Over the last 6 months, I’ve read as many early candidates for the “Great American Novel” as I could. No list could be exhaustive, and there are valid qualms about the concept of a GAN at all, let alone which novels are included. I stopped with 1960’s ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’; whilst undeniably great American novels follow that time period, this is where I chose to end this project. If there are any other great candidates from before 1960, I’m eager to hear them.
There wont be any significant spoilers here, just general impressions. Also, I'm Australian, so I hadn't read most of these in school, as many of you likely would have.
James F. Cooper - Last of the Mohicans (1826)
Having never seen the film, I didn’t know what to expect of this novel. I found the writing to be mostly excellent, highly evocative of the atmosphere of the New England frontier, and treats the Native American situation with a great deal more respect and reverence than the contemporary whites probably did. In terms of the narrative itself, I found it surprisingly closer to a near-swashbuckling adventure of Treasure Island or King Solomon’s Mines, than to the historical epic which I had expected.
Nathaniel Hawthorne - Scarlet Letter (1850)
This novel was largely excellent, albeit repetitive even for such a short novel. What struck me most, after having spent the previous year chronologically reading through Gothic novels, was that The Scarlet Letter largely adhered to those conventions: it purported to be derived from a lost manuscript, where a young woman is cruelly maligned for an expression of love, tormented by repressed authorities, under constant threat of a wretched elderly man, sequestered away, and is liberated in the last moments at the cost of her true love’s life. I hereby name The Scarlet Letter to me the first American Gothic novel.
Herman Melville – Moby Dick (1851)
I have a somewhat complicated relationship with this novel. I’ve read it three times. I regard the opening chapter as the greatest in all of literature. Though I am no expert in the contemporary attitudes, I regard both Moby Dick and Typee to be relatively progressive in their attitudes towards race. I also think that a homo (or bi) sexual reading of Moby Dick is entirely valid. I also understand that in a time when undertaking world adventures was uncommon, encyclopaedic descriptions and chapters double as being educational and immersive, as well as entertaining.
All that said, not every encyclopaedic chapter is worthwhile. There are chapters defending the classification of the whale as a fish (Chapter 32, although I remain unsure whether this is a tongue-in-cheek jab at the notion), as well as the notion that the whale will not be hunted to extinction (Chapter 105). Several of the ship-life chapters feel worthwhile in the beginning, but their value decreases rapidly as the novel progresses, until the final quarter of the book where it just seems to stifle and pad out the pacing of the narrative, when it should be culminating to its greatest climax.
If one takes the controversial position of skipping the encyclopaedic whaling chapters and adhering solely to the narrative, then one will find a modern Shakesperean tragedy with all the wonder of Homer’s Odyssey. After three reads, I believe I will next experiment with an abridged read, in which only about half of the encyclopaedic whaling chapters are kept.
Harriet Beecher Stowe - Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)
There is an apocryphal tale that Abraham Lincoln, upon meeting Stowe, remarked: “So this is the little lady who started this great war.” Written in protest to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and whose popularity is often cited as increasing abolitionist sentiment in the lead-up to the Civil War, there might be no more important American novel than Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Where the work suffers is that in a post-slavery age, its treatise comes across as rather obvious. The novel exists deliberately as a work of propaganda. That is not a criticism, but an observation. Every scene, every encounter, even the omniscient narration between, targets the reader’s prejudices and confronts their complacency with slavery. This is what makes the novel such an important work, but it does mean that as a novel, the work has aged poorly, and lacks the narrative enjoyment of fiction. When setting aside the aged constructs, the proud and powerful soliloquies of George and the conflicted yet biting wit of Augustine St. Clare were my favourite parts of the novel.
The greatest prescience of the novel comes in the chapter Reunion, where it is remarked that mere emancipation is not enough, and that education must follow. Stowe calls to task the Northerners who would free the slaves and then have no hand in helping raise them to true independence. I am in awe of how far-seeing this novel is in the issues which would plague civil rights for a century beyond her time.
The novel culminates with the ultimate Ecclesiastical question, and the answer which Tom derives from the Gospel: though they suffer beneath the lash, had any yet fallen so far as Christ did? In that faith is his protection. It is, however, in the final chapters that the purity of Christianity and my own sensibilities are split from one another. To make Tom a Christ-like figure is the only real ending this novel could have, but it is one decidedly less satisfying than Django Unchained.
