FICTION: GENRE
American Fiction Classics
25 books
Twenty-five novels that define American fiction as a tradition — the books that established what American literature was capable of, set the terms for the debates that followed, and proved that a young country with no aristocracy and no ancient cathedrals could produce writing that competed with anything the Old World had to offer. The list runs from the 19th century through the mid-20th, covering the major movements and the major writers without attempting to be comprehensive about either. These are the books that appear on every "must read" list for a reason — not because they're assigned in school, but because they did something with language and story and the American experience that hadn't been done before and hasn't been equaled since.
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Beloved
Toni Morrison
Sethe escaped slavery in Kentucky in 1855 and killed her infant daughter rather than allow her to be taken back into bondage. The novel begins eighteen years later when the ghost of that daughter returns to her Ohio home. Morrison won the Nobel Prize largely on the strength of this book and it is one of the indisputably great American novels — the specific horror of slavery not as history but as lived present, the specific love of a mother operating under conditions that made love itself dangerous, and the question of what survival costs and whether the cost is always worth paying. Not an easy read. One of the necessary ones. Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God covers the interior life of a Black Southern woman across three marriages with a musical prose style that has never been matched.
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The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck
One of the great American novels, The Grapes of Wrath is set in the Dust Bowl-era Midwest. Forced to move, the Joad family drives westward with thousands of other down-on-their-luck Okies in order to try to find a better life for themselves in California. There’s perhaps no better snapshot of this time period of American history than Steinbeck’s masterpiece. Plus, the final scene is one that will stick with you for a long time to come.
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The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway
The novel that catapulted Hemingway to worldwide fame and success. The Sun Also Rises follows Jake Barnes and a group of ex-patriot friends through Spain and France, with plenty of wine-drinking and bull-fighting. The novel is a bit semi-autobiographical in that the main character is trying to deal with his war wounds — both physical and emotional — and escape to the supposed romanticism of traveling and eating and drinking to your heart’s content. Does Jake find happiness? You’ll have to read to find out.
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Native Son
Richard Wright
This novel tells the story of 20-year-old Bigger Thomas, a young African-American living in utter poverty in Chicago’s South Side in the 1930s. He, inevitably (as argued by the novel), ends up in jail for a crime he did in fact commit. Was it his character which drove him to it, though, or was it society, by placing him in a certain social stratum? Race, identity, social status, society’s pressures — this novel offers an important read on the black experience.
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Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
The story of a nameless black man in New York City who grows up in the South, but moves north to be part of the Brotherhood, a society that supposedly fights for justice and equality. He soon realizes the political motivations behind the movement though, and retreats in an attempt to figure out who he is as a black man in white America. A novel about race, identity, acceptance, and being comfortable with who you are — it’s a book everyone should read.
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A Confederacy of Dunces
John Kennedy Toole
This New Orleans-based novel won author John Kennedy Toole the Pulitzer Prize. Its perfect comedy of errors is centered around the character of Ignatius J. Reilly, a lazy and socially ignorant, but very intelligent man, who still lives with his mother at the age of 30. A Confederacy of Dunces serves as a guide for what a man ought not to be, while providing sound entertainment all the while.
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The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton
Newland Archer is engaged to the right woman, from the right family, in Gilded Age New York, and falls in love with her unconventional cousin Ellen Olenska, who has left a bad European marriage and returned to a society that cannot decide whether to accept or destroy her. Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921 and the novel is the most precise dissection of social conformity in American fiction — not a women's novel but a novel about what masculine paralysis looks like when a man chooses the safe life over the real one and spends the rest of his days wondering. Around 360 pages. The AoM reader who approaches this skeptically will find by the final chapter that Archer's choice — and what it costs him — is the most honest portrait of a certain kind of masculine failure available in the canon.
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Rabbit, Run
John Updike
Not a basketball novel. The best basketball novel. Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom was a high school star in small-town Pennsylvania and the book opens with him joining a pickup game of children and briefly becoming the best player on the court — the only moment in his adult life where the world makes the sense it made at eighteen. Everything after is the long accounting of a man whose identity peaked early, whose body was once briefly perfect, and who spends his adult years unable to find anything that replicates the clarity of being the one who could do something nobody else could do as well. Updike uses basketball as the grammar of masculine decline. The reader who thinks this sounds depressing is correct and should read it anyway. Cross-seeds with the Coming-of-Age Fiction list.
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As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner
The Bundren family transports the corpse of their matriarch Addie across Mississippi in August heat to bury her in the town she came from, and fifteen different narrators take turns describing the journey from inside their own damaged consciousness. Faulkner published this in 1930 and it remains the most formally audacious American novel of its era: each narrator sees the same events differently, none of them fully understands what is happening, and the accumulation of partial perspectives produces something more complete than any single reliable narrator could achieve. The difficult entry on this list — not as demanding as The Sound and the Fury, which is the right next step for the reader who finishes this and wants more. Around 267 pages. The reader who expects difficulty and leans into it will find Faulkner funny, which is the thing most first-time readers miss.
