The Great American Novels

In 1868, a little-known writer by the name of John William DeForest proposed a new type of literature, a collective artistic project for a nation just emerging from an existential conflict: a work of fiction that accomplished “the task of painting the American soul.” It would be called the Great American Novel, and no one had written it yet, DeForest admitted. Maybe soon.

A century and a half later, the idea has endured, even as it has become more complicated. In 2024, our definition of literary greatness is wider, deeper, and weirder than DeForest likely could have imagined. At the same time, the novel is also under threat, as the forces of anti-intellectualism and authoritarianism seek to ban books and curtail freedom of expression. The American canon is more capacious, more fluid, and more fragile than perhaps ever before. But what, exactly, is in it? What follows is our attempt to discover just that.

In setting out to identify that new American canon, we decided to define American as having first been published in the United States (or intended to be—read more in our entries on Lolita and The Bell Jar). And we narrowed our aperture to the past 100 years—a period that began as literary modernism was cresting and contains all manner of literary pleasure and possibility, including the experimentations of postmodernism and the narrative satisfactions of genre fiction.

This still left millions of potential titles. So we approached experts—scholars, critics, and novelists, both at The Atlantic and outside it—and asked for their suggestions. From there, we added and subtracted and debated and negotiated and considered and reconsidered until we landed on the list you’re about to read. We didn’t limit ourselves to a round, arbitrary number; we wanted to recognize the very best—novels that say something intriguing about the world and do it distinctively, in intentional, artful prose—no matter how many or few that ended up being (136, as it turns out). Our goal was to single out those classics that stand the test of time, but also to make the case for the unexpected, the unfairly forgotten, and the recently published works that already feel indelible. We aimed for comprehensiveness, rigor, and open-mindedness. Serendipity, too: We hoped to replicate that particular joy of a friend pressing a book into your hand and saying, “You have to read this; you’ll love it.”

This list includes 45 debut novels, nine winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and three children’s books. Twelve were published before the introduction of the mass-market paperback to America, and 24 after the release of the Kindle. At least 60 have been banned by schools or libraries. Together, they represent the best of what novels can do: challenge us, delight us, pull us in and then release us, a little smarter and a little more alive than we were before. You have to read them.

The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925

Fitzgerald’s third novel received mixed reviews and was a commercial flop, plunging its author into a sense of failure from which he never really recovered. A century later, Gatsby is one of the few books still required of most high-school students. Why has it achieved that rare thing, permanence? Because the prose, sentence by gorgeous sentence, goes down like spun sugar. Because the romantic myth of self-creation speaks deeply to readers—especially Americans, especially young ones. Because no novel has more thrillingly portrayed the corrupting obsessions of love and money. And because the story of the “foul dust” that swirls through Gatsby’s mind—the empty allure of Daisy and Tom Buchanan, the partygoers of West Egg, the American dream itself—is told by the most stringent and generous of narrators. — George Packer

An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser, 1925

A contemporaneous review of An American Tragedy in The Atlantic compared Dreiser’s “method of creation” to that of an oyster. The author researched exhaustively—for this novel, he gathered everything he could find about the 1906 drowning of a pregnant girl in upstate New York and the young man sentenced to the electric chair for the crime. After ingesting all that information, Dreiser, much like the oyster, “smoothed, agglutinated, worked over” the material for a decade, to produce more than 800 dense pages. Dreiser’s pearl was an intricate morality tale: the making and unmaking of Clyde Griffiths, a boy who wants out of poverty, and then, once he glimpses a new life for himself, will do anything to protect his status. This country will make you chase the wrong things, and the consequences, in this sordid tale, are no less than death. — Gal Beckerman

The Making of Americans, by Gertrude Stein, 1925

Stein’s nearly 1,000-page opus is perhaps the work on this list that most shrewdly explodes the conventions of the novel while making the case for a different kind of storytelling. The Making of Americans tells the saga of a family across three generations; its subtitle, “Being a History of a Family’s Progress,” both explains the premise and serves as an early taste of Stein’s peculiar, elliptical style. Stein writes very plainly, but also oddly—“just far enough out of the ordinary to disconcert,” as the novelist William H. Gass put it. Using simple words and phrases that she repeats and morphs into almost chantlike rhythms, Stein examines the roles of fathers and mothers and children, as members of a family and as individuals. This is a challenging, often infuriating read. But if you’re able to give yourself over to its dulcet, quasi-musical cadences, you might develop the sneaking suspicion that more conventional narratives are only scratching the surface of what language can reveal. Stein’s risky repetitions, and the way she writes sentences—cerebrally but always playfully—to draw attention to both the passage of time and the eternity of the present, are mind-expanding. And they’re evidence of true ambition and vision. — Jane Yong Kim

Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather, 1927

Cather thought the 19th-century realist novel of Balzac and his heirs was “over-furnished.” Death Comes for the Archbishop is as elegantly spare as one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie houses. Set in the New Mexican outback “still waiting to be made into a landscape,” the novel follows two French clergymen seeking to establish order in the chaotic and violent region after American incorporation in 1850. Cather’s Father Latour is scrupulously respectful of the local Indians, friendly with the frontiersman Kit Carson, and not afraid to pull a gun on predatory settlers. Not Catholic herself, Cather imbued her archbishop with an Emersonian faith that true miracles arise from refining our perceptions, “so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.” — Christopher Benfey

