Our Favorite Authors' Great American Novel Picks
Great writers are also great readers, which is why we trust them to give the best book recommendations. To celebrate 250 years of storytelling, we asked some of our favorite authors to share what they consider The Great American Novel, and they came up with a wide range of essential books that capture the spirit of American literature through powerful storytelling and unforgettable characters.
Ann Patchett
Author of Whistler
BUCKEYE by Patrick Ryan is my Great American Novel. Though most of the book centers around WWII, the scope of the characters' experiences stretch back to the First World War and ahead to Vietnam. The novel shows how our country and its citizens have been shaped by war, and how we don't know exactly what to do with ourselves in peacetime. All of this is seen through the lens of the small Ohio town of Bonhomie, where the lives of two couples become intertwined. This is a glorious sweep of a novel, full of love and war and the perilous intimacies of small-town life. It is funny and tender, realistic and strange, going well beyond history and into the heart of our nation.
Andrew Sean Greer
Author of Villa Coco
It is hard to remember a time when comic books weren’t at the center of our culture—a time before Marvel movies, that is—but in the twentieth century, they were seen as no more than junk for children who bought Sea Monkeys and X-ray goggles. Then Michael Chabon came along and, through passionate language, elegant description, bracing narrative and sheer showmanship, showed us the depths of comic art as part of the epic American story. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay still thrills me every time I reread it. More than that: it inspires me to make art out of my enthusiasms, poetry out of my fancies, in other words: to write from the best of me. What other definition of “greatness” could there be?
Ayad Akhtar
Author of The Radiance
In 1936, for a piece in Fortune magazine, photographer Walker Evans and writer James Agee spent eight weeks with three sharecropping families in rural Alabama. Fortune would end up rejecting the remarkable work that they came up with, and Agee would spend the next several years expanding his piece, eventually shaping one of the great prose poems in American literature. If a picture was, back then, worth a thousand words, Agee obliged by providing an accompanying word count for Evans’s images, in language that arrests the mind with its now-savage, now-tender, always-eloquent beauty. Agee’s address to the reader is shot through with moral implication: his guilt at using his subjects’ misery to write the work, his profound empathy for their struggles, and above all, a relentless drive to voice their “human divinity.”
Not since Thoreau’s Walden had anyone so thoroughly reinvented the book-long essay, replete with lists and landscapes, verbal portraits and scenes of daily life, and famously, a full page on a pair of work overalls, its blue worn nearly to silver. Open it anywhere. Its subjects shine forth with an austere radiance that has been with me since first reading the book over thirty years ago; a harrowing early episode of Agee coming up behind a young Black couple along a country road is one of the most chilling depictions of the terror of American racism I know.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is ambitious beyond reason, a book that demands so much of its reader, but with even more to offer those willing to rise to that demand. Of his intentions in writing the book, Agee writes early on: “Beethoven said a thing as rash and noble as the best of his work. By my memory, he said: ‘He who understands my music can never know unhappiness again.’ I believe it. And I would be a liar and a coward and one of your safe world if I should fear to say the same words of my best perception, and of my best intention.”
Caro Claire Burke
Author of Yesteryear
America — the country, yes, but also the idea, the myth, the promise — is a place of constant reinvention. Our nation’s finest novels are those which take this premise of mythmaking, and of myth busting, and who plumb these two competing desires as deeply and ferociously as the reader can bear. Enter James, a truly great and profoundly American novel, the best in recent memory, in which Percival Everett takes one of the most famous stories in United States history and flips it inside out, revealing all the stitches inside. To say I loved this novel would be an understatement, and also beside the point. What this story really did was offer me a new language for my own country. Only a truly great American novel can do that.