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Ragtime
E.L. Doctorow
Three families — a white upper-middle-class family in New Rochelle, a Jewish immigrant named Tateh and his daughter, and the Black ragtime musician Coalhouse Walker — intersect with historical figures including Harry Houdini, Emma Goldman, J.P. Morgan, and Henry Ford in the New York of 1906 to 1912. Doctorow published this in 1975 and invented a form that nobody else has successfully imitated: a novel that moves with the momentum of popular fiction and the ambition of serious literature, using invented characters alongside real ones to reconstruct the specific texture of American life at the moment it became modern. Around 320 pages and the historical fiction entry on this list. The reader who wants to understand the Progressive Era will find Doctorow more useful than most histories.
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The Bonfire of the Vanities
Tom Wolfe
Sherman McCoy is a bond trader at Pierce & Pierce who considers himself a Master of the Universe and discovers in 300 pages of the most precisely observed social comedy in American fiction exactly what that title is worth when the machinery of New York's racial and class politics decides to make an example of him. Wolfe spent years reporting on Wall Street, the Bronx courthouse system, and the tabloid press before writing this, and the authority shows — every character, every institution, and every social transaction is documented with the specificity of a man who went and looked. Around 659 pages and the satire entry for the contemporary tier. Published in 1987 and a more accurate account of how American cities distribute justice than most nonfiction on the subject. Cross-seeds with the Essays & Longform list, where Wolfe's journalism appears.
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The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow
Augie March grows up in Depression-era Chicago — Jewish, poor, charming, and constitutionally unable to commit to any of the lives that more forceful people keep trying to impose on him — and the novel follows him through a series of picaresque adventures across America and Mexico as he tries to figure out who he actually is. Bellow published this in 1953 and won the National Book Award; it remains the deep cut entry on this list, known by reputation and unread by most. Around 586 pages and the most exuberantly American novel of the postwar era — the prose runs on pure energy, the character of Augie himself is a continuous invention, and the argument the novel makes about self-determination versus the claims other people make on you is more relevant than the publication date suggests.
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The World According to Garp
John Irving
T.S. Garp is the illegitimate son of a feminist icon and a ball turret gunner who never regained consciousness, and the novel follows his life as a writer, husband, and father through a series of accidents and violences that Irving orchestrates with the specific dark humor of a man who believes that life is simultaneously tragic and absurd. Published in 1978 and the most purely readable novel on this list — Irving is a 19th-century novelist writing in the 20th century, which means plot, character, and narrative momentum rather than formal experiment. Around 609 pages. The fatherhood angle runs throughout: Garp's obsession with protecting his sons from a world he correctly identifies as dangerous is one of the most honest portraits of paternal anxiety in American fiction. Cross-seeds with the Fatherhood list.
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Sometimes a Great Notion
Ken Kesey
The Stamper family is the last logging operation in an Oregon coastal town to refuse to join a union strike, and the novel follows the consequences — for the family, for the town, and for the specific American mythology of individual defiance — with a structural complexity that makes One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest look like a warm-up. Kesey published this in 1964 and it is the deep cut of deep cuts on this list: 715 pages, Oregon timber country in the rain, and the most rigorous examination of rugged American individualism in the canon — what it looks like from inside a family that actually lives by it rather than just believes in it. The reader who has already read Cuckoo's Nest will find this is the better book. The reader who hasn't should start with Cuckoo's Nest and come back.
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Sister Carrie
Theodore Dreiser
Carrie Meeber arrives in Chicago in 1900 with four dollars and no particular plan and rises through the city by attaching herself to men with money, none of whom she loves, while the men who love her destroy themselves in her wake. Dreiser's publishers tried to suppress the novel for its moral frankness — nobody is punished for their sins, ambition is rewarded, and desire functions as an economic force rather than a character flaw — and the suppression made it the foundational document of American literary naturalism. Around 499 pages and the deepest cut on this list. The novel that established that American fiction could tell the truth about money, sex, and class without the Victorian requirement that the immoral suffer for it. The reader who has not heard of Dreiser is in the majority; the reader who finishes this will understand why that is an injustice.
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Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy
A teenage runaway known only as the kid falls in with the Glanton Gang — a historical band of scalp hunters operating on the Texas-Mexico border in 1849 — and participates in a campaign of violence whose scale and deliberateness McCarthy renders in biblical prose that is simultaneously the most beautiful and most disturbing in American fiction. Published in 1985 and the McCarthy entry on this list, distinct from The Road on the Fathers & Sons list — where that novel is about love under extinction, this one is about violence as a foundational American condition. Around 351 pages. The Judge, the novel's villain-philosopher, is the most terrifying character in American literature. The reader who finishes this book will spend days thinking about what it argued. Note: this is not comfortable reading. It is not meant to be.