A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway, 1929

Hemingway wrote 47 potential endings to A Farewell to Arms, all of which Scribner published in a 2012 collection. Among them were “The Nada Ending” (“You will die and I will die and that’s all I can promise you”) and “The Fitzgerald Ending,” suggested to Hemingway by his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald. Yet the one Hemingway eventually settled on helped make this book one of the most unforgettable novels of the 20th century: “After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.” Based largely on Hemingway’s own experiences during World War I, the novel follows an American lieutenant and his doomed romance with the English nurse Catherine Barkley. Their love story, unfolding across Europe, is shot through with quiet existentialism and disillusionment. Hemingway’s rhythmic, stripped-down, often-mimicked style lulls readers into a sort of trance that allows his final line to explode like a tossed grenade, devastating in its simplicity. — Valerie Trapp

Passing, by Nella Larsen, 1929

This classic novel of the Harlem Renaissance studies the charged relationship between two women, childhood friends who reencounter each other in the racially stratified environment of 1920s New York. There is the prim and orderly Irene Redfield, an upright member of the Black bourgeoisie. And there is the seductive, pleasure-seeking Clare Kendry, who “passes” as white. These women, first presented as opposites, come to seem like eerie doubles, for this is a novel in which even the most profound binary division of Larsen’s era—the color line—is revealed as unstable. With the ringing laugh and languorous eyes of the doomed Clare, Larsen transformed the stock character of the “tragic mulatta.” The “old Harlem” Larsen depicts is long gone. But her haunting inquiry into the mutability of identity will retain its power for years to come. — Charlie Tyson

The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner, 1929

The Sound and the Fury is, genre-wise, a work of southern Gothic—but menace afflicts more than the novel’s plot. Its storytelling is haunted too. Faulkner was a contemporary of Freud’s, and the fortunes of the Compson family of Mississippi, conveyed by multiple members, spin psychology’s emergent insights into fiction. Though the novel’s immediate timeline is constrained (much of its action takes place over the Easter weekend of 1928), its story races and roves: Readers learn of ancient hatreds, remedial kindnesses, dissolutions both preventable and inescapable. And Faulkner relays much of the saga through stream-of-consciousness narration that was innovative in its time and remains resonant in our own. The novel’s several narrators are not merely unreliable; they are also incompatible. They live the world so differently that the discord leaks into their language. The result is a story that is occasionally beautiful, frequently wrenching, and thoroughly destabilizing—a tale told by a genius, signifying, somehow … everything. — Megan Garber

Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner, 1936

Faulkner won two National Book Awards, two Pulitzer Prizes, and a Nobel over the course of his career, but he also, for a while, held the Guinness World Record for the longest sentence in literature. It comes in the middle of Chapter 6 of Absalom, Absalom! and it is 1,288 words long. It contains at least eight distinct scenes, more than a dozen characters, and very little punctuation. Like so many of Faulkner’s sentences, it runs on, swerves abruptly, implodes, and is really, really not for everyone: The New York Times, in its pan of Absalom, described Faulkner’s writing as “one of the most complex, unreadable, and uncommunicative prose styles ever to find its way into print.” But the reward is commensurate with the effort, because Faulkner is literature’s master technician, and every one of his choices is intentional. These sentences are fractals, each as complex and as thrilling as the entire novel—a structurally innovative exploration of hubris, legacy, race, obsession, and evil that traces the rise and fall of a poor Virginian determined to build a dynasty in antebellum Mississippi. Faulkner isn’t uncommunicative; he’s communicating it all, all the time. “The truth seems to be that Faulkner fears banality,” that Times review surmised. Thank goodness.  — Ellen Cushing

Nightwood, by Djuna Barnes, 1936

One of the first popular novels to portray lesbian relationships—and an early example of what today would be called metafiction—Nightwood follows members of Paris’s underground scene in the 1920s as they are pulled into the orbit of the young American Robin Vote, who leaves behind multiple anguished men and women over the course of a story that also explores anger, identity, and isolation. Barnes’s intimate prose explores the convolutions of these relationships, and the passion driving them. As the book’s editor, T. S. Eliot, wrote, the result is “so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it.” — Elise Hannum

East Goes West, by Younghill Kang, 1937

In 1921, Kang left behind his native Korea for America, just before all Asians were legally barred from entering the country. He settled in New York, worked at NYU and the Met, married an American woman, and connected with his future editor, Maxwell Perkins. In 1931, The Grass Roof—a bildungsroman starring the precocious young Chungpa Han—made Kang the first Korean American novelist. East Goes West is the rare sequel that eclipses its predecessor; the word-drunk Han is less of a prig here, more the endlessly amusing innocent abroad. Kang’s overstuffed opus shape-shifts from vivid New York novel to hectic picaresque to nightmare vision of a collapsed American dream. — Ed Park

Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, 1937

Hurston was born in segregation and died penniless, but throughout her life, she deplored the role of victim and insisted on a fierce independence. She was a conservative who opposed both the New Deal and desegregation, a Black woman who refused to be categorized by race or to allow male judgment to crush her spirit. Discrimination, she once wrote, didn’t anger but only surprised her: “How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.” A prolific writer, she was also an anthropologist of Black American and Caribbean culture, and her field research informs her great novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Set in the small, all-Black Florida town of her childhood, it’s a bewitching folktale, told in a rich vernacular, about loyalty, jealousy, heartbreak, and a woman’s unkillable struggle for fulfillment. Criticized by Richard Wright, W. E. B. Du Bois, and others for ignoring politics, Hurston replied: “I am not interested in the race problem, but I am interested in the problems of individuals, white ones and black ones.” She upset the expectations of her time and still challenges those of ours. — George Packer

