Books Referred To As "Great American Novel"
Though the term is singular, many novels have been referred to as "the Great American Novel".
At one time or another, the following works have been considered to be the Great American Novel:
- 19th century
- 1851: Herman Melville's Moby-Dick
- 1884: Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- 20th century
- 1925: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
- 1936: William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!
- 1938: John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy
- 1939: John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath
- 1951: J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye
- 1952: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
- 1953: Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March
- 1955: Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita
- 1960: Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird
- 1973: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow
- 1975: William Gaddis's J R
- 1985: Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West
- 1987: Toni Morrison's Beloved
- 1997: Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon
- 21st century
- 2010: Jonathan Franzen's Freedom
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