In tracking pieces of great American literature from the 19th-21st century, we can identify an overwhelming sense of the loss of true purpose, disembodiment, and dislocation that is rather fitting when you consider the historical context.
Against the backdrop of the first colonial settlements and the changes made in American society following the Civil War of 1865, to the Great Depression, the First and Second World Wars and the prefab building and re-building of America in a new, utterly capitalist image – it’s frankly no wonder that increasingly radical, postmodern narratives began to emerge.
Where society would rely on historical narratives to construct meaning, all meaning was subsequently, systematically dismantled by the arrival of mass consumerism. It’s hinted at, for example, in The Great Gatsby – in those all-knowing, all-seeing yet empty eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg's billboard.
Roles and purpose in American society were no longer clear-cut, as women, racial minorities and queer communities struggled for basic human rights and independence. No longer could citizens rely on an unwavering national identity, for it had been changed beyond recognition.
The land of the free and the home of the brave began to feel, for many, to have lost all sense of reality. But with mass consumerism taking charge, there was increasingly no sense of personal self to fall back on. Suddenly, the hidden ugliness of the American Dream was brought to light.
It's not surprising, then, that so much of the literature to come out of America in the late 19th and 20th centuries served as a cautionary reaction to the commodification of society, and the overwhelming feeling that there was – and perhaps still is – an innate meaninglessness to life. Ironic, given so much of the 20th-century political agenda was focused on dismantling the threat of communism.
The reality of the Great American Novel is that it puts the country and all its flaws under a microscope and that makes it all the more devourable.
Without further ado, we’ve curated a selection of the greatest American novels of all time to sink your teeth into.
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
An epic re-telling of Cane and Abel through the lens of the Great Depression, Steinbeck’s magnum opus tells the story of the Joad family and their journey from Dust Bowl Oklahoma out west to the promised land of California.
The sweeping, omniscient narrative creates a sense of the scale of human existence, switching between rich descriptions of rolling landscapes to the moral minutiae of our protagonists’ struggles, behaviours and actions. A dismantlement of the American Dream which nevertheless offers readers comfort in solidarity, The Grapes of Wrath is one of the best American novels of all time.
Buy now £9.19, Amazon
Stoner by John Edward Williams
In 2013, The New Yorker’s Tim Kreider referred to Stoner as “the greatest American novel you’ve never heard of” – and that sentiment continues to ring true today. An expansive picture of a gut-wrenchingly normal existence, William Stoner’s unremarkable life is documented with excruciating, fascinating detail.
A broken marriage, an academic career which fails to see him remembered, and an ultimate confrontation of extreme, stoic solitude – Williams’ novel will fill you with an overwhelming sense of hope that even the most inconsequential of lives contain a universe of minutiae to be unravelled.
Buy now £7.46, Amazon
Babbit by Sinclair Lewis
An ingenious work of satire set during the 1920s economic boom, Lewis’ Babbit is the story of businessman George F. Babbit. Babbit loves his job, making money, succumbing to advertisements, buying the latest appliances, and is a proud member of the Republican party.
A symbol of middle-class America, Babbitt experiences a rude awakening, which sees him become determined to transcend the meaningless nature of consumerist society in search of a greater purpose. In 384 pages, Lewis deconstructs modern America with slick, satirical ease.
Buy now £10.99, Waterstones
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
Baldwin’s groundbreaking 1950s novel continues to serve as a vital literary voice for queer representation. In a first-person, obscurely present-tense narrative, an American ex-pat named David tells us the story of his life from his home in the south of France. In under 200 pages, we learn of the breakdown of David’s marriage to Hella and his subsequent romantic entanglement with an Italian waiter named Giovanni. Forced to confront his concept of morality and a suffocating case of internalised homophobia, the level of raw candour in Baldwin’s novel was – and continues to be – monumental.
Buy now £7.09, Amazon
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie
A collection of great American novels would be incomplete without the inclusion of a great Native American author. Alexie’s brilliant collection of 22 interwoven short stories provides an intricate, simultaneously laugh-out-loud funny and woeful window into the lives of Native American families living on Reservations and beyond.
Covering themes including coming of age in a world where urban society reigns supreme, cultural heritage, identity, power and powerlessness, addiction, grief, and the power of storytelling – Alexie may be covering life as a Native American, but the scope at which he accomplishes this work of art is universal.
