10 Books That Might Be the Great American Novel

The Great American Novel will probably never exist, or has as much a chance of existing one day as Atlantis. Like, if you say “never,” and then it happens, you’ll feel silly, but then you kind of want to say “never” because the idea of it existing, right now, feels silly. Basically, the Great American Novel is something people like to talk about and debate, as in selecting one work from an American author as the literal greatest novel ever published.

It’s mythical, really. There also isn’t really a clear “Great American Movie,” either (but Citizen Kane, Casablanca, The Godfather, and maybe The Searchers are all contenders), so it’s not like this is unique to the world of literature. For now – and maybe forever – there are only candidates for the crown of the Great American Novel, and what follows is a rundown of some (but definitely not all) of them, and in no particular order, either.

10

‘The Great Gatsby’ (1925)

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The Great Gatsby is one of those rare novels pretty much everyone’s read, seeing as it’s a staple of the English curriculum at a high school level. So, depending on what website you use to read people’s reviews of The Great Gatsby, it might present as a rather divisive book, maybe more to do with the fact that some people don’t respond well to being made to read things.

Still, reading The Great Gatsby is easily the best way to experience this particular story about class, longing, and the American Dream, since the movie adaptations to date haven’t really captured what makes the novel special (at least special to those who didn’t mind reading it). It’s not a long read, and it is pretty openly about a broad range of things (hence it being a good literary work for high school students), with the focus on America – and the American Dream – also going a long way toward making it one of the Great American Novel contenders.

9

‘The Last of the Mohicans’ (1826)

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So, The Great Gatsby was just mentioned, and is one of the oldest candidates here, but then you’ve got The Last of the Mohicans, which is a whole century older… and The Great Gatsby is already a century old, almost exactly, at the time of writing. There was still a whole lot of American history yet to happen when The Last of the Mohicans was published, but it’s still very much about an early important stage in its history.

The Last of the Mohicans is centered around the French and Indian War, with the novel’s events specifically taking place in 1757. There’s that broader conflict, and then some romance elements that add further drama to the story, plus, all the while, it’s something of an epic adventure novel, too. Also, like The Great Gatsby, it’s one that a fair few people are made to read in school.

8

‘Infinite Jest’ (1996)

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One of those “could only be a book” sort of books, and also something very recent as far as potential Great American Novel contenders go, here’s Infinite Jest, which can’t really be summarized. Like, there are a handful of different stories going on at the same time here, but the ways in which they’re related aren’t always very clear, events don’t play out chronologically, and there are huge quantities of endnotes that perhaps give slightly more context to the whole thing, but emphasis on the “slightly.”

That all sounds frustrating, but if you approach Infinite Jest as an episodic work (and you kind of have to, at least on your first read), it’s good to find how so many of those episodes, so to speak, are some level of funny, surprising, thought-provoking, or even emotional. It’s well and truly a book that’s not for everyone, but it is an impressive piece of literature (not just for the size), and if it was considered something of an instant classic around the time it was published, things are looking up for it being considered a traditional classic – and part of the American literary canon – as time continues to go by.

7

‘The Grapes of Wrath’ (1939)

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At the risk of boiling down The Grapes of Wrath to something simpler than it really is, this is kind of the definitive piece of literature about the Great Depression. That might be the main factor in its status as a potential pick for the title of the Great American Novel, since it’s about an experience that affected the whole nation for pretty much a whole decade.

That might make it okay if it’s “just” the Great Depression book, since the 1930s was defined by that event, and The Grapes of Wrath was well-timed as a 1939 release, encapsulating that decade not long before the next half-decade or so (maybe a little less for America specifically) was defined by World War II. Oh, and it’s a powerfully written, moving, and often poetic novel, with it being no small task to stand out within a body of work as strong as author John Steinbeck’s was.

6

‘Underworld’ (1997)

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It’s probably the size of Underworld that makes it, more often than not, the default pick for the title of Don DeLillo’s “best” novel. And, since he’s one of the most distinctive and significant American writers of the past 50-ish years, it’s the one novel of his that feels most in line with what people expect out of that so-called Great American Novel (again, it’s like Highlander… there can be only one).