U.S.A., by John Dos Passos, 1937

This utterly original trilogy—since collected in one volume—conveys the wild energy, brutal injustice, and disillusioned hopes of the young republic, from the turn of the 20th century through the First World War to the stock-market crash of 1929. Each novel is a hybrid contraption, consisting of a recurring cast of generally thwarted fictional characters; prose-poem biographies of the era’s public figures, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, J. P. Morgan, Woodrow Wilson, and Isadora Duncan; autobiographical interludes in first-person stream of consciousness; and “Newsreels” that mash up headlines, song lyrics, ad slogans, and overheard vernacular. Unlike most American literature, U.S.A. is more interested in social history and class conflict than in the private dramas of individuals. This might help explain why Dos Passos—who once ranked in the company of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway—has fallen into the near-obscurity that is the fate of most writers, even some great ones. — George Packer

Ask the Dust, by John Fante, 1939

Ask the Dust brings the downtown Bunker Hill area of Los Angeles to sharp, raging life. Set during the Great Depression, the novel follows Arturo Bandini, a striving writer (and Fante’s alter ego), as he tries to get his stories published, keep from getting kicked out of his crummy boarding house, and make Camilla, a waitress, fall in love with him. Fante writes with an intoxicating energy; I’ve never forgotten his spare, exuberant description of Bandini’s diet of oranges, which he buys for five cents a dozen: “Eat them in bed, eat them for lunch, push them down for dinner.” This is an L.A. novel through and through: Bandini comes to the city “to write a love story, to learn about life.” Over the course of a book that somehow feels made of automotive exhaust, dust from the Mojave Desert, and hot Santa Ana winds—a book that is also about the fierce allure of art—he does exactly that. — Jane Yong Kim

The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler, 1939

In The Big Sleep, Chandler introduced the world to Philip Marlowe, the hard-boiled, incorruptible private detective who would feature in a series of novels and stories. What chance did anyone have? It was as if Rembrandt had inked comic books, or Rodin had sculpted sex dolls: Chandler, a writer who could somehow dazzle while describing a bougainvillea in a Los Angeles streetscape, placed an impossible-to-dislike protagonist in intricate plots with drawn-out mysteries, surprise twists, seductive dames, and enough corpses to keep the mortician’s wife in mink. The voice that croaks to life in The Big Sleep would be imitated many times over, but this was the book that first exposed readers to that combination of cynicism and wit. With time and a big-enough magnifying glass, you might spot an inconsequential loose end, but no matter. Chandler would be worth reading even if the plots were nonsense—for mood, for character, for sentence-by-sentence quality, and, most of all, for the lines. Here’s one to whet your appetite: “Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.” — Conor Friedersdorf

The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West, 1939

West’s darkest, most hard-edged novel acutely renders the loneliness and struggle at the outskirts of Hollywood’s limelight. The Day of the Locust is populated with sad sacks, daydreamers, and weirdos: the sloppy-grinned studio artist Tod, who decorates sets while working on an epic painting called The Burning of Los Angeles; the aspiring actor Faye, blessed with looks but not talent; the accountant Homer, plagued by inner angst and a pair of curiously large hands. Theirs is an insignificant world that’s propped up by fantasy and artifice, not unlike Homer’s pitiful rented cottage, with its “roof thatching, which was not really straw but heavy fireproof paper colored and ribbed to look like straw.” West saw Hollywood with an unusual clarity, the way its cruel absurdities inevitably lead to tragedy and violence. He didn’t pull his punches, and the novel is the more brilliant for it. — Jane Yong Kim

The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, 1939

Ma and Pa Joad and the rest of their world-weary clan, packed inside a makeshift truck, driving to California through squalid Depression shantytowns—the images of Steinbeck’s seventh novel are so indelible now that readers may overlook how radical they were in their time. At a moment when many of his novelist contemporaries were primarily interested in the glamorous and coastal, Steinbeck devoted himself to looking human suffering square in the face, telling stories about unfortunate, unloved, unlovable people in a plainspoken and sometimes profane style. (“I tried to write this book the way lives are being lived, not the way books are written,” he told his editor.) Readers, especially working-class ones, adored The Grapes of Wrath, making it an instant best seller, even as powerful tastemakers criticized its sentimentality and its politics. Since then, it has been banned and burned, widely assigned and widely adapted, turned into shorthand for the horrors of the Dust Bowl and the perseverance of the downtrodden; it is also probably the only novel on this formidable list to have inspired a Bruce Springsteen song. But before all that, there were the Joads: refugees, survivors, driven away from home by desperation and climate disaster, headed west, into that golden light. — Ellen Cushing

Native Son, by Richard Wright, 1940

The story of Bigger Thomas—a poor Black man who responds to the conditions of his life with progressively more brutal violence—has been provoking vigorous debate since it was published. Wright’s subverted bildungsroman suggests that American racism is as much to blame for Bigger’s gruesome crimes as he is: Every Black man, the novel contends, is already guilty in the eyes of the law. Native Son is not a particularly subtle book, to be sure, but the ideas about anti-Blackness and poverty that Wright presented nearly a century ago are still relevant—and worth seriously engaging with—today. — Hannah Giorgis

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers, 1940

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter launched the career of one of our greatest and most original writers: A 23-year-old white woman from segregated Georgia, born Lula Carson Smith, who had taken the first name Carson and the last name of her new husband, and who had never published a novel before. In his review in The New Republic, Richard Wright—the author of Black Boy and Native Son—wrote, “To me the most impressive aspect of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is the astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race.” In a life plagued by illness and addiction, resulting in an early death at age 50, McCullers produced four novels, an unfinished memoir, two plays, and many short stories, letters, and commentaries. But Heart demonstrates her rare, core capacity to inhabit any kind of person. In her work, she created characters who were Black (conversing across differences, with no white people in the room), Jewish, deaf, Filipino, and every kind of queer.  — Sarah Schulman

