The Atlantic magazine recently published its list of “Great American Novels.” It is a great marketing tool for the magazine, no doubt designed to generate controversy and advertising revenue.
For anyone interested, I’ve listed all of the 136 books on the list below. You can also access and download a spreadsheet version on my Google Drive.
I know I will be going through the list to see what I have read and what I haven’t.
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