether we're reading "Othello" or Gone With the Wind or Gatsby, we ask, where does the author come down on the issue -- of silencing Desdemona or of slavery or of human worth measured in dollars?

Is the writer illuminating, endorsing, critiquing? What is this writer's relationship to the issues raised in the work? And, how do we know? Show me the words. :)

The Eastern/Western motif in Gatsby is, all by itself, telling. The West wasn't a vast empty space. It was the site of a genocide. And FSF deploys the myth in a dramatic but also, unselfconscious manner.

So, to come full circle, Gatsby isn't the ultimate "American" novel. It's a great novel of the ultimate American founding myth -- or to be more blunt, the founding Big Lie. And FSF did it beautifully and with the economy of a poet.

[mitchum]

71. Yes; for me, Fitzgerald was always the shopgirl with her nose pressed against...

the front window of the mansion. There is far more longing for, than scathing analysis of, the empty rich.

[EFerrari]

73. And he did that better than anyone. That was his gift.

And his problem, all at the same time.

[mitchum]

75. That's a really nice way to put it...

it really is

[EFerrari]

77. I think it may be true. I don't have American Lit studies under my belt

but Fitzgerald, Hemingway and the lot of them all seemed to be wrestling with the same stuff. And it killed most of them. :(

Imho, that says less about these gifted writers than it says about our culture at that time as a whole.

I'm not a fan and, at the same time, there was something in the air that prodded them in that direction.

:shrug:

[idgiehkt]

90. F. Scott Golightly??

Sorry I just had to say it, the image cracked me up. :rofl:

[EFerrari]

92. LOL!

:rofl:

[idgiehkt]

58. and at least middle class

I think Fitzgerald intentionally manipulated his readers in that book starting on the first pages, "a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out at birth" etc, knowing everyone holds themselves just a bit (at least) morally superior to their fellows. I admire his writing and have enjoyed other works of his but that book to me is like the Great-American-fantasy-island-lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous-wank-off or something. I think "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair, or "Cold Mountain" by Charles Frazier, could just as easily qualify. If there is one that is a true telling it is "Main Street" whereas to me Gatsby is like the great american fantasy of reality.

[EFerrari]

59. I haven't read Main Street and since so many of you rate it

now I have to. Damn you! lol

I haven't been able to say this very well, but FSF waffles when he tries to critique the culture that kills Gatsby. It's like he half wants to be in it and he half hates it. That's the tension that makes the novel great, and more than the sum of the author's "intention".

The thing about the modernist American guys is that they kept forwarding the myth of this vast empty American continent -- that never existed. Prelapsarian fantasy. :shrug:

[idgiehkt]

60. Main Street IS the great american novel

It's about the middle class, and how we eat our own, so to speak.

Being a twelve stepper, and knowing alot about the life of Bill Wilson (Bill W. who founded AA) helps me with Fitzgerald. Bill Wilson's life was very, very similar to the Fitzgeralds. When you read his story you get the same feeling, but then with the stock market crash and his descent into alcoholism, etc, but you get the emotions as well, and his struggle to let go of those killing ambitions to be a 'great man' of some sort and find some humility so that he didn't drink himself to death. Ironically, he became a "great man" by doing that, although he was still a deeply flawed person, being a womanizer, which apparently didn't cease after founding AA. Reading about Bill W. helped me really understand what Fitzgerald was getting at, to me it's the very same thing the founding fathers based the American Revolution on, or that Thoreau was driven by...a quote from Joan Baez' ex comes to mind although I can't remember the name of the guy, the one who mailed his draft cards back to the feds in protest of the Vietnam war; he said "the life of a man belongs to that man" or something similar. It's like the railing of a lower status white male against these other higher status males only because they feel, as each man (probably as does each human, if not each sentient being, but they don't take it that far) probably does, that they are 'just as good' as these saps that are rich and they deserve to have that same lifestyle, and if they can't have it then they have to find serious defects in the people that do. That is probably where the love/hate comes in, the inner conflict in his writing. The introduction to that story seems to comfort the readers with the supposition that if we can't be rich, at least we are more 'moral' or something like that, lol.

[EFerrari]

61. Oh, this imperfect humanity thing. Can't live with it.

Can't live outside of it. :)

[LBJDemocrat]

19. Moby Dick?

I can't believe anyone actually likes that book. It's pathetically boring and pretentious.


1. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (the best, bar none)
2. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
3. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
4. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

[EFerrari]

28. Faulkner, definitely. He's a list all by himself.

:)

[sarge43]

20. Huckleberry Finn and In Cold Blood n/t

[XemaSab]

21. Good one....

Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
Huck Finn by Mark Twain
Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck
The Human Comedy by William Saroyan
the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder

[jmowreader]

27. My five...

The Great Gatsby, by Fitzgerald
The Call of the Wild, by London
On the Road, by Kerouac
The Catcher in the Rye, by Salinger
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Thompson

[The empressof all]

30. It's hard to narrow it down so I have 7

I'd go with:

Confederacy of the Dunces
Slaughterhouse 5
Moby Dick
Scarlet Letter
Catch 22
Huck Finn
Little Women

[EFerrari]

57. Why did you include Little Women? I almost did.

:)

[DU GrovelBot]

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[jobycom]

62. The Color Purple, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, Native Son, and

Huckleberry Finn.

I answered first--now to see how others responded. :)

[EFerrari]

63. One more list as my penance, pinto.

The Portrait of a Lady, James
House of Mirth, Warton
The Maltese Falcon, Hammet
Myra Breckinridge, Vidal
American Tabloid, Elroy


(whew! hope we're even now!)

[saltpoint]

68. Jesus. If you arent a librarian in this life, I hope you return as one in the

next.

Some absolutely GREAT selections on your lists in this thread.

(My copy of Simon Schama's POWER OF ART arrived yesterday. And Caravaggio's the first chapter!)

[EFerrari]

70. Schama: Dead Certainties.

:rofl:

[Richardo]

79. Huckleberry Finn, Catch-22, To Kill A Mockingbird, Grapes of Wrath, Gatsby

[RetroLounge]

83. Wow. Great list here...

My list would be ever changing.

Gatsby
To Kill A Mockingbird
Absalom Absalom or maybe The Sound and The Fury
On The Road
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

RL

[EFerrari]

87. What's great about these lists is that I haven't read the fifth choice.

lol

[NNadir]

86. Slaughterhouse-five; Catch-22, Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Painted Bird.

[ncabot22]

88. Here are mine

Moby Dick- Herman Melville
The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson
Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
House of the Seven Gables - Nathaniel Hawthorne

Although he wrote mostly short stories, I do believe Edgar Allen Poe is one of the most important American authors. He influenced writers around the world and had the ability to tell a fantastic tale.

[EFerrari]

89. Where did Shirley Jackson come from ? Was she an alien

that was just dropped in? :thumbsup:

[ncabot22]

94. Another Jackson fan, I presume

:) She is vastly underrated as a writer but so influential. A very interesting woman, too.

[EFerrari]

100. I don't know much about her but read her collected works

and wow, what a great read. :)

[fishwax]

93. have you read Poe's novel

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym? It's worth a read, imo, and while probably not one of the best american novels, certainly one of the more interesting, for a variety of reasons :)

[ncabot22]

95. I read it a long time ago

Thanks for reminding me...I need to re-read it. Fall of the House of Usher is my favourite Poe story.

[fishwax]

96. that's one of my favorites too

it's a great short story, and really covers a lot of ground thematically. He was such a master of the short story, though--he has a few dozen excellent examples ... :hi:

[AnotherGreenWorld]

91. 1. The Breast, Philip Roth

2. Julian, Vidal
3. Creation, Vidal
4. Jesus' Son, Johnson
5. Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon

Actually, I don't know. I really hate American literature.

This is probably more realistic:

1. Catcher in the Rye, Salinger
2. Messiah, Vidal
3. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain
4. The Jungle, Sinclair
5. To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee

[BooScout]

97. Obviously.....

My first pick would be: 1. To Kill A Mockingbird... followed by:


2. A Farewell to Arms
3. The Catcher in the Rye
4. Go Tell it on the Mountain
5. The Grapes of Wrath

[mtnester]

99. I will start with Thoreau, Walden (1854), then move to

Steinbeck - Grapes of Wrath
Jack Kerouc - On the Road
Margaret Mitchell - GWTW
Margaret Atwood - The Handmaids Tale
Jean Hegland - Into the Forest

I know, that is six. I really have my top 100, but, as with trying to determine the best guitar player of all time, everything is in context, and it is nearly impossible to limit it to 5, or 6, or 30....

[alcibiades_mystery]

101. Gravity's Rainbow......Pynchon, 1973