Sarah E. Moffett

Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper
The Scarlet Letter, Nathanial Hawthorne
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
U.S.A. trilogy, John Dos Passos
All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren
The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
Slaughter-House Five, Kurt Vonnegut
Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
The Catcher and the Rye, J.D. Salinger
On the Road, Jack Kerouac

The Great American Novel. What is it exactly? “The ‘Great American Novel’ is the concept of a novel that most perfectly represents the spirit of life in the United States at the time of its publication. It is presumed to be written by an American author who is knowledgeable about the state, culture, and perspective of the common American citizen. It is often considered as the American response to the tradition of the national epic.” Thus saith the English speaking world’s online collective knowledge, also known as Wikipedia, who provided the above list.

Others have included Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, Lewis’s The Jungle, Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Walden’s Thoreau. While I grant that while under the Wiki definition the last three are a stretch, the world is a smaller place without Lewis’s culturally necessary crusading and Lee’s world in the eyes of a child.

My full list is here. Your suggestions?

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