A Time to Be Born, by Dawn Powell, 1942

Set in New York City just before America’s entry into World War II, Powell’s satire tells the story of a pompous newspaperman named Julian Evans and his second wife, Amanda Keeler, a manipulative writer who stole him out from under the nose of his first. After Amanda’s novel becomes wildly successful, bolstered by planted reviews in Julian’s papers, she spends her days throwing parties, expounding on pressing geopolitical matters in various outlets (with the help of the most informed experts money can buy), and avoiding her husband. Powell’s novel is effortlessly funny, fantastically mean without ever being cynical, and particularly astute on gender politics while avoiding earnestness and essentialism; as Powell’s friend Edmund Wilson once put it, “The women who appear in her stories are likely to be as sordid and absurd as the men.” — Maya Chung

All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren, 1946

The greatest novel about American politics is a mirror of its subject—more than a little messy, occasionally melodramatic, but also completely transfixing. Warren was inspired by the Depression era’s most seductive populist, the Louisiana politician Huey P. Long, who was assassinated in 1935, and he fictionalized him as the unforgettably charismatic Willie Stark. Warren lyrically and unstintingly captures the American South in a time before air-conditioning, writes about corruption with gritty realism, and displays both the rhetorical power of the demagogue and the convenience of moral relativism. Warren once protested that his book wasn’t actually about political life but what he described vaguely as “deeper concerns”—which is, in fact, why he so nails his depiction of it. — Franklin Foer

The Street, by Ann Petry, 1946

The Street was the first novel by a Black woman to sell 1 million copies. It tells the story of Lutie Johnson, a single mother bringing up her son in 1940s Harlem. The story rarely leaves this neighborhood, which grows more and more claustrophobic to both Lutie and the reader. In lucid prose, Petry captures the physical exhaustion and unforgiving logic of poverty, the way its calculations leave no margin for error. And although we meet multiple residents of this street, Petry is almost relentlessly focused on Lutie. Through the prism of her experience, the novel delivers a powerful indictment of racism, sexism, and the class system in America. At times, The Street reads almost like documentation; this is clear-eyed critique by way of clear-eyed observation, and it’s all the more devastating because of it. — Katie Kitamura

In a Lonely Place, by Dorothy B. Hughes, 1947

To try to re-create the thrill of World War II combat, Dix Steele takes to wandering the streets of Los Angeles at night—and committing serial murder. Hughes wastes little time hiding her killer’s identity, instead building a gripping noir in the anticipation of his inevitable capture. — Elise Hannum

The Mountain Lion, by Jean Stafford, 1947

Stafford is one of the 20th century’s most undervalued writers, too often remembered only as Robert Lowell’s first wife—the one he disfigured in a car crash while driving drunk—instead of as the top-tier fiction writer she was. In masterful short stories and especially her second and greatest novel, she managed an American miracle: combining Jamesian psychological depth and style—at once lapidary and viscous, like see-through molasses—with Mark Twain’s backwoods wildness and humor. The Mountain Lion sits, nestled between What Maisie Knew and Huckleberry Finn, on the slim shelf of great novels about childhood. It’s the story of a pair of siblings, 8-year-old Molly and 10-year-old Ralph, and the summers they spend on their uncle’s ranch in Colorado. Stafford treats both natural landscapes and the inner worlds of childhood with extraordinary reverence, as sites of perilous mystery. In her portrayal of Ralph, she writes the single greatest account I know of an adolescent boy coming into his sexuality, a terrifying discovery that alienates him from himself and others. How could she know this? I wondered as I read it. Only by means of a great writer’s clairvoyance. — Garth Greenwell

The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger, 1951

Allie’s baseball glove. The ducks in Central Park. Mr. Antolini. Phoebe on the carousel. And the imitated-ever-after voice of the teenage narrator, Holden Caulfield, who sees “phonies” everywhere: “They were coming in the goddam window.” Caulfield’s alienation may be associated with the 1950s, but Salinger began giving form to his central character at least a decade earlier, while still a student at Columbia. (In manuscript form, Salinger even carried Caulfield in his knapsack when he landed at Utah Beach on D-Day.) Catcher has anchored high-school reading lists for generations, and read is still what you have to do—it has never been made into a movie. — Cullen Murphy

Charlotte’s Web, by E. B. White, 1952

Many critics have called Charlotte’s Web the greatest children’s book of the 20th century. The praise is both richly deserved and something of an error. White’s novel may take place, for the most part, on a farm; its protagonists may be a pig named Wilbur, a spider named Charlotte, and a feisty girl named Fern; it may involve, through Charlotte’s ability to weave words into her webs, a little bit of magic. But childishness, in the novel, is a feint. A standard work of kid lit would not describe a young pig learning of his own mortality and moaning in reply. (The novel’s genesis may be found in an essay White published in The Atlantic called “Death of a Pig.”) Nor would it feature a spider asking, “After all, what’s a life, anyway?” White’s novel—as Wilbur, affable and innocent and raised to be slaughtered, fights for survival; as Charlotte and other creatures strive to save him—is a sly kind of fable, and a uniquely mature one: a nature-versus-man adventure that considers the tenderness of the human story. Growing up, growing old, finding purpose along the way—it’s all here, in this children’s book and this novel for the ages, conveyed through a spider that is, in the story’s estimation, that rarest and most remarkable of things: “a true friend and a good writer.” — Megan Garber

Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison, 1952

You might love to tell people at parties that Invisible Man is one of your favorite books; perhaps it even is. The first-ever novel written by a Black author to win the National Book Award, Invisible Man has taken on a revered status among the signifiers of American erudition. There’s a reason, though, for all of that esteem. Through the surrealist journey of its nameless narrator, from a gladiator-style fight in the post-Reconstruction South to a hidden underground apartment in the North, Ellison’s novel is to this day the most compelling treatment of W. E. B. Du Bois’s theory of Black “double consciousness.” In his nightmares, the narrator encounters a motif, a letter stating simply: “To Whom It May Concern, Keep This Nigger Boy Running.” He’s a race man, after all. — Vann R. Newkirk II

Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury, 1953

In addition to writing one of literature’s all-time-great first lines, Bradbury bestowed twin gifts upon humanity with Fahrenheit 451. The first gift is the terrible familiarity of the world he made, and the second is his blueprint for a way out—a warning, then an exit. Here are the firemen who burn books instead of putting out fires. Here is the mechanical hound of surveillance technology tracking your every move. Here are the screen-addled citizens, their “night-frightened faces, like gray animals peering from electric caves.” But there are also the rebels. There are those who still ask questions and still read books. Those who pick dandelions, and smell autumn on forest walks, and gaze in wonder at the stars in “great processions of wheeling fire.” Dystopian futures will always creep in if you let them, but those who seek beauty and truth can still fight to win. — Adrienne LaFrance

Maud Martha, by Gwendolyn Brooks, 1953

Although Virginia Woolf is usually credited as a progenitor of stream-of-consciousness writing, Maud Martha —the only novel by Brooks, who was best known as a poet—pushes such techniques in new directions, with powerful, lyrical narration. And Maud Martha is no Mrs. Dalloway: She is a Black woman contending with the limits on her dreams and desires imposed by racism, colorism, and sexism. Full of disappointment but also a survivor’s joy, Maud Martha is a complicated woman, and readers get to follow her into the close confines of domesticity. The story is told in a series of linked vignettes, and its innovative structure will forever be emulated. The book’s feminist intimacy and its percolating anger show that Brooks was not writing for a mainstream, white audience; she was speaking to another reader altogether. — Helena María Viramontes

The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow, 1953

“In Augie March I wanted to invent a new sort of American sentence,” Bellow said of his third, wildly amusing novel. Its narrator, Augie March, is a fidgety, impulsive, intelligent, and cocky boy, a Jewish American picaro who gets swept up in the illicit schemes and hijinks of Depression-era Chicago. The sentences that Bellow invented do not just flow; they exert an explosive pressure that never, ever lets up. Augie March is a great geyser of a novel, spewing high eloquence and low comedy, flooding the eyes and ears with Yiddish puns and gangster slang. Yet Bellow’s riotous style carries in its depths a terrible, almost unbearable existential angst. Augie’s restlessness is born of his desperation to understand what he should do and who he should be. “His desire is to be an Augie,” Bellow explained. “Surely the greatest human desire—not the deepest but the widest—is to be used.” But what if you can’t figure out how the world should use you? Then you end up “an Augie”—a wisecracking, uninhibited antihero, and one of American literature’s mildest and most lovable outlaws. — Merve Emre

Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, 1955

The 1997 paperback edition of Lolita has a blurb on the back calling it “the only convincing love story of our century.” This is just one example of how people, even for decades after the initial uproar about the novel’s publication (in 1955 in France and in 1958 in the U.S., after some skittishness about obscenity), continue to be so weird about it. Lolita is, of course, not a love story but a horrific spin on the travelogue. And the line most often cited as its first (“Light of my life, fire of my loins”) is not the actual first line, or on the first page. Oh well. Everybody knows what it’s about. Lolita needs its disgusting premise for the opportunity that such constraints offer for inventive language, or “aesthetic bliss,” which was Nabokov’s self-stated only goal. He has his pedophilic narrator describe the act of looking at old photographs of a woman when she was a child in an effort to become sexually attracted to her as an adult: “I tom-peeped across the hedges of years, into wan little windows.” You have to do things the hard way to get to a sentence like that. — Kaitlyn Tiffany

Giovanni’s Room, by James Baldwin, 1956

After publishing Go Tell It on the Mountain, a novel about Black life in Harlem, Baldwin’s publisher, Knopf, balked at his next, which was about a group of queer white men in Paris. “This new book will ruin your career, because you’re not writing about the same things and in the same manner as you were before, and we won’t publish this book as a favor to you,” Baldwin said Knopf told him. But Baldwin did not believe that his identity as a Black American man should preclude him from excavating another aspect of what makes us human—whom and how we love, and what we risk losing in pursuit of love. Giovanni’s Room, which was ultimately published by Dial Press, demonstrates the deftness of Baldwin’s writing, and it brought me into the minds and lives of characters I have never forgotten. — Clint Smith

Peyton Place, by Grace Metalious, 1956

Metalious’s scandalous page-turner was an instant phenomenon, selling 60,000 copies in its first 10 days after publication. The fascination came from the ways it exposed the lurid underbelly of a small New England town: Characters get abortions and engage in incest, murder, alcholism, rape. In Eisenhower’s America, this was the id raging beneath all of the postwar conformity (so successful was the conceit that a Peyton Place film and soap opera would follow). Looking back at the book in 2014, the novelist Thomas Mallon wrote that Metalious was at her best in the novel’s “portraits of women with a moment to themselves, reflective, solitary stretches.” If Metalious was revealing hidden lustiness, she was also tapping into a well of sadness.  Americans were desperate to see their dark fantasies and anxieties revealed on the page, and she gave them what they wanted. — Gal Beckerman