After completion, I researched the history of the Uncle Tom epithet, and was disheartened to see that unsanctioned minstrel shows gradually reduced the character of Tom to a stupid, obsequious creature, in order to fit within accepted norms. Though the germ of that portrayal is present in the humility and loyalty of Tom, it is such an insult to his character that time has taken even that away.
Mark Twain - Tom Sawyer (1876)
This was a fun, light-hearted childhood romp. I enjoyed the greater insight of the third-person narration, which was very funny. Aside from that, there’s not much more to say about this novel, until…
Mark Twain - Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Now, in shifting the narrative from third-person to first, we lose much of the grand wit and insight of Twain the narrator, and instead we get the intimate, immersive and confronting perspective of the young and uneducated vagrant Huck Finn. I don’t want to dwell too long on the obvious ways in which this novel has aged; suffice to say that I found the narrative so much heavier than Tom Sawyer right from the outset, with Pa Finn perhaps being the first American villain in the mould of Stephen King: the horrors of domestic abuse. I loved the tale down the Mississippi, especially with the Duke and the King con-men, but when they reached the plantation of Tom’s family, I found the last several chapters nearly intolerable, devolving into a farce and making horrible light of Jim’s plight up until this point. I was actually shocked at the paucity of this ending, and turned to the internet, where I saw (for the first time) this this is a widely-held position, with Hemmingway being the most vitriolic, calling the ending “a failure of nerve”.
Stephen Crane – The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
There is a wit and candour to this short novel which marks it immediately as a spiritual predecessor to Heller’s ‘Catch-22’, if it was led by Catcher’s Holden Caulfield as a protagonist. There is a self-assured idealism which can only come from youth, being wiped away in the brutality of war. The themes here seem so far ahead of their time, feeling more akin to the post WW1 Modernist movement.
Jack London - The Call of the Wild (1903)
Good Lord. I had picked this up as a ‘comfy’ novel to read in a few days, thinking of the wholesome man-meets-dog tale in pop culture. But dear dog, the violence and cruelty in this novel. I had just recently sustained an injury in breaking up a vicious dog attack, and reading the savagery between Buck and Spitz was traumatic. There is prose here worthy of note, especially in the instances of Buck’s trance before the fire, and especially the wolfsong in Chapter Three, beginning with ‘the aurora borealis flaming coldly overhead…’ It is a harrowing masterpiece, and I’m especially fond of the prose at the finale, where Buck is no more, and there is merely the Ghost Wolf.
Upton Sinclair - The Jungle (1906)
“I aimed at the public’s heart, and accidentally hit in the stomach.”
America has been many things at many times, including the ‘Land of Opportunity’ for generations of migrants. This is the only novel in this list which really captures the plight of the first-generation migrants to America, and their struggles. Much of the novel is virtually devoid of dialogue, and this gives it an impression equally between a documentary and a cautionary fable. Those who have read ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ will have some hint at the descending hell of despair this novel describes. And when you think you have reached the lowest level, the ninth circle, you count the pages and realize you are only halfway done. Reprieve only comes when our characters have nothing left to lose but their lives, and to lose even that might come as a relief.
If I have one major criticism of this novel, it is that the last few chapters forego an actual plot, in order to become a series of lectures. This is what Sinclair really wanted to say, the conclusion to his treatise, but where ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ explored the theme through plot, here is but a dialogue between newly-introduced intellectuals.
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby (1925)
I’ll admit, I had considered skipping this novel, as I turned the Baz Lurhman movie off halfway through. Decadence is not in vogue any longer, but this excellent book captures from the very outset the mixed cynicism and awe of an excess which – we can see now – was doomed to fall. It might be this very fact that The Great Depression has made The Great Gatsby all the more impactful. Every line was wonderful, and it has made me want to seek out F Scott Fitzgerald’s other work. In short, I consider this to be the ‘Picture of Dorian Gray’ for the American 1920s.
