The Five Essential American Literature Books

Cafe Society
81

The Great Gatsby
Last of the Mohicans
The Right Stuff
Ben Hur
Tom Sawyer

82

Ooh, good call. I was so focused on fiction that I overlooked that.

83

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Winter’s Tale, Mark Helprin
The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien

84

My offerings:

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon

A Prayer For Owen Meany, by John Irving

A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

mmm

85

Sometimes a great notion - Kesey
The winter of our discontent - Steinbeck

Oh, and the Catcher in the rye is terrible. Nobody wants to hang out with moody, whiny teenagers, even in books

86

My suggestions would be:
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
*East of Eden *by John Steinbeck
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Moby Dick by Herman Melville.

I would expand it to seven by adding Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon

87

I had to suggest 6.

*Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas

Huckleberry Finn

The Old Man & The Sea

Gone With The Wind

The Maltese Falcon

The Virginian (by Owen Wister, first great novel of the American West)*

88

Autobiographies are some of the best fiction in American history.:smiley:

89

Beloved
Absalom, Absalom
To Kill a Mockingbird
Call of the Wild
Catch 22

90

Well - coming at this both as a reader and a collector of first editions, it is interesting to see how the collectibility and value of books suggests how important those books are to our culture. From the first half of the 20th century, you have the Big 5:

  • **Fitzgerald **- go with The Great Gatsby
  • **Hemingway **- go with Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms - as a reader I would recommend The Fifth Column and The First Forty-Nine, his collection of short stories, because to me, that was the format he did his best work in
  • **Faulkner **- go with As I Lay Dying, because the structure is complex, but not nearly as comples and Sound and Fury, and yet it captures the love/hate relationship he has with his southern people
  • **Steinbeck **- go with Grapes of Wrath, but I would prefer Tortilla Flat or Cannery Row; I much prefer the magical-realist Steinbeck to the gritty populist.
  • **Sinclair Lewis **- first American to win the Nobel; he was as respected as the others in his day, and many of his titles are still taught. I would go with Babbitt, which wonderfully captures the emergence of the modern businessman.

Outside of Lit, and more into genre, I would go with **Hammett **- Red Harvest. I would also add **Native Son by Richard Wright **over Invisible Man by Ellison.

Second half of the 20th Century:

  • To Kill a Mockingbird
  • Catcher in the Rye
  • Gravity’s Rainbow
  • Catch-22
  • On the Road

I would add plenty of sci-fi (Dune), noir (Elmore Leonard and so many others) and others…

19th Century:

  • Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
  • Red Badge of Courage
  • Moby Dick