So, here are my picks for Great American Novels, by time period, using the criteria above:
19th Century: Hawthorne, Nathaniel: The Scarlet Letter. Still relevant today, as our country seems to be in a perpetual state of Puritan hangover. Hester Prynne was the first of a long line of "alienated youth" types, followed by Huck Finn, Jay Gatsby, Holden Caulfield, and Ponyboy Curtis, among others. This trope seems much more common in American literature. Edgar Allan Poe may be the "Father of the American Short Story," but, in my opinion, Hawthorne is the "Father of American Literature." Some would place Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage and Henry David Thoreau's Walden here as well. Going out on a limb: Frederick Douglass's autobiographies.
20th Century: Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Great Gatsby. The American dream is a sham. Everyone has an angle and nobody is who they seem. Smart women have to pretend to be stupid. There are no easy answers and no happy endings. If you tried to read it as a sophomore in high school and hated it, give it another try. Secondary choices: Sinclair Lewis's Main Street John Dos Passos's U. S. A. trilogy. Also, Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery.
D. H. Lawrence: A difficult pick for me because I think his prose is wildly uneven--sublime and poetic in one paragraph, laughably purple in the next. However, he was one of the first American authors to ignore "madonna/whore" archetypes and portray women as sexual beings with identities separate and apart from their relationships. I recommend his literary criticism above any of his fiction.
For the latter part of the 20th century, the picks are much tougher, because the American novel flourished during this period, and there was much more diversity of voice. So, as a personal cop-out, I will recommend some authors, then award my prize for The Great American novel.
I will recommend William Faulkner for his perfect capture of Southern angst. He is, however, very dark and his canvases are small, so if you want to read only The Sound and the Fury or As I Lay Dying and bail on the rest, I won't blame you.
I also have to recommend Ernest Hemingway, for having inspired an entire generation of American writers. His depiction of American malehood and his glorification of war and imperialism, not to mention his misogyny, put me off. I read him anyway.
John Steinbeck: The Pearl, Of Mice and Men, his most personal, Cannery Row, and his two greatest, The Grapes of Wrath and The Winter of Our Discontent. This last one finally garnered him a Nobel prize and, because of its absolute artistry, would qualify as one of the Great American Novels of the 20th Century.
Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat's Cradle. I'm a big fan of his short stories and literary and social criticism as well.
Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird: Southern Gothic meets courtroom drama meets coming-of-age story. Lee keeps all the balls in the air without missing a beat. Maycomb, Alabama's crisis of conscience is America's crisis of conscience.
Joseph Heller: Catch-22. Heller takes Vonnegut's honesty and ambiguity up several notches. Written in strange, stream-of-consciousness prose and cynicism even I have a hard time swallowing at times, this novel is a brutally honest story about war and its effects on humans. No moralizing or jingoism here. This was the book American teens hid inside their Biology textbooks in the 1960's and '70's.
Dystopian Fiction: The earliest American dystopian book was published in 1835 by Jerome B. Holgate, under the pseudonym of Oliver Bolokitten, Esq., depicting a future America where blacks and whites intermarry to the point where we can no longer distinguish who is of which race so we can deny them voting rights and housing and stuff. Or something. Written to discredit the Abolitionist movement. I've never read it, but it sounds like it would be a good laugh. The seminal dystopian fiction seems to have mostly been written by Brits (Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, H. G. Wells). Of course, we have Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, but he was actually late to the party, his book being published in 1951. By the late 19th century, xenophobia took a back seat to worries over the effects of technology and class warfare. I couldn't find any dystopian fiction by American authors from this period. By the mid-20th century, fears of nuclear holocaust and Fascism were major concerns. More American dystopian books to consider: It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis which predates Bradbury by almost 20 years, and If This Goes On by Robert A. Heinlein. My must-read-before-I-die pile keeps growing. However, I find Heinlein a rough go because he doesn't trust his audience (I'm looking at you, Stranger in a Strange Land),so I may pass on him anyway.
Hey, WordNerd: Why is there nothing published after 1961 on your list? Because writers of the late 20th century don't write with the same scope as their predecessors. The "American experience" has shattered into a million tiny shards. More fiction is published and spread across more genres, and authors work in microcosms more than their predecessors did. That's not to say that there are no great books being written.Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, Cormac McCarthy, women writers such as Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, Alice Walker, Leslie Marmon Silko and Jhumpa Lahiri are among them. Perhaps the American voice is changing. Perhaps it is now a chorus of voices. That's a good thing, but it's also an indication that there's no American Collective Experience anymore.
I'm cheating here because the author is British: Neil Gaiman's American Gods tries to define (or perhaps explain?) a very fragmented American Experience by exploring the numerous mythologies in our melting pot. Easily the best book I've read in the past 10 years.
AAAAnnnnnnd, the moment you've been waiting for. THE Great American Novel according to The WordNerd:
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Why: The first American novel written with a distinctly American voice. The perfect balance of romanticism and realism. A hopeful vision for America's future, where people a valued for what they do more than for what they believe or how much money they have. A young man's journey and his witty observations on the foibles of humanity. A young man who, despite numerous attempts to "sivilize" him, will always follow his own lights. A paean to individuality without extolling "the virtues of selfishness."
I'm in good company here. Ernest Hemingway, who himself inspired a generation of writers, wrote: "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn."
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