Buy now £9.05, Amazon
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
The year is 1953, and Esther Greenwood has just begun an internship at a prestigious New York magazine. Ecstatic that she might finally be on track to reach her goal of becoming a famous writer, Esther’s hopes become convoluted and out of control as she grapples with the societal expectations of womanhood.
Plath’s fig tree analogy continues to serve as a consciousness-shifting moment for women across the globe who delve into her magnum opus. Unwaveringly brilliant, the narrative moves from moments of sharp humour and wit to a desperate excising of mental illness in the wake of 1950s misogynistic society. Plath delivers a fictionalised account of her struggles as a writer through the ‘distorting lens of a bell jar’ – as she told her mother when explaining the influences behind the novel. Yet we as readers feel her pain through Esther Greenwood with razor-sharp clarity.
Buy now £9.99, Waterstones
Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion
A visceral portrait of American life in the 1960s, Didion dissects the commodification of society and the ever-meaningless nature of existence with almost unbearable lucidity. A former actress suffering from some kind of nervous breakdown, Maria Myeth drives in circles around the empty freeways of California to remind herself of her dislocation, disembodiment and the nothingness which surrounds us all. It is a cautionary tale of a society governed by too much freedom, and far too much excess.
Buy now £8.99, Waterstones
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
A marvellous tale of four ‘little women’ who come of age during Civil War New England, Louisa May Alcott’s novel has been enjoyed for generations. It follows the lives of the four March sisters – Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy – and their unwavering bond as they navigate a tumultuous journey into womanhood.
Buy now £13.59, Amazon
Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
It is said that upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln declared, “So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!”. Initially written in instalments in the abolitionist newspaper The National Era, Stowe’s novel was published as a complete volume in 1852. Arguably crafted in response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 which declared that escaped slaves, if found, must be returned to their enslaver, Stowe delivered a vivid depiction of the immense struggles endured by enslaved people.
Contemporary readers can recognise the rather outdated, and what came to be an entirely stereotypical image of the ‘kindly’ African American older man, yet Stowe’s impact on the ultimate abolition of slavery in the USA cannot be understated. Indeed, the writer’s views on 19th-century racial injustice are complicated and the novel sparked a widespread emotional response to the sheer horror of slavery.
Buy now £8.27, Amazon
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
A remarkable talent lost far too soon, David Foster Wallace crafted an Odyssean novel when he wrote Infinite Jest in 1997. A mighty, 1,000-page strong text which takes place in an almost timeless future, a group of students and recovering addicts are on the hunt for the master copy of Infinite Jest – a movie which is said to be so perilously entertaining that watchers will simply die from pure, catatonic laughter.
A tale of grief, addiction and the search for purpose at the turn of the 20th century, Wallace’s novel is perhaps best recognised for its encyclopaedic metamodernist narrative in which some of the 388 endnotes have their own footnotes.
Buy now £11.49, Amazon
Underworld by Don De Lillo
Whether you’re a baseball fan or not, it’s hard to come across an individual who hasn’t heard of Bobby Thompson’s winning hit, known as The Shot Heard ‘Round The World, during the 1951 play-off for the pennant between the Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers. Don DeLillo’s masterpiece begins with Thompson’s infamous hit and loosely follows the very journey of that fateful walk-off home run, offering a panoramic vision of Cold War-era America in the process.
Indeed, he simultaneously tells the story of the USSR’s first atomic detonation, sparking the beginning of a multiple decade-long standoff between the global superpowers. Throughout the novel, we follow Nick Shay – a waste management executive from the Bronx – as he attempts to trace the history of the baseball that won the Giants the pennant.
Buy now £12.73, Amazon
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
There seems to be a running theme across great American novels which sees each offer a panoramic view of human existence – simultaneously zeroing in on what exactly constitutes the life of an American and expanding outwards for a universal perspective. Jennifer Egan does exactly this, and so much more, in her marvellously multifaceted narrative which seamlessly links the lives of multiple individuals.
Egan’s mystical novel is at first about the lives of an ageing former punk and record executive named Bennie Salazar and his troubled young executive, Sasha. Yet the novel swells with the passage of time, making quantum leaps between past and present to illustrate a series of fateful, sliding-doors moments that have led our characters to where they are. If you happen to love this novel as much as we do, Egan has just released a sequel called The Candy House.
Buy now £4.49, Amazon
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
A central figure of the Beat Generation, Kerouac’s novel has come to represent a kind of bible to nomadic creators and rejectors of capitalism across the globe. When Sal Paradise meets Dean Moriarty, they embark on a search for pure hedonism – seeking out the limits of the American dream in all its endless highways, dive bars, and the infamous underground jazz scene of 1950s America. Bob Dylan read On the Road in 1959, and said of the work, “It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s”.