Chang-rae Lee
Author of A Tender Age
I’m not a book collector, but years ago when I saw a first edition of John Dos Passos’ 1919 for sale, I bought it immediately, as it’s always been on my personal Great American Novel shortlist. The second volume of his sweeping U.S.A. trilogy, 1919 displays the full array of Dos Passos’ literary and artistic gifts, blending gritty reportage and slice-of-life character tales, along with formally innovative ’Newsreel’ vignettes and his own stylish hand-drawn illustrations, to portray a teeming, raucous, and often contentious nation in the boom times after WWI. Epic in scale but arrestingly intimate, raw, and often poetic, the novel captures for me the ever-yearning hope and struggle of our American story.
Chloe Benjamin
Author of Under Story
It seems to me that any great American novel accounts for the complexity of our country’s history and contradictions. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye vividly depicts not only the experience of racism but the ways in which the white gaze can become internalized, leading to an estrangement from the self. This edition includes a foreword in which Morrison talks about the origin of the novel—the experience of hearing an elementary school friend wish for blue eyes—and her desire to show how profoundly internalized prejudice can damage “the most delicate member[s] of society.” It is a devastating novel, not just in Morrison’s portrayal of Pecola Breedlove’s yearning but in the way she humanizes characters like Cholly, the traumatized father who impregnates her, or Mrs. Breedlove, Pecola’s mother, whose job as a maid to a wealthy white family demands that she coddle that family’s child over her own. I was also struck by the novel’s formal inventiveness: the ranging perspectives, the chopping & remixing of Dick and Jane language, the portion that is entirely dialogue between Pecola and an imaginary friend. All along Morrison asks that we consider our own culpability—that we look at Pecola not just with pity but with shared responsibility.
Chris Bohjalian
Author of The Amateur
Literary critic and journalist H.L. Mencken called The Great Gatsby “a glorified anecdote” in his review of the novel in 1925, and 101 years later, high school students remain baffled why they have to read it. As one 16-year-old once said to me when I praised it, “At least it’s short.” Grudging praise, indeed.
Moreover, Fitzgerald was a product of his era, and there are moments of racism and antisemitism that make me cringe.
And yet it is always in the debate as one of the great American novels – as it should be. You just have to have been bloodied a bit by living and have a prefrontal cortex that has fully matured to appreciate it, which is why adolescents are often blind to the novel’s wistfulness, beauty, and insight into the damaged human soul. Also? Nick Carraway, the narrator, introduces himself with sanctimonious priggishness, while insisting he’s not really judgmental at all. (Okay, have I sold you on the novel?)
But it gets better and it gets better fast, a mere four pages in, when Carraway reconnects with Tom and Daisy Buchanan on Long Island, and we are off on a novel with spectacular parties, great clothes, fast cars, distilleries of booze, criminal shenanigans, and – in the end – three corpses, one floating in a swimming pool a la “Sunset Boulevard.”
Moreover, it’s all in the service of the deeper themes Fitzgerald is exploring about the distinctly American character. We are a nation built on slavery, genocide (a word Fitzgerald would not have known), and cultural and capitalist predation. And yet we still try mightily to find our better angels, the other side of a very cruel coin. We remain, in spite of what we know, relentlessly optimistic, even romantic. Has there ever been a greater male romantic than Jay Gatsby? Sure, “Gatsby” is a synonym for excess, but also for hope.
Recall the acuity and rhythmic splendor of those remarkable last paragraphs: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . .And one fine morning –
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Fitzgerald is speaking both of the specificity of the American experience and the universality of the human capacity for hope.
I collect Gatsbys, and even have one in Armenian. That’s how much I cherish this tale. And that’s why I place it in the discussion of candidates for “Great American novel.”
David McCloskey
Author of London Station
Look At Me is a spookily prescient look into America’s fascination with, well, ourselves. Published mere months before 9/11, the book is an exploration of influencers and America’s descent into collective narcissism well before social media even existed. It’s a testament to what was coming, though I’m sure readers in early 2001 found none of it particularly realistic. There are also terrorist sleeper cells and an eerie glance into the imagined life of an operative living among us. Written as a peek into the future, for good or for ill, Look At Me taps into the American psyche of today. It’s also a cracking read.
