5 books that define America — for better and for worse

The great American novels know that this is not an innocent country.

Some countries built their identities on their land. Some countries built their identities on a shared ethnic heritage. America, however, began with an idea on a piece of paper.

“America was an enlightenment experiment, and so that means we have to make our own identity,” said Mark Graybill, a professor of English at Widener University who specializes in American literature. To do so, we need books: novels that articulate what it’s like to live in this strange new land.

Lawrence Buell, the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Emeritus at Harvard, wrote a definitive study on this problem called The Dream of the Great American Novel. Buell said that the calls to produce and recognize a national literature began in 1776, but they intensified throughout the 19th century. That was especially the case after the War of 1812, when America reaffirmed its independence from England. The widespread belief, said Buell, was that “now we are a mighty political entity, we should be a cultural force as well.”

In 1868, the novelist John William DeForest coined the phrase “great American novel” in an essay that feared the genuine article had not yet been written.

The body of American literature is vast and weird, and making it into the great American novel conversation is a matter of luck and timing as much as it is of merit. So I asked all the experts I spoke with to recommend a book that A. was not on our main list and B. expressed something interesting about America. Here are the novels they told me about.

Edgar Huntly by Charles Brockden Brown (1799). The title character goes looking for the murderer of his sweetheart’s brother in the gothic landscape of unsettled Pennsylvania.

Who Would Have Thought It? by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton (1872). The first English-language novel by a Chicana woman skewers the hypocrisy of American liberals.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952). A perennial pick in the great American novel discussion, Ellison’s debut tracks its unnamed narrator through ever more surreal misfortunes as he navigates the corrupt institutions available to Black Americans.

Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973). Ambitious and sprawling, paranoid and kaleidoscopic, Pynchon’s World War II tale follows an American intelligence officer who discovers a shocking connection between his erections and Nazi rocket strikes.

Two Wings to Veil My Face by Leon Forrest (1983). One of the books Toni Morrison edited at Random House, Two Wings uses the story of one steel-eyed survivor’s life to delve deep into the history of Black America, all in sumptuous, jazz-inflected prose.

The Overstory by Richard Powers (2018). Powers’s lyrical Pulitzer-winning novel follows nine people struggling to save America’s wilderness.

The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai (2018). Makkai bears witness to the early years of the AIDS crisis in this gripping, thriller-like novel.

There There by Tommy Orange (2018). The urban Indians of Oakland, California, can’t bring themselves to believe in their own Indigenousness, but in Orange’s taut and disciplined debut, they’re trying anyway.

No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood (2021). Lockwood turns the experience of being extremely online in the late 2010s into a Joycean stream-of-consciousness parable with ravishing, extraordinary sentences.

Over time, readers, critics, scholars, and the people who build school curricula have developed a loose consensus on some of the books that might aspire to the title — books that are certainly great, certainly interested in America, and certainly novels, but which may or may not be the great American novel. Buell has identified a collection of “recipes” that they all tend to follow. Among the key ingredients for one of the recipes, he said, are 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.”

I talked to literary scholars and critics about five major contenders for the great American novel, all of which follow Buell’s recipe. I wanted to understand what it was about these books that spoke to so many people, who decided that they were so important, and what their vision of the United States is.

Taken together, the national portrait these novels offer is darker than you might expect or than the people who helped canonize these books might have wanted. If they’re united on one thing, it’s the idea that America is not an innocent country.

The Scarlet Letter (1850): An American origin story

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter has long been a mainstay on school syllabi and is a perennial pick for the great American novel. “It first became acclaimed,........

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