America, unlike nations built on land or ethnic heritage, began as an Enlightenment experiment on paper. To forge a national identity, it needed books—novels that articulate life in this strange new land. According to Mark Graybill, a professor of English at Widener University specializing in American literature, “America was an enlightenment experiment, and so that means we have to make our own identity.” Lawrence Buell, the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Emeritus at Harvard, wrote a definitive study, The Dream of the Great American Novel, noting that calls for a national literature began in 1776 but intensified after the War of 1812, when America reaffirmed independence from England. The widespread belief, Buell said, was “now we are a mighty political entity, we should be a cultural force as well.” In 1868, novelist John William DeForest coined the phrase “great American novel” in an essay fearing the genuine article had not yet been written.
The Canon and Its Contenders
Over time, readers, critics, scholars, and curriculum builders developed a loose consensus on books that might aspire to the title—great, interested in America, and novels. Buell identified “recipes” they tend to follow, including a “democratic collective that’s in distress in one way or another. A collectivity of people that are operating under great pressure, great anguish often. And in that collective crucible, you see national themes of one sort or another played out.” Literary scholars and critics examined five major contenders, all following Buell’s recipe. Taken together, the national portrait is darker than expected, united by the idea that America is not an innocent country.
Other notable novels recommended by experts include: Edgar Huntly by Charles Brockden Brown (1799), a gothic tale set in unsettled Pennsylvania; Who Would Have Thought It? by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton (1872), the first English-language novel by a Chicana woman; Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952); Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973); Two Wings to Veil My Face by Leon Forrest (1983); The Overstory by Richard Powers (2018); The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai (2018); There There by Tommy Orange (2018); and No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood (2021).
The Scarlet Letter (1850): An American Origin Story
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter has long been a mainstay on school syllabi and a perennial pick for the great American novel. According to Buell, “It first became acclaimed, almost overnight, as the first serious topnotch piece of long fiction yet written by an American.” The novel tells the tale of Hester Prynne, forced to wear a red “A” for adultery, yet insisting on her dignity. It serves as a metaphor for American mob-mindedness and prudishness around sex, as well as for Hester’s independence and self-determination. Set in early Puritan Boston, it functions as an origin story, insisting on the gloomy Puritanism that began the American experiment. Hawthorne wrote, “The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.” In The Scarlet Letter, the United States is a utopian idea, a prison, and a graveyard.
Moby-Dick (1851): A Democracy at Sea
Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, dedicated to Hawthorne, tells the story of Captain Ahab’s obsession with a white whale. Unlike Hawthorne, Melville was not revered in his lifetime; the novel had its revival in the 1920s and ’30s. Jennifer Greiman, a professor of English at Wake Forest University and editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, said, “Melville emerges as this voice speaking to the middle of the 20th century like a prophet.” With its swirling structure of digressions and asides, Moby-Dick made sense to modernists. Greiman argued its late adoption speaks to its American quality: “It’s that sense of it as a book that is speaking to something that’s going to come in the future.” The novel’s multi-racial crew—white and Black Americans, Native Americans, Africans, Indians, and Pacific Islanders—makes a collective fatal mistake by handing power to Ahab. “It’s often read as a democratic tragedy,” said Greiman, “because you have this multi-racial crew, and one of the first things they do together is hand over all of their power to Ahab and doom themselves.” The novel shows the weakness of democracy under a charismatic despot and the possibility that America’s great experiment may end in tragedy.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884): Taking on America’s Original Sin
Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was an immediate hit, but not singled out as important until after his death. Ernest Hemingway enshrined it in 1935, writing that “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” By the 1970s, it was the most assigned work in American classrooms, according to Matt Seybold, scholar in residence at the Center for Mark Twain Studies. Today, it is assigned less often due to Twain’s use of the n-word. The heart of the novel is Huck’s relationship with Jim, a runaway enslaved man. In the most celebrated passage, Huck decides to help Jim escape, saying, “All right then, I’ll go to hell.” Seybold said this is often read as “America overcoming the sins of its inception.” However, the novel continues for another 50 pages, with Huck toying with Jim’s freedom. Seybold agrees with Toni Morrison’s read of the ending as a metaphor for Reconstruction—the promise of freedom reduced. Twain was radicalized by a Frederick Douglass speech on sharecropping. “Twain takes us back into the cruelty, the absurdity of antebellum America,” said Seybold. “That’s also America, right?”
The Great Gatsby (1925): A Bleak Look at the American Dream
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was a critical success but sold modestly. Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air and author of So We Read On, noted, “I always tell my students, if you want to be a writer, just think about the fact that Fitzgerald’s last royalty check was for $13.13.” It took campaigning from friends and publishers for Gatsby to be remembered, boosted during World War II when the US army shipped copies to soldiers. Now generations have read about Jay Gatsby, who becomes a millionaire to win Daisy Buchanan. Buell writes that the idea of the bootstrapper stretches back to Benjamin Franklin, but Gatsby makes that ideal sinister through ill-gotten gains and hollow longing. “It’s that idea of aspiration, of yearning, of trying even in the face of knowing that sometimes the game is rigged,” said Corrigan. “This is a novel that deeply questions the idea of an American meritocracy.” To say Gatsby is the great American novel is to say America is a place of capitalist striving, but the dream is beautiful yet disappointing.
Beloved (1987): The Haunting of America
Starting in the 1960s, feminist and African-American scholars pushed to break the canon apart. Into this atmosphere came Toni Morrison, whose 1987 novel Beloved tells the story of a formerly enslaved woman haunted by the ghost of the baby she killed to save from slavery. It was published to acclaim but did not win the National Book Award, prompting 48 critics, writers, and activists to publish an open letter in the New York Times. Later that year, Morrison won the Pulitzer. In 1993, five years after publication, she won the Nobel Prize. Jeffrey Lawrence, an American literature scholar at Rutgers, said, “For a lot of novels that become these cultural touchstones, there has to be a campaign behind them. There have to be people who are making cultural arguments for why it matters. And in Morrison’s case, this happened relatively quickly.” Dana A. Williams, a professor of African American Literature at Howard, said Morrison “unpack the difficulties of slavery…in so many different ways. It showed the history of the institution, yes, but it showed it from so many different perspectives.” Beloved forces readers to think about how humanity is articulated in America—who is alive, who is dead. The novel shows that slavery has haunted America’s legacy from the beginning, making clear that the country is not innocent.
Conclusion: Self-Knowledge Through Literature
Returning to Buell’s idea of a democratic collective in peril, the threats in these novels are embedded in America’s national character: mob-minded censoriousness, weakness before charismatic leaders, the sin of slavery, and the emptiness of capitalist striving. These texts tell us that America is a nation of beautiful ideas that constantly struggles to live up to them. “The novel as a genre really exists to critique the society that it is writing about, in a way that allows us to ask questions and to answer questions that only fiction can allow us to do,” Williams said. Despite their merciless critique, these books are enshrined, celebrated, and cherished over 250 years. We teach them in schools and turn them into movies. Perhaps the great American value they enshrine is clear-eyed self-knowledge. Every country is prone to self-propagandizing, but it is comforting that the quest to define national identity through texts has led to a canon that tells the ugly truth about who we are.
