Great American Novels
Here is a collection of great American novels. What constitutes a great novel is largely a matter for the reader to decide. I hope that after I have worked my way through this list (ambitious) I will have found most or all to have been worth the effort. I have no idea how long it will take to accomplish this task. All I can do is try my best. I know there will be distractions and side-trips along the way. There are too many good books out there to stick exclusively to a single list. Inspiration always plays a role in selecting the next read.I will do my best to work my way through these. I’m looking forward to the journey.
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
1925
An American Tragedy
Theodore Dreiser
1925
The Making of Americans
Gertrude Stein
1925
Death Comes for the Archbishop
Willa Cather
1927
A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway
1929
Passing
Nella Larsen
1929
The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner
1929
Absalom, Absalom!
William Faulkner
1936
Nightwood
Djuna Barnes
1936
East Goes West
Younghill Kang
1937
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston
1937
U.S.A.
John Dos Passos
1937
Ask the Dust
John Fante
1939
The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler
1939
The Day of the Locust
Nathanael West
1939
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck
1939
Native Son
Richard Wright
1940
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers
1940
A Time to Be Born
Dawn Powell
1942
All the King’s Men
Robert Penn Warren
1946
The Street
Ann Petry
1946
In a Lonely Place
Dorothy B. Hughes
1947
The Mountain Lion
Jean Stafford
1947
The Catcher in the Rye
J. D. Salinger
1951
Charlotte’s Web
E. B. White
1952
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
1952
Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury
1953
Maud Martha
Gwendolyn Brooks
1953
The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow
1953
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov
1955
Giovanni’s Room
James Baldwin
1956
Peyton Place
Grace Metalious
1956
Deep Water
Patricia Highsmith
1957
No-No Boy
John Okada
1957
On the Road
Jack Kerouac
1957
The Haunting of Hill House
Shirley Jackson
1959
Catch-22
Joseph Heller
1961
A Wrinkle in Time
Madeleine L’Engle
1962
Another Country
James Baldwin
1962
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Ken Kesey
1962
Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov
1962
The Zebra-Striped Hearse
Ross Macdonald
1962
The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath
1963
The Group
Mary McCarthy
1963
The Crying of Lot 49
Thomas Pynchon
1966
A Sport and a Pastime
James Salter
1967
Couples
John Updike
1968
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Philip K. Dick
1968
Divorcing
Susan Taubes
1969
Portnoy’s Complaint
Philip Roth
1969
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut
1969
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
Judy Blume
1970
Desperate Characters
Paula Fox
1970
Play It as It Lays
Joan Didion
1970
Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine
Stanley Crawford
1972
Mumbo Jumbo
Ishmael Reed
1972
Sula
Toni Morrison
1973
The Revolt of the Cockroach People
Oscar Zeta Acosta
1973
Oreo
Fran Ross
1974
The Dispossessed
Ursula K. Le Guin
1974
Winter in the Blood
James Welch
1974
Corregidora
Gayl Jones
1975
Speedboat
Renata Adler
1976
Ceremony
Leslie Marmon Silko
1977
Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison
1977
A Contract With God
Will Eisner
1978
Dancer From the Dance
Andrew Holleran
1978
The Stand
Stephen King
1978
Kindred
Octavia E. Butler
1979
The Dog of the South
Charles Portis
1979
Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson
1980
The Salt Eaters
Toni Cade Bambara
1980
Little, Big: Or, the Fairies’ Parliament
John Crowley
1981
Oxherding Tale
Charles Johnson
1982
Machine Dreams
Jayne Anne Phillips
1984
Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy
1985
A Summons to Memphis
Peter Taylor
1986
Watchmen
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
1986
Beloved
Toni Morrison
1987
Dawn
Octavia E. Butler
1987
Geek Love
Katherine Dunn
1989
Tripmaster Monkey
Maxine Hong Kingston
1989
Dogeaters
Jessica Hagedorn
1990
American Psycho
Bret Easton Ellis
1991
How the García Girls Lost Their Accents
Julia Alvarez
1991
Mating
Norman Rush
1991
Bastard Out of Carolina
Dorothy Allison
1992
The Secret History
Donna Tartt
1992
So Far From God
Ana Castillo
1993
Stone Butch Blues
Leslie Feinberg
1993
The Shipping News
Annie Proulx
1993
Native Speaker
Chang-rae Lee
1995
Sabbath’s Theater
Philip Roth
1995
Under the Feet of Jesus
Helena María Viramontes
1995
Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace
1996
I Love Dick
Chris Kraus
1997
Underworld
Don DeLillo
1997
The Intuitionist
Colson Whitehead
1999
Blonde
Joyce Carol Oates
2000
House of Leaves
Mark Z. Danielewski
2000
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Michael Chabon
2000
The Last Samurai
Helen DeWitt
2000
The Quick and the Dead
Joy Williams
2000
Erasure
Percival Everett
2001
I, the Divine
Rabih Alameddine
2001
The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen
2001
Caramelo
Sandra Cisneros
2002
Perma Red
Debra Magpie Earling
2002
The Russian Debutante’s Handbook
Gary Shteyngart
2002
The Namesake
Jhumpa Lahiri
2003
Veronica
Mary Gaitskill
2005
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Junot Díaz
2007
A Visit From the Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan
2010
I Hotel
Karen Tei Yamashita
2010
Open City
Teju Cole
2011
Salvage the Bones
Jesmyn Ward
2011
The Round House
Louise Erdrich
2012
Americanah
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
2013
Nevada
Imogen Binnie
2013
A Brief History of Seven Killings
Marlon James
2014
Family Life
Akhil Sharma
2014
Fates and Furies
Lauren Groff
2015
The Fifth Season
N. K. Jemisin
2015
The Sellout
Paul Beatty
2015
The Sympathizer
Viet Thanh Nguyen
2015
Amiable With Big Teeth
Claude McKay
2017
Lincoln in the Bardo
George Saunders
2017
Sabrina
Nick Drnaso
2018
Severance
Ling Ma
2018
There There
Tommy Orange
2018
Lost Children Archive
Valeria Luiselli
2019
Nothing to See Here
Kevin Wilson
2019
The Old Drift
Namwali Serpell
2019
No One Is Talking About This
Patricia Lockwood
2021
The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
2021
Biography of X
Catherine Lacey
2023
I also enjoy the reflection that is part of the journey.