In 1868, a little-known writer by the name of John William DeForest proposed a new type of literature, a collective artistic project for a nation just emerging from an existential conflict: a work of fiction that accomplished “the task of painting the American soul.” It would be called the Great American Novel, and no one had written it yet, DeForest admitted. Maybe soon.
A century and a half later, the idea has endured, even as it has become more complicated. In 2024, our definition of literary greatness is wider, deeper, and weirder than DeForest likely could have imagined. At the same time, the novel is also under threat, as the forces of anti-intellectualism and authoritarianism seek to ban books and curtail freedom of expression. The American canon is more capacious, more fluid, and more fragile than perhaps ever before. But what, exactly, is in it? What follows is our attempt to discover just that.
In setting out to identify that new American canon, we decided to define American as having first been published in the United States (or intended to be—read more in our entries on Lolita and The Bell Jar). And we narrowed our aperture to the past 100 years—a period that began as literary modernism was cresting and contains all manner of literary pleasure and possibility, including the experimentations of postmodernism and the narrative satisfactions of genre fiction.
This still left millions of potential titles. So we approached experts—scholars, critics, and novelists, both at The Atlantic and outside it—and asked for their suggestions. From there, we added and subtracted and debated and negotiated and considered and reconsidered until we landed on the list you’re about to read. We didn’t limit ourselves to a round, arbitrary number; we wanted to recognize the very best—novels that say something intriguing about the world and do it distinctively, in intentional, artful prose—no matter how many or few that ended up being (136, as it turns out). Our goal was to single out those classics that stand the test of time, but also to make the case for the unexpected, the unfairly forgotten, and the recently published works that already feel indelible. We aimed for comprehensiveness, rigor, and open-mindedness. Serendipity, too: We hoped to replicate that particular joy of a friend pressing a book into your hand and saying, “You have to read this; you’ll love it.”
This list includes 45 debut novels, nine winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and three children’s books. Twelve were published before the introduction of the mass-market paperback to America, and 24 after the release of the Kindle. At least 60 have been banned by schools or libraries. Together, they represent the best of what novels can do: challenge us, delight us, pull us in and then release us, a little smarter and a little more alive than we were before. You have to read them.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
1925
Theodore Dreiser
1925
Gertrude Stein
1925
Willa Cather
1927
Ernest Hemingway
1929
Nella Larsen
1929
William Faulkner
1929
William Faulkner
1936
Djuna Barnes
1936
Younghill Kang
1937
Zora Neale Hurston
1937
John Dos Passos
1937
John Fante
1939
Raymond Chandler
1939
Nathanael West
1939
John Steinbeck
1939
Richard Wright
1940
Carson McCullers
1940
Dawn Powell
1942
Robert Penn Warren
1946
Ann Petry
1946
Dorothy B. Hughes
1947
Jean Stafford
1947
J. D. Salinger
1951
E. B. White
1952
Ralph Ellison
1952
Ray Bradbury
1953
Gwendolyn Brooks
1953
Saul Bellow
1953
Vladimir Nabokov
1955
James Baldwin
1956
Grace Metalious
1956
Patricia Highsmith
1957
John Okada
1957
Jack Kerouac
1957
Shirley Jackson
1959
Joseph Heller
1961
Madeleine L'Engle
1962
James Baldwin
1962
Ken Kesey
1962
Vladimir Nabokov
1962
Ross Macdonald
1962
Sylvia Plath
1963
Mary McCarthy
1963
Thomas Pynchon
1966
James Salter
1967
John Updike
1968
Philip K. Dick
1968
Susan Taubes
1969
Philip Roth
1969
Kurt Vonnegut
1969
Judy Blume
1970
Paula Fox
1970
Joan Didion
1970
Stanley Crawford
1972
Ishmael Reed
1972
Toni Morrison
1973
Oscar Zeta Acosta
1973
Fran Ross
1974
Ursula K. Le Guin
1974
James Welch
1974
Gayl Jones
1975
Renata Adler
1976
Leslie Marmon Silko
1977
Toni Morrison
1977
Will Eisner
1978
Andrew Holleran
1978
Stephen King
1978
Octavia E. Butler
1979
Charles Portis
1979
Marilynne Robinson
1980
Toni Cade Bambara
1980
John Crowley
1981
Charles Johnson
1982
Jayne Anne Phillip
1984
Cormac McCarthy
1985
Peter Taylor
1986
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
1986
Toni Morrison
1987
Octavia E. Butler
1987
Katherine Dunn
1989
Maxine Hong Kingston
1989
Jessica Hagedorn
1990
Bret Easton Ellis
1991
Julia Alvarez
1991
Norman Rush
1991
Dorothy Allison
1992
Donna Tartt
1992
Ana Castillo
1993
Leslie Feinberg
1993
Annie Proulx
1993
Chang-rae Lee
1995
Philip Roth
1995
Helena María Viramontes
1995
David Foster Wallace
1996
Chris Kraus
1997
Don DeLillo
1997
Colson Whitehead
1999
Joyce Carol Oates
2000
Mark Z. Danielewski
2000
Michael Chabon
2000
Helen DeWitt
2000
Joy Williams
2000
Percival Everett
2001
Rabih Alameddine
2001
Jonathan Franzen
2001
Sandra Cisneros
2002
Debra Magpie Earling
2002
Gary Shteyngart
2002
Jhumpa Lahiri
2003
Mary Gaitskill
2005
Junot Díaz
2007
Jennifer Egan
2010
Karen Tei Yamashita
2010
Teju Cole
2011
Jesmyn Ward
2011
Louise Erdrich
2012
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
2013
Imogen Binnie
2013
Marlon James
2014
Akhil Sharma
2014
Lauren Groff
2015
N. K. Jemisin
2015
Paul Beatty
2015
Viet Thanh Nguyen
2015
Claude McKay
2017
George Saunders
2017
Nick Drnaso
2018
Ling Ma
2018
Tommy Orange
2018
Valeria Luiselli
2019
Kevin Wilson
2019
Namwali Serpell
2019
Patricia Lockwood
2021
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
2021
Catherine Lacey
2023
The Great American Novels
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14.03.2024
In 1868, a little-known writer by the name of John William DeForest proposed a new type of literature, a collective artistic project for a nation just emerging from an existential conflict: a work of fiction that accomplished “the task of painting the American soul.” It would be called the Great American Novel, and no one had written it yet, DeForest admitted. Maybe soon.
A century and a half later, the idea has endured, even as it has become more complicated. In 2024, our definition of literary greatness is wider, deeper, and weirder than DeForest likely could have imagined. At the same time, the novel is also under threat, as the forces of anti-intellectualism and authoritarianism seek to ban books and curtail freedom of expression. The American canon is more capacious, more fluid, and more fragile than perhaps ever before. But what, exactly, is in it? What follows is our attempt to discover just that.
In setting out to identify that new American canon, we decided to define American as having first been published in the United States (or intended to be—read more in our entries on Lolita and The Bell Jar). And we narrowed our aperture to the past 100 years—a period that began as literary modernism was cresting and contains all manner of literary pleasure and possibility, including the experimentations of postmodernism and the narrative satisfactions of genre fiction.
This still left millions of potential titles. So we approached experts—scholars, critics, and novelists, both at The Atlantic and outside it—and asked for their suggestions. From there, we added and subtracted and debated and negotiated and considered and reconsidered until we landed on the list you’re about to read. We didn’t limit ourselves to a round, arbitrary number; we........
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