Hernan Diaz
Author of Ply
What defines a certain kind of “Great American Novel” is its intention of stretching the form beyond its limits, sometimes hoping to give it the most beautiful death possible—consider Melville, late James, Toomer, Barnes, Stein, Gaddis, or Morrison to name just a few authors from the last couple of centuries. In our century, no American author makes this lovely self-destructive imperative more explicit than David Markson in The Last Novel (2007). It is the final instalment in his heartbreaking, hilarious, haunting Notecard Quartet, which I recommend reading as if it were one single volume. “Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage. Self-evident enough” is how Markson at one point describes the books. “Plotless. Characterless. Yet seducing the reader into turning pages nonetheless,” he writes elsewhere. There are few books that I return to as often as these.
James Patterson
Author of The Country Road Murders
LONESOME DOVE by Larry McMurtry: If I had to recommend one Great American Novel, Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove would be high on my list. It's got everything I love as a reader: unforgettable characters, a huge sense of adventure, humor, heartbreak, and a story that never lets go of you. McMurtry takes the mythology of the American West and fills it with real people who are complicated, funny, brave, and flawed. It's one of those rare novels that's both epic in scope and deeply personal, and that's a hard combination to pull off.
Jason Rekulak
Author of Look What the Cat Dragged In
Ask a hundred readers to name the Great American Novel and you’ll get a hundred different responses—everything from The Great Gatsby to Lonesome Dove to Little Women. But if you asked a hundred readers to name the Great American Horror Novel, I bet the large majority would agree it’s The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. Since its publication in 1959, the book has acquired a vast legion of fans—from Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates to Guillermo del Toro and Martin Scorcese, and those are just the names I remember off the top of my head.
Karin Slaughter
THE GREAT GATSBY is my choice for Great American Novel because it is a quintessentially American story about wealth buying entrée into a world of opulence and excess. In the way of history rhyming, we’re yet again facing the same income inequality as the time of Gatsby, our own “careless people" playing by a special set of rules while everyone else (as Nick Carraway would say) "beats on, boats against the current..." Gatsby is an enigmatic figure, a striver and a thug whose desperate need to belong blinds him to the dangers of the hedonistic class. When there is an example to be made, it’s never to the detriment of one of their own. The novel is brief but layered with love, revenge, and even a good murder mystery. The story still exists as a cautionary tale to the modern reader that eventually, we can all be ceaselessly dragged back into the past.
Madeline Cash
The best 'great American novels,' in my opinion, make a mockery of American life, Catch-22 second to none in the genre. It's of course a tragic parody of WWII that had become canonical by the time the Vietnam War got going (we never learn). But I find Heller's humor particularly relevant now, amidst the farce of this current administration and its complete inadequacy and derangement, the novel reminds us to laugh, even as the plane is going down. What else can we do?
Mary Beth Keane
When I was assigned My Ántonia in college, the open, rolling landscape of the Great Plains and the people who worked so hard to make their lives there felt like such a relief after the museum-like spaces and unspoken social rules of Wharton and Fitzgerald. In My Ántonia I met people I knew. They were "Bohemian" (Czech), Norwegian, Russian. They were homesick, mired in poverty, and suddenly in a place that was alien to them, with only stories of home to comfort them. On its face the novel is about these new Nebraskans – their daily struggles, disappointments and hopes – and Cather’s brilliance is that she imbues even the smallest moments with tremendous dignity. But the true heart of the story is about possibility. What’s more American than that?
Matt Dinniman
I remember pulling Harriet the Spy out of a dusty box of books that had been left behind by the previous renter of our new house. I was ten years old, and this book changed my life. The unflinching portrayal of an 11-year girl from New York who wrote all of her thoughts—good and bad—down in a diary and how her friends reacted when they discovered it remains the most realistic depiction of how kids that age treat each other. It remains relevant even 60 years after it was written.