DeLillo has written more exhilarating books (like Libra) and funnier ones (like much of White Noise and the underrated End Zone), but Underworld is still moving in its own way. It’s certainly dramatic and haunting, and then adventurous in how it’s structured, beginning in the 1950s, then jumping forward to the 1990s, and then working backward, all the way back to the 1950s. It’s about so much of American culture and history throughout almost the entirety of the 20th century’s second half, ensuring Underworld feels undeniably important, weighty, and even daunting (the last of those qualities in a good way, though).

5

‘Lolita’ (1955)

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Lolita is always tricky to talk about, by design. Before digging into it, or trying to talk around what it involves, it’s interesting to note that Lolita was written by someone who’s considered both a Russian and American author: Vladimir Nabokov. So, Lolita wasn’t written in Russian and then translated, or anything, as Nabokov was trilingual (also speaking French), and was certainly a master of at least one of those languages, if Lolita is anything to go by.

What’s tricky here is that the book is about an incredibly dark thing, and has an abhorrent narrator/central character, and yet it’s written so well that it’s not technically hard to read because it’s overly dense or convoluted or anything. You get some really poetic, memorable, and occasionally funny language in service of a hugely upsetting story about child abuse and one man’s explanations of why he perpetuates that abuse (and justifies it). It’s brilliant and almost impossible to recommend in equal measure, as paradoxical as that might sound.

4

‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ (1973)

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Gravity’s Rainbow is here for similar reasons to Infinite Jest, and both novels are equally rewarding and confounding. You’ll probably feel a similar way reading both, and there are plenty of pages to turn through with the pair of them, though Gravity’s Rainbow is about very different things (at least it seems, from what you can ascertain about what it’s, uh, “about”), with it taking place (mostly) during the Second World War.

That makes it a Great American Novel contender that’s not set in America, since Europe is where the many, many characters throughout Gravity’s Rainbow find themselves, but plenty of the characters are American, and so is the author, Thomas Pynchon. There is actually a MacGuffin of sorts here, too, but Indiana Jones (or the literary equivalent of Indiana Jones) this ain’t. You’ll read so many things that can never be unread, but most of those things here – however confronting, confusing, or flat-out gross – are still worth reading.

3

‘Blood Meridian’ (1985)

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If you talk about Blood Meridian’s premise, mentioning it as a story set during the middle of the 1800s in and around the United States–Mexico border, it might sound like a Western. It is, technically, and a very dark one at that, seeing as the characters who find themselves around the United States–Mexico border are all bounty hunters who take part in a series of increasingly vicious attacks on those they’re hunting.

The first violent act is nauseating, and then the next 20 or so (there might be more than 20, in all honesty) prove similarly grueling. So, Blood Meridian can also call itself a work of horror, to be perfectly blunt. It’s perhaps the most graphic and viscerally upsetting contender for the title of the Great American Novel, and should probably only be tackled so long as you know, to at least some extent, what you’re in for. Even among Cormac McCarthy‘s other novels, it stands out as raw and unapologetically brutal.

2

‘The Catcher in the Rye’ (1951)

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A little earlier, The Great Gatsby and The Last of the Mohicans were mentioned as high school staples, for English, and now things are going to conclude with another couple of high school staples. The Catcher in the Rye fits neatly into that camp, and it’s a bit like The Great Gatsby in the sense that it’s honestly quite divisive. You’ve got people who think the unlikability of Holden Caulfield is part of the point, and makes for an interesting character study, and then some people who just can’t stand spending a couple-hundred pages with him.

It’s potentially one of the more challenging books that’s not massively long, mostly for this reason. Yet there’s also something to be said for reading something that you’re pretty much guaranteed to have some kind of strong opinion about, be it positive or negative… and you do have to read The Catcher in the Rye, as opposed to experiencing it as a movie or TV show, since an adaptation is very unlikely to ever happen.

1

‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ (1960)

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You get some coming-of-age story qualities in To Kill a Mockingbird, which helps it fit right in with the high school canon, and then it’s also a very upfront and broad look at sizable themes/issues, a little like The Great Gatsby. Much of it revolves around a court case that concerns a Black man being tried for a crime committed against a white woman, and the whole thing takes place in the Deep South during the 1930s, making it an exploration of racial prejudice, quite clearly.

There are other things, too, and To Kill a Mockingbird balances everything with relative ease, all the while hitting a good many different beats emotionally. It’s not too hard to see why it’s considered such a classic, and similarly easy to unpack the ways it’s an overall rather strong Great American Novel contender.