Deep Water, by Patricia Highsmith, 1957

Highsmith once called her protagonists “my psychopath heroes,” and Vic Van Allen is one of her more underrated creations. A taciturn man who buries his disgust over his loveless marriage by busying himself with “intellectual” hobbies—running a boutique printing press, designing hand-set colophons, breeding snails—Vic is the picture of self-deception. Deep Water dissects Vic’s emasculated psyche as he coolly watches his wife neglect their daughter and carry on affairs. When his frustration leads to violence, though, the crime is not the point; as with many Highsmith stories, Deep Water is a slow-burn study of ego, obsession, and greed—as well as how gender roles, social status, and extreme wealth can shelter the guilty. Highsmith achieved more success abroad than in the States, but through characters like Vic, she proved herself adept at diagnosing a specific, all-American amorality. — Shirley Li

No-No Boy, by John Okada, 1957

No-No Boy is angry and raw, a gut punch of a novel that takes place in 1946, as Japanese Americans are reeling from the joint traumas of internment and war. Ichiro has just come back to Seattle after four years away. While many young Japanese American men are returning from fighting abroad, Ichiro is among those called “no-no boys,” who were imprisoned for resisting the military draft and, to the consternation of some friends and family, refusing to sign a loyalty oath to the U.S. Ichiro feels guilty, furious, and lonely all at once, “like an intruder in a world to which he had no claim.” He finds his way forward in “a demimonde of broken dreams, fallen heroes and brawling drunks,” as the writer Ruth Ozeki has described it. Okada’s novel was published only 12 years after World War II ended and initially wasn’t received well; it was rediscovered in the 1970s by a group of Asian American writers in San Francisco and reissued, this time to greater acclaim. What those writers saw then remains potent today. The bitter shame of having one’s fealty questioned, the aching pain of family conflict, the lurking sadness of a community shattered by internment and beset by the existential question of how to truly belong to this country—with the particular honesty that fiction can afford, Okada manages to capture it all. — Jane Yong Kim

On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, 1957

Kerouac’s chronicle of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty’s druggy, boozy odyssey by car fictionalized a generation’s disillusionment in the years after World War II and became the defining novel of the Beat movement. But for all of its countercultural influence, On the Road is fundamentally, traditionally American, as its characters cross the country chasing after a mythic and unattainable dream. — Elise Hannum

The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson, 1959

Jackson is most known for her short story “The Lottery.” I remain convinced, however, that her strongest work is The Haunting of Hill House. As far as Gothic literature goes, it has it all: ghosts, lesbians, surprise staircases, the titular haunted house. But what distinguishes it as one of the best American novels ever written (and I’m not being hyperbolic) is Jackson’s intricate, almost surreptitious craft. Hill House’s earliest scenes don’t even really resemble those of a ghost story. Instead, it opens almost like a feminist road novel, with its heroine, Eleanor, taking a car on a joy ride. The alarming speed with which vehicular freedom switches gears into landlocked claustrophobia is one of Jackson’s signature magic tricks. Each time I reread this novel, I end up asking myself: How did she do that? — Jane Hu

Catch-22, by Joseph Heller, 1961

Not many book titles contribute a new term to the language. Would this one have caught on if it had been Catch-14 (rejected because the number 14 was deemed not funny enough)? Heller’s darkly comic and absurdist anti-war novel drew on the many bombing missions he’d flown in Europe during the Second World War. The “catch” in Catch-22 took various forms, famously this one: You can’t stop flying missions unless you can show you’re crazy, but you can’t be crazy if you want to stop flying missions. A logical trap—and, as readers know, one applicable to all of modern life. — Cullen Murphy

A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle, 1962

In the expansive universe of A Wrinkle in Time, science feels like magic, creativity is a force against creeping darkness, and children have more agency than adults. But what I always loved most was how Meg Murry’s normal teenage troubles—her awkwardness, her indignation—could be formidable gifts. — Elise Hannum

Another Country, by James Baldwin, 1962

The friends and lovers who animate Another Country are reminiscent of the characters who filled Baldwin’s own itinerant life. The novel begins by following Rufus Scott, a depressed jazz drummer, and then tracks the reverberations after he jumps off the George Washington Bridge. A wide circle of artists experience the pain of losing Scott; his sorrows echo their own. Baldwin, with his usual poetry, summed up the story of one character, a writer in Greenwich Village: “Love was a country he knew nothing about.” — Gal Beckerman

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey, 1962

No book captured the stultifying conformity of American society in the late 1950s and early ’60s better than Kesey’s portrait of an Oregon mental institution. Our main character, McMurphy, finds himself there simply because he is an individual unafraid to speak his mind. But as the novel progresses, this quality will become even more of a liability, and the oppressiveness of the hospital, of a society that will not accept difference, will break him. — Gal Beckerman

Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov, 1962

There’s the poet (John Shade). There’s the critic (Charles Kinbote). The story they tell together—an autobiographical poem of 999 lines, written by the one and discussed at length by the other—becomes Pale Fire, and the novel is Nabokov at his Nabokoviest: puns and puzzles and heroic couplets, words as form and function, slyness summoned to explore the banality of grief. The book is also Nabokov at his most inventive. With its prose-addled poetry and ever-expanding web of cross-references, Pale Fire captured the headiness of hypertextual discourse decades in advance. The book reads, at times, like the internet. It is a prescient piece of metafiction. That alone explains its significance. But Nabokov’s most complicated novel is also his starkest. All fiction is, in some way, a reckoning with death, and Pale Fire is ingenuity that aches: an attempt to wrangle poetry from, as Shade calls it, the “twisted life” and “the inadmissible abyss.” — Megan Garber