Min Jin Lee
Edith Wharton’s THE HOUSE OF MIRTH is a social novel, that is, a work of fiction depicting real life issues affecting ordinary people. Set in the Gilded Age, Lily Bart, a young woman of genteel birth, dreams of more for herself but lacks the wherewithal to get what she wants. The young man she admires believes that he cannot make her an offer of marriage. Feeling alone in the world, Lily struggles with her ambition and the cruelties inflicted by a hypocritical society. What makes this a heavyweight contender for the Great American Novel is how elegantly Wharton critiques the political, economic, and cultural systems which prohibit our heroine’s choices in our nation of gorgeous promises. I like Lily’s innocence, and I dislike Lily’s choices; however, I love Wharton’s intelligent and riveting drama in telling the story of a young woman in a young America.
Natalie Adler
Author of Waiting on a Friend
The Great American Novel has to reckon with the bones on which this country was built. So much of American literature is ghost literature. Ghosts show up in fiction when something repressed in the past returns to demand justice from the present. To me, there’s only one Great American Novel: Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
Patricia Finn
Author of Golden Boy
I was introduced to this book by my father, who liked to read aloud to his children. We lived in the city, but he was a depression-era boy with generational ties to the Great Plains. In reading My Ántonia, I think he wanted us to hear, if not feel, the layered beauty of the prairies he loved brought to life by Cather’s prose. But a literary masterpiece is more than nostalgia and years later, when I read the book myself, I understood the difference.
Scholars have been writing about this book for decades, and new readers can take advantage of their insights. For my part, I love the book for Cather’s characters who push past class barriers, ignore gender roles, and fail utterly in crushing the ebullient spirit of an immigrant child named Antonia. I love it for the quiet despair of her father. I love it for the eternally cautious Jim Burden, whose best days are behind him only because he believes it to be true. And I love it for Nebraska—as much a character in this novel as any of the two-legged ones.
I envy those reading it for the first time.
Paul Tremblay
Author of Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep
I was a late bloomer when it came to reading for pleasure and by the time I found my way to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five I was married, in my late twenties, and fully wrestling with adulthood (as in, wtf am I gonna do now?). The novel’s protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, unstuck in time and within the narrative, is the novel’s beating heart. The book’s north star, however, is Vonnegut’s deceptively straightforward narrative voice. It’s a voice that’s so alive, so full of humor, rage, honesty, sorrow, longing, and a madcap, punk-rock kind of joy, a joy of creation and freedom made more compelling and melancholic within the novel’s backdrop of WW2 atrocities.
Reading the book was a change-my-life event, the kind I continue to seek as a reader. I never dared think I could write something like SH5, but dammit, it made me want to try. It’s by far the book that I’ve reread and revisited the most. With idiocracy fascism on the rise, aided by tech bro oligarchs (a swarm of locusts devouring art and economies as well as water and land), we need to continue reading Vonnegut. His famous refrain within SH5 of “So it goes” was not written as nihilistic despair, or worse, as lassitude and acceptance of the stripe the spineless among us who simper about AI’s use being inevitable. “So it goes” is a call to art, a demand for peace, and a quintessentially human cry of dissent and unacceptance.
An appreciative nod also goes to the wonderful
graphic novel adaptation by Ryan North and Albert Montey. I have a tattoo of one of their SH5 images!
Stephen Graham Jones
Author of Off The Reservation
The magical thing about Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine is the distinct sense that this story that starts on Easter Sunday in 1981, with June Morrissey walking into a snowstorm, is just one of hundreds of stories like this, one of thousands—more than we could ever count. Every day there's a woman walking out into the cold, a doorknob in her purse. Every place has a boy like Lipsha, looking for something to hold onto. Every age needs a Gerry out there shaking things up, a Fleur raging and laughing, a Nector and a Marie and a Lulu to show us what love is, and isn't always. With Love Medicine, we're looking at this time, these families in this place, but this novel, this sweeping, epic, family story, it makes walking through the world different: there's a June under that streethlight, just looking away; isn't he sort of a Lipsha over there, twirling those car keys around his finger? And, if they're there, and this is a story, then . . . who am I in it? Where do I fit in? The best novels leave us asking that question. Love Medicine is, to me, the best of all novels
Tananarive Due
Author of Mazywood
When I hear the phrase “Great American Novel,” the first book that comes to mind is Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved. As a writer who is best known for writing horror—a genre that often is derided in terms of its literary value–I’m mindful that Morrison’s novel is especially powerful because it’s about a murdered child’s ghost haunting the mother who chose infanticide over her baby’s bondage. It’s based on the true-life story of an enslaved woman named Margaret Garner, who made headlines in 1856 after she made the same tragic choice.