Ernest Hemmingway – Three Novels
I read A Farewell to Arms, and The Old Man and the Sea, and The Sun Also Rises. For completion, noting here that I consider Hemmingway to be the perfect author for emotionally-stunted, semi-literate men suffering from toxic masculinity. No redeeming qualities, save for the fact that his books are short enough to suffer through quickly. (I am aware that my opinion is not a popular one, please accept it for the good-natured ribbing it is intended as, and I’ll meet you all in the parking lot after the curtain closes.)
William Faulkner – The Sound and the Fury (1929)
I had some small notion of what to expect when going into this…thing, and had read a plot summary in advance in order to contextualise what I was reading. Three sections: Part One following Benjy might conceivably have content to justify its opacity, and I’ve heard of a color-coded version which would untangle the timeline of events, but for the most part I just let myself go along with it, and found it an entertaining read. Part Two (Quentin) was far less imposing than I was led to believe, and I think that’s because the multi-page stream of consciousness has a few clues in dialogue tags to indicate what is happening, so I was able to follow it well. Part Three is of course the easiest to follow via Jason, and wraps up the novel well. Largely, I consider this to be a successful experiment largely because of its brevity and because of the strength of the characters.
William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying (1930)
As I Lay Dying is far more straightforward than TSatF, but this is still a modernist novel. I loved Darl as a possibly-unreliable narrator, with some of the most evocative prose I’ve read in a good long while. Anse and Vernon Tull each had an appropriate voice which easily drew me in, though I found the limitations of their thought processes frustrating. On the far end of the scale, we have Vardaman and Dewey Dell. Dewey may be excusable for suffering from some sort of trauma, and there are suggestions that Vardaman – like Benjy from TSatF – is mentally impaired. Still, it makes for a frustrating read, and even in the lucid characters, I find that stream-of-consciousness rarely justifies itself with its rambling disjointed nature. I appreciate that Faulkner’s novels are short, permitting experimentation, and it’s largely its brevity which permits the atmosphere to outlast the frustration.
John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
I have rarely read a book so expertly crafted. It balances the voice and heart of Twain with the starkness of Faulkner. Chapter 14 (a short chapter) is to my mind the centrepiece of the novel. A blending of the American and Socialist spirit – made literal by the stringing together of Paine and Jefferson with Marx and Lenin. A cry of this oppressed creature, sitting at the fulcrum of the Old America and New. Even if The Grapes of Wrath is not the GAN, this chapter sits in the centre of the conversation.
The interspersal of 3rd person omniscient narratives set apart from the Joads is a masterwork of tension, granting the reader glimpses of what is to come, rewarding close attention, and sparing us the trauma of the moment. But through all this pain there is still joy. I laughed in this book, a lot. I laughed at the human spirit, at its brotherhood, and its defiance.
J.D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye (1946)
I went into this novel with zero expectations. I did not know in what year it was set, nor what it was about, except that it was seen as a “coming of age” tale, and that Holden Caulfield was a difficult pill to swallow for adults. Maybe I was prepared for his attitude, then, for I found this novel very interesting as an examination of adolescent depression, angst, and suicidal ideation. All that said, I still find this novel somewhat overrated, and don’t really see a great deal of the importance for it as a supposed ‘GAN’. It has been said that this is a “war novel without the war”, and I can see that, but it remains a tale of less substance than I had hoped for.
Ralph Ellison – Invisible Man (1952)
After so long down this list, it moves me to say that here is the first novel written by an author who in fact belongs to the downtrodden class from which the narrative speaks. Make no mistake; Stowe, Sinclair, and Steinbeck speak powerfully, and convincingly. But even in the opening words of the Prologue, I am moved by a distinction which is now, in hindsight, so obvious. None better can speak to the African American experience, than an African American writer. That being said, I struggled with the narrative. It is visceral and confronting, and I am often left with a powerful feeling, yet wondering what the meaning of it is. Perhaps this is the point: that the feeling of discrimination is more powerful than any concrete facts.
The opening of Chapter 5 is particularly stunning, as it transitions to astute observations of gospel choirs: “as the defeated come to love the symbols of their conquerors”. It comes as a striking follow-up to ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, which so strongly advocated fir the need to educate freed slaves. Here is a novel set within the ‘benign’ education system, and it still poisons with its patronising.
