Winesburg, Ohio - Sherwood Anderson
The Complete Stories - Flannery O’Connor
Generation X - Douglas Coupland (Canadian author, but set in the US)
Cold Mountain - Charles Frazier
Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel - C. Vann Woodward (acknowledged by many historians as the finest biography around)
The Autobiography of Malcolm X - Alex Haley
Company Aytch - Sam Watkins (memoirs of a Confederate foot soldier)
Personal Memoirs - Ulysses S. Grant
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Phillip K. Dick
Earth Abides - George Stewart
A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee - David Crockett (Davy Crockett)
Run with the Horsemen - Ferrol Sams
Civil War, Vol. I-III - Shelby Foote
Sketch Book - Washington Irving (includes Rip van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow)
On the Road - Jack Kerouac
Last of the Mohicans - James Fenimore Cooper
USA - John dos Passos
E E Cummings: Complete Poems 1904-1962 e e cummings
The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems - Robert Frost
Undaunted Courage - Stephen E. Ambrose (history of Lewis and Clark expedition)
To Purge This Land With Blood: A Biography of John Brown - Stephen B. Oates
Farenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made - Eugene Genovese
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Travels with Charley: In Search of America - John Steinbeck
East of Eden - John Steinbeck
Little House on the Prairie - Laura Ingalls Wilder
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
Andrew Jackson: The Course of American Freedom, 1822-1832 (Andrew Jackson) - Robert V. Remini
Son of the Morning Star - Evan S. Connell
Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane
Words that Changed America - Alex Barnett (collected American speeches)
The Federalist Papers
Words That Make America Great - Jerome Agel (collects the great documents of American history)
American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson - Joseph J. Ellis
Profiles in Courage - John F. Kennedy
Superman, the Complete History: The Life and Times of the Man of Steel - Les Daniels (Why not? Superman is one of the icons of American literature, no?)
Batman: The Complete History - Les Daniels (ditto Batman)
The Amazing Spider-Man Masterworks (Amazing Spider-Man, No. 1-5) - Stan Lee and Steve Ditko (also the three following volumes) (Collects the early Spider-Man stories.)
The Wizard of Oz - L. Frank Baum
Dr. Seuss - all his books, naturally
Not too much humor listed so far . . . Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Patrick Dennis’ Little Me, J.P. McEvoy’s Hollywood Girl and/or Show Girl, almost anything by Milt Gross.
Also, don’t forget the forgotten! Terrific, once-popular writers who have fallen off the charts: Tiffany Thayer, Olive Higgins Prouty, Booth Tarkington, Christopher Morley . . .
I would also sugest, *Alas, Babylon * by Pat Frank. Many American students read this work during the cold war. Also, A Seperate Peace, by John Knowles.
I just realized, no one’s mentioned Moby Dick! I can’t say I reread it regularly, but it is a great work of American literature.
I will add the poet Robinson Jeffers, who wrote beautiful and profound poetry using the imagery around Monterey California. Really, folks, pick him up and read him.
Also, the stories of James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, and the essays of E. B. White and Amy Vowel. All four are very good reflections of some of the faces of America (or should i say the U.S.?), White and Vowel especially, both are keen observers of their age, both the big picture and small details.
Paper books or ebooks? If ebooks are Ok there are CDs with hundreds of seminal older American authors that are not that expensive. The Gutenberg Project also has thousands of free books.
I read a lot of Emerson and Thoreau and sometimes carry one or the other with me. Gandhi was strongly influenced by Thoreau as were many non-violent protestors in the 1960’s. These two old friends from Concord continue to put things into perspective for a lot of us. To each his own.
False God, for your purposes I would include:
Black Elk Speaks
Blue Highways by William Leastheat Moon
The plays of Thornton Wilder
The poems of Carl Sandburg
Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters
The Deerslayer by James Fenimore Cooper
Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Burns
(These are in addition to the excellent lists already provided.)
Hey, thanks!
Yup. And I’d meant only that I wasn’t going to include them on my lists. Not that I felt they shouldn’t be in the library False God is assembling.
Also, I’d like to second the recommendation for ebooks, if you’re allowed to use them. Only one publisher of works currently under copyright has a reasonable ebook policy, but for things like The Federalist Papers, and other vital texts in the public domain, you would be able to loan those out in multiple copies for a single investment.
Some dopers have already suggested comics titles- I have a few picks that go beyond the superheroes:
Love and Rockets by Jaime and Gilbert (and Mario) Hernandez- there are a bunch of collections out
anything by Dan Clowes, especially Ghost World and Caricature
Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware
One of Lynda Barry’s collections- all about growing up in the modern USA
Check out www.fantagraphics.com for sources and more titles
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. Brings the immigrant experience to life and shows the situations that underlie many of our laws, especially labor laws, today. I think this book would fit very well with your purpose.
For nonfiction, I’d recommend some Studs Terkel, probably “Working” or “Coming of Age.”
Johnny Got His Gun, by Dalton Trumbo.
I’m not sure how it ranks on the “Greatest Literature of all Time” list, but it’s a powerful read with some importance in American history. And if you buy it, you’re gauranteed to make a hippy smile somewhere. 
Moby Dick was mentioned in post 4.
As you’re outfitting a collection, I wonder if it’s worth having the books custom-bound so they’ve all got uniform hardback covers with the title of the book and the name of the collection on it? Makes the books less stealable too.
Can you do that with paperbacks? Does it make financial sense?
Do you know of any library that does such a thing? I don’t. Do you know how much it costs to have a book rebound?
Stamping the library’s name on one of the page ends of the book, and inside the covers, and putting magnetic tattler tags inside the spine is how you make a book less stealable.
Ooops. :smack:
I don’t know about making the books all uniform size, but I do know that binding paper backs into hardcovers happens fairly regularly on the college level. OTOH I’d imagine the cost is about 3/4 the cost of purchasing another copy of the book. So barely economical for a paperback book that is seeing a lot of use, but not for others.