Buy now £7.86, Amazon
Philadelphia Fire by John Edgar Wideman
In 1985, the City of Philadelphia Police bombed a row house owned by an Afrocentric cult known as MOVE. Our protagonist Cudjoe, a writer who has spent a decade fleeing from his past, becomes obsessed with finding a lone survivor of the bombing, which killed 11 and displaced 250 people. An innovative, gut-wrenching narrative which somehow manages to fill readers with a sense of joy for the future amidst such despair, Wideman illustrates the horrors of life in urban America for African Americans with a postmodern genius.
Buy now £9.49, Bookshop
Franny and Zooey by J.D Salinger
No one writes coming-of-age stories quite like J.D Salinger, and while Catcher in the Rye remains his most famous novel, Franny and Zooey is a wildly underrated classic. It follows the relationship between the titular characters, a pair of well-off siblings who hail from a highly sophisticated family full of oddballs. We encounter two journeys into adulthood, from two different perspectives which converge with comedic and emotional splendour.
Buy now £9.99, Waterstones
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger
The first of J.D Salinger’s books to be published, The Catcher in the Rye takes place over just two days in the life of 16-year-old Holden Caulfield following his expulsion from prep school. An essential teenage read – whether you are currently a teenager, or you’ve found yourself caring for one – we follow Caulfield’s aggravated and convoluted stream of consciousness as he rails against the falsity of adult life.
Buy now £11.58, Amazon
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Though not as popular on the UK literature syllabus as it is in the US, Harper Lee’s seminal novel is nevertheless just as beloved on our side of the pond. A story about classism and racism in the American Deep South in the 1930s, To Kill a Mockingbird is a coming-of-age story told through the eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, the children of a lawyer who has been tasked with defending a black man who has been falsely accused of rape. Delivering anti-racist messages far beyond its historical moment, Lee’s novel offers fascinating, yet gut-wrenching insight into southern society during the Great Depression.
Buy now £8.27, Amazon
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
It’s hard to imagine that an entire decade has passed since 2014. It’s even harder to imagine that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah has been with us for that long. The award-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun manages to craft a timeless narrative which follows protagonist Ifemelu from her early adolescence in Nigeria to her adulthood in America, and a move back to Nigeria later in life.
An epic treatise on the fallacy of Western utopias and the struggle to maintain a sense of cultural identity in an increasingly globalised world, Adichie writes of what it means to be Black in modern America with guts, humour and heart-wrenching romance.
Buy now £9.19, Amazon
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
In Cold Blood is widely considered the greatest true crime novel of all time, despite being an inexplicable literary detour at the time of its release from the author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the famed Truman Capote.
Blending a high literary writing style imbued with emotional poeticism with the clinical documentation of evidence and transcriptions of Capote’s own meetings with the killers in question utterly transformed the way in which true crime was written for years to come.
Detailing the horrific murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas in 1959, Capote’s non-fiction book is written like a fictional novel. In the first half, the author describes their idyllic small-town life before moving into the nature of the crime itself, the intricate psyches of the killers, and the concept of justice within the American system.
Buy now £8.96, Amazon
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A timeless classic, The Great Gatsby tells the story of a wealthy man and his pursuit for his childhood sweetheart, all set against the backdrop of the glamorous 20s. A masterful example of the American Dream in action, Fitzgerald’s novel goes far beyond romance and addresses themes of excessive wealth, human follies and the fragility of life.
This special edition includes a foreword by famed movie director, Francis Ford Coppola as well as exceptional artwork throughout that brings to life Gatsby’s lavish parties and frivolous lifestyle.
Buy now £42.95, Folio Society
South and West by Joan Didion
Even though South and West is only really a collection of notes and musings about Didion’s travels throughout the American deep South, her incomparable insight and ability to delve into the deepest corners of societal prejudices and idiosyncratic behaviours shines through as though this text is the polished final edition of a novel that has been worked on for decades.
Writing of the sticky and often sickly heat which encompasses the vast majority of towns and cities in the South, Didion at once reveals the sense of claustrophobia she feels not only because of the weather, but also the strange flat contentedness that its citizens feel in their unenviable positions. This, followed by her musings of California, makes for a strangely complete reflection on the polarities of the United States that is as relevant today as it was in the 1970s where the book is set.
Buy now £6.72, Amazon