The Zebra-Striped Hearse, by Ross Macdonald, 1962

Worms don’t have eyes, but it’s fitting that the keen and ponderous narrator of The Zebra-Striped Hearse describes his perspective as “the worm’s-eye view.” The private eye Lew Archer is a notably empathic investigator, as prone to catching people lie as he is to mulling the reasons they do so. His thoughtful disposition both softens the machismo of the hard-boiled story and sharpens its focus. Macdonald imagines the detective as society’s skeptic and its witness, sending Archer on a twisty yet tender jaunt through California, Nevada, and Mexico. Genre tropes abound, but they’re always starting points for deeper inquiries into romance, sexuality, and class mobility. Zebra’s lean prose and snappy dialogue place Macdonald among crime fiction’s great stylists, but the novel’s staying power is rooted in its intense curiosity. For the worm, the underworld is the world. — Stephen Kearse

The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath, 1963

There’s the depression of popular conception—the listless sadness of a character in a pharmaceutical advertisement—and then there’s the biting, brisk, darkly comic version that Plath brings to life in The Bell Jar. It is a curiously unyielding read: Though the book is semi-autobiographical, Plath’s lucid prose belies the mystery she was and remains. (She died by suicide a month after the book’s publication, under a pseudonym, in the U.K.; Plath’s family was embarrassed by the novel and blocked it from being released in her native United States for close to a decade.) The Bell Jar is as frustrating and brilliant as its author. — Elizabeth Bruenig

The Group, by Mary McCarthy, 1963

The Group follows eight friends, freshly graduated from Vassar, as they drink and debate and get into exploits so saucy that the book was banned in several countries. If that sounds very Sex and the City, it’s because—seriously—it helped inspire Sex and the City. But it has a harder edge than that description might imply: The main characters are frequently mean to one another, and McCarthy is mean about them. Her satiric descriptions spare none, whether she’s skewering the women’s naivete, their narcissism, their failed social strivings, or their haughty pretensions. (The men who show up intermittently are even worse, saying things such as “She has a thermal look. Nacreous skin, plumped with oysters. Yum, yum, yum; money, money, money.”) The novel is funny and sharp and gossipy, but it’s also sweepingly sad, a “history of the loss of faith in progress,” as McCarthy bleakly put it, that captures a collective shattering of optimism in the years between the New Deal and World War II—and the individual shattering, too, that can come just from growing up. — Faith Hill

The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon, 1966

Measured against its peers within Pynchon’s bibliography, the brevity of The Crying of Lot 49 is conspicuous—like when Beethoven compressed all of his talents into the three minutes of “Für Elise.” Yet this novella’s density is appropriate, considering the tangled, conspiratorial web that ensnares its protagonist, the young and easily influenced Oedipa Maas. Asked to execute the final affairs of a former lover, Maas is quickly diverted into a world of quack doctors, mob lawyers, garden-variety perverts, warring secret societies, and many other phantasmagoric phenomena of the bleary-eyed, burned-out 1960s counterculture. Rendered in Pynchon’s allusive and idiosyncratic prose, her journey feels like the trip from hell—and it becomes a shared dream for readers to snap out of too. — Jeremy Gordon

A Sport and a Pastime, by James Salter, 1967

I suppose the line would have to go something like: “Come for the sex, stay for the sentences.”

Come for the sex, stay for the narrative ingenuity? Come for the sex, stay for the unerringly precise observations of life in all of its vital, transient detail. Come for the sex, stay for the affect, the mood of the thing—the indolence, melancholy, sudden bursts of animal joy. A Sport and a Pastime is known—and for good reason—as an erotic novel. Indeed, there is a lot of sex in this short book. And not just a lot of sex, but a lot of good sex; sex that is satisfying to its fictional participants as well as to its readers. Meaning that it is well-written sex. All that sex is being had by the American Phillip Dean and the French shopgirl Anne-Marie. They are the novel’s protagonists, or at least they are the narrator’s protagonists. The narrator, an associate of Dean’s, is somehow privy to everything that transpires behind the closed door of his friend’s bedroom. The book never explains the narrator’s omniscience. He seems unlikely—given his all-encompassing view of the proceedings—to be recounting something learned secondhand. That his vantage is neither prurient nor voyeuristic excludes a Peeping Tom hypothesis. And though he seems to know Dean’s and Anne-Marie’s interior thoughts, it is also not entirely clear whether the narrator is concocting these scenes from whole cloth. At one point he refers to himself as a “somnambulist,” which seems about right. His account of these lovers is suspended between sleep and wakefulness, between fantasy and fact—and as such, makes this book less an erotic novel and more an interrogation of fiction itself. (Though by all means, come for the sex.) — Peter Mendelsund

Couples, by John Updike, 1968

Couples caused a scandal when it was published, but it was easy for Updike to weather. Having written a novel about suburban adultery before such novels were commonplace, he anticipated some outrage. No matter: The fainting-couch wailing only made him more famous. But what did matter to Updike were the friendships that he nuked. The book was a thinly disguised ethnography of his bored and prosperous social set in Ipswich, Massachusetts, which was torn between rigid WASPy mores and the enticements of the sexual revolution. Not all of his friends forgave him. How could they? It’s one thing to have your dinner-party pretensions and proto-polyamory exposed on the page. It’s quite another to have them rendered in precise lyrical prose by an all-time great American stylist. Nearly 60 years on, their loss is still our gain. — Ross Andersen