Although it was published in 1987, today Beloved feels like an even more apt metaphor expressing the cost of slavery that continues to haunt this nation. Beyond that, Morrison’s exploration of Sethe and her family’s horrific journey personalizes the lasting trauma of slavery more acutely than any statistics or history book ever could. That is the power of historical literature—to create people we care about plucked from history to serve as our personal witnesses and help us feel the lessons of the past. We cannot understand the history of this country without engaging with the true trauma of slavery and its aftermath, so Beloved, to me, is the Great American Novel.
Vincent Yu
Fortunately, choosing a work that fits the criteria of “Great American Novel” has always felt easier than defining the criteria itself. Unfortunately, choosing only one such work is a bit like singling out a grain of sand upon a beach. Abundance is the best part!
Case in point: Louise Erdrich, our Great American Novelist, has an oeuvre full of works that qualify for this distinction, including the two other novels in her “Justice Trilogy” that bookend the one I’ve chosen. Ultimately, I decided on The Round House because it captures just about every essential component of being alive in America: a young person’s coming of age, a community writ large, family bonds scrutinized and tested, close friendships refined, ballasts of tradition bracing against inexorable change.
In its refusal to look away from horrific crimes, as in its willingness to find humor and grace in pitch darkness, this book, to me, captures what it means to be American— to recognize and endure the sins of our past, in order to embrace the hope of our future.
William Kent Kreuger
Author of God's Country
With this novel, Harper Lee offers readers the almost perfect piece of storytelling. Rich characterization, a profound sense of time and place, powerful language, and important themes make this work a classic that should be required reading for students in every American literature class. It contains scenes of marvelous suspense—Jem’s manic flight from Boo Radley’s house, Scout confronting the lynch mob outside the Maycomb County jail, and of course, the climactic scene in the dark on a wooded path on Halloween night. Atticus Finch may be the most quietly heroic figure you’re ever likely to encounter in any story in any language. And finally, it’s told in one of the truest and most compelling narrative voices in the American canon. I reread this book every few years to remind myself of the magic that's possible with the written word.
Woody Brown
Author of Upward Bound
Train Dreams by Denis Johnson is the story of a logging man in Montana in the early 20th century. Robert Grainier is not a man of modernism, but the sound and fury of the railroad runs through his dreams and shapes his waking hours. Trains become a central motif for the protagonist when he is a young boy, orphaned in a vacuum of information. He is put on a train to Montana, and never learns where his departure point is, nor what has happened to his parents. He is the ultimate tabula rasa, an unwritten story in which the pen was first taken up in the third-class car on a train. The train is his mother and father and source of all memory. Trains are a highly complex metaphor. America wouldn’t be America without the train having presented our imaginations with the untamed frontier.
For children as well as for adults with autism, trains have a special significance. I can speak to the many layers of meaning that trains bear down their tracks. The rhythmic motion of the wheels generate calm in the agitated brain of the autistic person. The long, unbroken parallel lines of the railroad tracks satisfy our need for order and symmetry. Trains are routinized and dependable. They run on a predictable schedule. Despite of all the soothing sounds and regularities that autistic persons appreciate, trains also take you somewhere. Even autistic people long for novelty and adventure, to go someplace different and, most importantly, return home again. The apparent contradiction is echoed in Grainier’s complex relationship with trains. I also dream of trains.
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