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White Noise
Don DeLillo
Jack Gladney is the founder of Hitler Studies at a small Midwestern college, married to his fourth wife, raising a collection of children from previous marriages, and living in the specific condition of late American consumer culture — surrounded by products, information, and ambient anxiety about death. DeLillo published this in 1985 and it is the most prescient American novel of the twentieth century: the media saturation, the chemical disaster, the pharmaceutical approach to existential fear all look less like fiction with each passing year. Around 326 pages and the contemporary literary entry on this list. The accessible DeLillo entry point — more accessible than Underworld, more directly funny than Libra, and the right starting place for a reader coming to him for the first time.
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American Pastoral
Philip Roth
Seymour Levov — the Swede, perfect athlete, beloved son, successful businessman — builds the American dream in the New Jersey suburbs and watches it destroyed in the 1960s when his daughter plants a bomb in the local post office to protest the Vietnam War. Roth won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997 and this is the fullest account in American fiction of what the postwar American promise looked like from inside and what the 1960s did to the generation that had built it. Around 432 pages and the postwar Jewish-American entry on this list. The specific fury throughout — at the daughter, at the ideology that produced her, at the gap between the life the Swede built and the world it turned out to contain — is the most honest account of a certain kind of American bewilderment available in the literary tradition.
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The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen
The Lambert family — Alfred, the Midwestern patriarch with Parkinson's disease; his wife Enid, who wants one last Christmas with everyone together; and their three adult children who have built lives specifically designed to escape the family they came from — converge for the holidays in a novel that is both a precise account of one American family and the fullest portrait of the late-century American middle class available in fiction. Franzen published this in 2001 to enormous controversy about whether it was the Great American Novel and the controversy obscured what it actually is: a very funny, very sad book about parents and children and the specific thing that is irrecoverable between them. Around 568 pages. The contemporary family novel entry on this list.
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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Ken Kesey
Randle Patrick McMurphy gets himself transferred from a prison work farm to a psychiatric hospital thinking it will be easier time, and spends the novel in escalating conflict with Nurse Ratched, who runs the ward as a system of social control dressed as therapy. Kesey published this in 1962 and the novel is the foundational American text on institutions — the specific mechanisms by which authority domesticates the people subject to it, and the specific cost of the man who refuses domestication. Around 320 pages. The rebellion entry on this list. The reader who has seen the Nicholson film will find the novel told from Chief Bromden's perspective rather than McMurphy's, which is a considerably more complex and interesting book than the film suggests.
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My Ántonia
Willa Cather
Jim Burden narrates his childhood friendship with Ántonia Shimerda, a Bohemian immigrant girl on the Nebraska prairie, and the adult life each of them builds from the specific hardship and beauty of the frontier. Cather published this in 1918 and it remains the finest account of immigrant America in the literary canon — not the triumphant assimilation narrative, but the specific thing that is lost and gained when a family trades one world for another and the children grow up between both. Around 272 pages and the deep cut entry for the pre-war tier — largely unknown outside university syllabi despite being as good as anything Hemingway or Fitzgerald produced in the same era. The frontier entry and the unexpected angle simultaneously. The reader who encounters Cather for the first time will wonder why nobody told him sooner.
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Moby-Dick
Herman Melville
The book that inspired a gazillion white whale metaphors, and really, needs no description. However, here’s a brief one: Moby-Dick is Herman Melville’s 19th century masterpiece concerning whaler Captain Ahab’s insatiable quest to exact revenge on the great white whale that crippled him, as told by Ishmael, a sailor aboard Ahab’s ship. Also, it’s inspired by a true story, which makes it even more awesome. Be sure to listen to our podcast with Melville expert Mark Cirino.
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Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut
This absurdist, unconventional novel tells the tale of Billy Pilgrim, a fellow who’s become unstuck from the boundaries of time when he’s abducted by aliens. We see all of Billy’s life, primarily focusing on his experiences as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany in 1945 during the town’s infamous firebombing (a story shared by Vonnegut himself). Using part sci-fi, part humor, and part autobiography, Vonnegut takes the reader on a sometimes uncomfortable journey through the realities and absurdities of war.
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The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Set among New York City elites in the roaring ’20s, this book is considered one of America’s great literary products for a reason. Narrator Nick Carraway is befriended by his mysterious millionaire neighbor, Jay Gatsby, and proves to be a crucial link in Jay’s quixotic obsession with Nick’s cousin, Daisy. The metaphors, the beautiful writing, and the lessons one can garner about reliving the past all make The Great Gatsby worth reading, again and again. For more insight into this classic, give a listen to our interview with Maureen Corrigan, the author of So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures.
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Catch-22
Joseph Heller
Set in Italy during World War II, Catch-22 is the story of malingering bombardier John Yossarian. He’s a hero, but also enraged at the idea that there are multitudes of people he has never met who are trying to kill him. Beyond that, his own army has enacted Catch-22 — a bureaucratic rule which states a man is insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, yet if he makes a request to be removed from duty, he is sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved. And so a military satire, and a phrase synonymous with the word “conundrum,” is born.