What 1951-2000 U.S. Literature will endure?

Cafe Society
1

Meaning - NOT your personal favorites, per se, but the ones that high school kids will have to read in 200 years (actually, if humanity is still around in 200 years, books will probably be scanned or implanted or something, but that is another story…)

Anyway - another way of asking the question might be: What U.S. Lit will have crossed over into the public consciousness? In the 1800’s, your average American will probably at least have heard of, if not read:

Moby Dick (or The Whale)
The Scarlet Letter
The Red Badge of Courage
Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer and maybe Prince and the Pauper or CT Yankee
Little Women
Poe’s short stories (Cask of Amontillado, Tell-tale Heart, etc…)

but not much more. Sure, any reasonable reading person will know about many more, but these few books are the ones that have “crossed over” and represent U.S. fiction for the 1900’s. (NOTE: I am sure I missed one or two obvious ones, but you get the point).

So for the period of 1951 - 2000 - what has or will cross over and be required reading 200 years from now?

The obvious ones to me are:

Catcher in the Rye
To Kill a Mockingbird
Catch-22
The next ones are maybes:

Portnoy’s Complaint
Song of Solomon
On the Road
The Invisible Man (Ellison, not H.G. Wells, thank you!)
World According to Garp
Slaughterhouse-5
The Shining (don’t laugh, I’m serious!)
A Separate Peace
The Fountainhead (don’t laugh, I’m serious!)
Cuckoo’s Nest

Notice there is no Pynchon, Bellow, Updike, Mailer or a bunch of other highly respected and famous works and authors. I just don’t see those works “crossing over” - anybody with the least interest would learn about them super-quick, but I am talking about books that come to represent the 2nd half of the 20th century and are students are expected to read and know - notice by including the Fountainhead, which I think is poorly written, I am trying to acknowledge its persistent (cult?) status. And by including the Shining, I am acknowledging the sheer magnitude of popularity Stephen King has experienced, the fact that he has been gaining respect (e.g., regularly appears in the New Yorker now) and am willing to bet that some later academics will hold him up as an author that is to be studied…

What are your thoughts - what are the top 3 core books? What are the next tier of books that could make it but you aren’t as sure?

2

Lord of the Rings

I’m hard pressed to come up with anything else that will definately be remembered 200 years from now.

3

I hear ya, Mahaloth - but [nitpick] LOTR is British; I am looking for American. [/nitpick]

That being said, I notice I didn’t include any sci-fi/fantasy…

Foundation Trilogy?
Stranger in a Strange Land?
Dune?
Neuromancer?

Maybe Neuromancer, simply because it coined the phrase cyberspace. But while Dune is my fave sci-fi book, it is not in the same realm of public consciousness as Catcher or Mockingbird. Nor is Stranger or the Foundation Trilogy…I don’t know…

4

The problem with this question is that most of the titles you list from the 1800s were not the books that most people thought most highly of then. Twain was enormously popular, but Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer weren’t thought of as more than children’s literature. Moby Dick had a cautiously positive response on its first introduction but a backlash soon appeared and it was savaged by the intellectuals. Poe legendarily had a greater reputation in France than in the U.S.

And it’s just too soon to know which of the current crop of authors will make it big. After all, your own list doesn’t contain a single book written after 1982.

Mahaloth, the OP was on U.S. lit. And what an embarrassment for our whole culture if LotR is remembered as the defining literature of our times.

5

I vote for Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or Fear and Loathing: On The Campaign Trail 1972.

6

Good call on Cuckoo’s Nest. And The Shining was to be my nomination. How about Watership Down?

7

I know the OP didn’t mention kiddie lit, but I think Dr. Seuss will be remembered as one of the greats, almost the Lewis Carroll of his time.

8

Ditto Seuss. I think Updike is already in there a bit–I was required to read his short story A & P many times during my academic career.

I can’t believe any sci-fi will make it, despite my love of the genre. No Asimov, Gibson, Heinlein, or Herbert.

But judging by past “classics” (usu. popular dime novels of their day–like the Leatherstocking Tales), our grandkids can expect to read a lot of Grisham and Clancy. Bleck.

9

Oh poop. I just realized why I can’t say Watership Down. Don’t mind me…

10

I’ll second Dr.Seuss.

Add.

Celestine Prophecy
Illusions. Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
Robert Frost
Ernest Hemingway
Scarlet Letter
Catcher in the Rye
Brave New World
Animal House
1984

Outside American Literature as I do not think Literature must have a nationality even in the future.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead
Lord of the Rings
Kalevala

11

I thought Tolkien was born in South Africa and then moved to UK (or was it viceversa?).
Fight Club?
On the Road?
The Naked Lunch?
Dunno, it´s hard to say.

12

I was going to say “The Great Gatsby,” but realized I was in the wrong half century.

The Old Man and the Sea

Good call on Frost, Antiquarian, but most of his best stuff is pre-1950, I believe.

13

I don’t want to hijack anyones post but why don’t we look at literature as a whole from the 20th century, instead of the parameters we have now. I can’t think of a reason Lit would be geocentric in 200 years.

14

Atlas Shrugged.

The Fountainhead was published in 1943.

15

If Literature can include a magazine, I vote for Playboy.

Yes I read it.

16

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Antiquarian *
Celestine Prophecy
<snip>
1984

[QUOTE]

I do hope you’re not serious about that craptacular piece of shit, Celestine Prophecy? You might as well include Alchemist, Men are from Mars, Women from Venus, Real Men don’t eat quiche and Max Headroom’s Guide for life.

Also, Orwell was born in Bengal, India, and a British national, so he should not be included.

My take on such a list: It should include great literature and/or books that will tell people 200 years from now something about our society. I choose to exclude books written during these years, dealing with events outside these years.

Tom Wolfe / The Bonfire of Vanities
Don De Lillo / Underworld
Norman Mailer / The executioner’s song (Or Harlot’s Ghost)
Bret Easton Ellis / American Psycho
J.D. Salinger / Catcher in the Rye
Erica Jong / Fear of Flying
James Ellroy / American Tabloid & The Cold Six Thousand
There are more of course, these just off the top of my head.

17

East of Eden & The Winter of our Discontent by John Steinbeck
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
The Illustrated Man, The Martian Chronicles, and possibly others by Ray Bradbury
The Crucible by Arthur Miller

Possibilities: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (SF will continue to be read if the story is good and the characters are believeable) by Heinlein
Some of Sharyn McCrumb’s ballad novels, especially She Walks These Hills and The Rosewood Casket.
Some of Updike’s work
The poetry of Nikki Giovanni and Gwendolyn Brooks

World Literature:
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez
Jorge Luis Borges’ work
the poetry of Seamus Haney (hope spelling is right)
some of the mystery novels of P.D. James. To enlarge upon a statement of Chandler’s in The Simple Art of Murder, the reasons why we read mysteries ain’t going out of style any time soon.

18

Yeah, the book was good but the movie is the definitive version. :smiley:

BTW Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, was a Brit.

19

I think The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe, because it’s a great book, but more importantly because it chronicles the beginning of the space age, and as we go into the future I think the dawn of space will be increasingly seen as almost mythic in nature.

How about The Princess Bride? I know it seems a longshot, but I swear that movie is getting more popular with each successive generation. Most of my generation never read the book, and the movie only did mediocre business. But everyone I know watches it regularly on DVD, and their kids universally love it.

20

The Princess Bride? Interesting. But I doubt anything more than a tiny fraction of the movie’s viewers has read the book.