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick, 1968

Before there was Blade Runner, there was Dick’s prescient science-fiction noir, which opens not with the movie adaptation’s columns of fire spewing into a degraded sky, but with a tedious domestic dispute. Both scenes communicate dystopia in their own ways, but Dick’s is sneakier: Bounty Hunter Rick Deckard and his wife argue over the settings on the machine that controls their mood, immediately raising the question of just how real they are in comparison to the rogue androids that Deckard is paid to capture and “retire,” or, essentially, kill. This is a bleak, wry, and mind-bending novel—a consideration of the all-too-porous lines that separate human from animal from machine. — Lenika Cruz

Divorcing, by Susan Taubes, 1969

Divorcing is a rediscovered masterpiece, a raw, witty, and utterly original novel about the life and afterlife of a mordant female Jewish philosopher. When it came out, a sneering critic for The New York Times called it the noodlings of a “lady novelist.” Taubes drowned herself a few days later. The book was reissued in 2020, this time to delirious praise. Extraordinary scenes include the narrator’s own funeral as seen from her pink-silk-lined coffin, her head’s jubilant liberation from her body after it is decapitated in a traffic accident on the Champs-Élysées, and an argument between her and her husband narrated by way of a hilarious close analysis of his hand gestures, how his outraged index finger launches on “a vertical course to the sublime.” Taubes’s voice, assured and vulnerable at the same time, comes out of nowhere anyone else has ever been. She should have been a major American novelist. — Judith Shulevitz

Portnoy’s Complaint, by Philip Roth, 1969

Before I read Portnoy’s Complaint, I thought it wasn’t for girls. I knew it was full of masturbation and mommy issues, something about sex with a piece of liver? But I read it anyway and couldn’t believe what a loss it would have been not to. No book better channels the strangeness of being Jewish in America, for one. It’s also a nasty, horny book—which matters. Portnoy’s Complaint is the novel in which Roth taught himself to write freely about sex and desire. Without Portnoy, there’s no Sabbath’s Theater, no Counterlife, none of the David Kepesh books. And without those, who could say how dirty John Updike, a famous Roth-envier, would have let himself get in those later Rabbit novels? What avenues would have been open, more recently, to writers such as Melissa Broder and Patricia Lockwood? Would we have gotten the serious threesomes in Lillian Fishman’s Acts of Service without the tragicomic ones in Portnoy? Alexander Portnoy, his shrink, and his piece of liver flung the bedroom doors open for postwar American fiction. We all owe him—which is to say we owe Roth—for that. — Lily Meyer

Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, 1969

Slaughterhouse-Five is Vonnegut’s most enduring novel, thanks to its blend of his signature preoccupations: science fiction (time-traveling extra-dimensional aliens), black humor (a full military trial over the theft of a teapot, held amid the ashes of an utterly destroyed city), and good-natured fatalism. Told in deceptively simple language via nonchronological flashes, it cartwheels between moments and planets, focusing on its protagonist’s imprisonment by the Germans on the eve of the Allied firebombing of Dresden. The novel is an attempt to live with the horrors that repeat on loop in our memories, impervious to any attempts to rewrite them. In the end, its characters, and the reader, are left with no comfort beyond the book’s resigned refrain, its alien race’s response to death: “So it goes.” — Emma Sarappo

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, by Judy Blume, 1970

In the five decades since this novel’s publication, Blume has become one of America’s most beloved, most banned authors, and its protagonist, Margaret Simon, a kind of a patron saint of flat-chested preteen girls (who can forget the famous “I must, I must, I must increase my bust!” chant?). That reputation is well earned; Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is indeed full of first periods and crushes and kissing games. But don’t let the sixth-grade setting fool you: This book is for people of all ages (and genders). It’s about feeling like the odd one out, the existential pain of yearning to belong, what it means to define your own relationship to religious faith. It’s got a big heart, subtle wisdom, and impeccable comedic timing. — Amy Weiss-Meyer

Desperate Characters, by Paula Fox, 1970

Sophie Bentwood, a literary translator, is living in the late 1960s with her husband, a lawyer, in a so-called transitional Brooklyn neighborhood. Insulated in their professional and domestic lives from the rage and violence sweeping the nation, they nevertheless carry a sense of encroaching dread. Their notional sympathy for Black and poor people recedes before fear and disgust as, slicing tomatoes with their Sabatier knives for a meal of “risotto Milanese in a green ceramic bowl,” they watch addicts and drunks through their brownstone windows. Desperate Characters follows this couple through one weekend during which Sophie, bitten by a stray cat, focuses her fear on tetanus and rabies. Even the slightest bits of mundane dialogue in Fox’s delicately wrought novel convey the suffocating force of the couple’s “ordinary estrangement” from the world and from each other. With exquisite control of tone, gesture, and incidental detail, Fox delineates the corrosive effects of mutual wariness, suspicion, boredom, and sometimes sheer hatred upon two people beset with thoughts of passion spent, dreams deferred, lovers lost: “Ticking away inside the carapace of ordinary life and its sketchy agreements was anarchy.” Desperate Characters is a dark and gripping meditation on Thoreau’s famous observation that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” — Andrew Delbanco

Play It as It Lays, by Joan Didion, 1970

A stylish, pitiless tour through an arid West seething with artifice, Didion’s Hollywood gothic is at once claustrophobic and anomic. Readers join the distant and ironic narrator, Maria, on a journey that takes her from the cocktail parties of Los Angeles’s glitterati to sizzling wide-open highways to a psychiatric institution where she begins atoning for a life half-lived. Didion withholds explicit judgment on Maria’s behavior; the sum of her actions and motives is for readers to determine. But her world is a dark vision of American discontent at a moment of turmoil and transition. — Elizabeth Bruenig

Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine, by Stanley Crawford, 1972

Crawford died in January, leaving behind a corpus of strange and exhilarating work. There’s probably no better place to start than Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine, which Crawford himself described as “the best th