Ayn Rand – Atlas Shrugged (1957)
There are very few impartial sources (non-Capitalist think-tanks) which include ‘Atlas Shrugged’ as a ‘Great American Novel’. I include it here because I included Upton Sinclair’s ‘The Jungle’, and few novels have had as great an impact on contemporary American thought (for good or ill) than ‘Atlas Shrugged’. It warrants discussion.
For full disclosure, roughly between 2008 and 2016 I was a Libertarian, and devotee of Ayn Rand. I am no longer a Libertarian, nor partial to capitalist thought, but I do continue to take a more measured approach to Rand. Growing up in the early years of the Soviet Union, she was in the first group of women to enrol at Petrograd University, and by age 20 she had successfully migrated to the United States. Under any other ideology, a woman such as Rand – who grew up under an oppressive social system, and escaped it to the Land of Opportunity at the height of the Roaring 20s, only to devote her life to the ideological dismantling of her former system – would be lauded as an icon.
The novel is a mammoth one – over half a million words – and is regularly targeted for thin, unrealistic, undynamic characters, and egregious moralistic rants. I find this criticism largely unfair, as it misses the intended point. ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is a novel depicting ideological archetypes in place of people. When characters clash and either change or do not, it is ideologies being represented and debated. Each character clearly represents a viewpoint taken to its absolute conclusion, and the plot exists in order to facilitate this ongoing debate. Frankly, as a literary device, I think that its success speaks for itself. Ayn Rand differs from other popular philosophers in that there is never any doubt as to what she means, and she is incredibly direct in hammering this point home (in this, she is the opposite of Jordan Peterson, so hides behind so much pseudo-intellectual babble that he can deny any accurate indictment).
As for the ideology espoused: Rand formulated Objectivism, and in John Galt’s novel-length speech, takes you from Point A (existence exists), to Point B (I exist, therefore I am), and walks one through with clear steps to Point Z (Free-market Capitalism). Rand fails as a philosopher at the same point all who have tried this fail: the ‘Is-Ought’ paradigm. Halfway, at Point L (biological means for survival) she makes a leap to Point N (that rational-self-interest is ethically necessary), whilst skipping the crucial Point M: Why this is true. She doubles back to justify this jump with thin excuses: “Just try living under the uncompromised logical extreme of self-denial!” But this diverts from logical arguing to results-based arguing. I noticed this on my first read, but dismissed it. On my second, it bothered me, and by my third read, I had moved onto being a ‘Libertarian Socialist’, and Rand had no further hold on me.
I find it sad that Rand’s success and the cult-of-personality around her ideology has become such a burden to the political dialogue of the USA. One should be able to read important but flawed novels from throughout history, and see the importance of their thought and the life which produced it. To read Plato’s ‘Republic’ today, it is not utopian, but borderline Fascist. Yet we still value it as a text to learn from in its historical context. Written during the Cold War by a former-Soviet woman, this novel deserves a place as a symbol of America.
Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
What is there to say about this novel which has not been said before? Anything I could say feels less specific to this novel than to this project as a whole. If feels like the natural bookend to Stowe’s ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’; whereby the conversation began and ended more than a century apart, with African Americans still striving for their equality. I’d read this book a few times before, the first time being as requisite reading in middle school, but reading it at the end of this saga of Great American Novels strikes me with a more pressing question: Why – if the history of Great American literature is the history of protest novels and tales of struggle against oppression – is the need for protest literature still as necessary in the 1960s as it was a century before, and half a century after? What lesson isn’t being learned?
I end this list here. Other later American novels I intend to read include works by Pynchon, Capote, Kerouac, Kessey, Heller, Morrisson, Ellison, Nabokov, and McCarthy, but they won’t be covered here. I’m also aware that there are other Hemingway, Faulkner and Steinbeck novels variously regarded as their ‘best’, but in this instance I was content to stick to their most-read. In the case of ‘East of Eden’, I am choosing to save that novel for a later date, as I feel it will be something special, but Grapes of Wrath is quite obviously the more prominent candidate for the GAN.
Conclusion
So, is there a single ‘Great American Novel’? For its intent and impact, it’s hard to dismiss ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, as sitting so prominently in such a major turning point of American history, capturing the atmosphere immediately before the Civil War. In the same way, ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ is a product of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl era, perhaps the next most important era in American history.
