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What's Your Pick for the Great American Novel?

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smoogatz Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-12-07 04:31 PM
Original message
What's Your Pick for the Great American Novel?
I'd have to go with "The Great Gatsby," I think. It's got it all--great characters, great story, great writing, and it's all about money and sex and class and cars and drinking. How can you beat that?
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no_hypocrisy Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-12-07 04:33 PM
Response to Original message
1. It Can't Happen Here or Elmer Gantry
both by Sinclair Lewis.
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patrice Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-12-07 04:34 PM
Response to Original message
2. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Glorfindel Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-12-07 04:38 PM
Response to Original message
3. "The Grapes of Wrath"
followed in no particular order by "Huckleberry Finn," "Gone with the Wind," and the one that changed my life, "The City and the Pillar," by Gore Vidal (you had to be there...)
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catgirl Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-12-07 04:38 PM
Response to Original message
4. Anything by John Steinbeck
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cloudbase Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-12-07 05:16 PM
Response to Reply #4
21. Count me in
with a vote for Steinbeck.
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Nay Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-12-07 06:12 PM
Response to Reply #21
29. Yeah, me too. I just read "The Wayward Bus" and am now
reading "Grapes of Wrath." I had forgotten how goddamn good Steinbeck is.
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YOY Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-12-07 04:39 PM
Response to Original message
5. You've got my pick right there
Even before I opened your thread!

Jay really was 'better than the lot of them'...transcends the era in which it was written to any period really.

The elites hate a self-made-man and many truly think they are better than the regular guy.
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LSparkle Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-12-07 04:39 PM
Response to Original message
6. "On The Road" by Jack Kerouac
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smoogatz Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-12-07 05:11 PM
Response to Reply #6
19. I always think of "On the Road" as a memoir--
but Kerouac wrote it as a novel. An American classic, whatever the hell it is.
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Stuckinthebush Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-12-07 04:41 PM
Response to Original message
7. Sisters by Ms. Cheney
No?

Oh...To Kill a Mockingbird then
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RoseMead Donating Member (953 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-12-07 04:43 PM
Response to Original message
8. Moby Dick or Catch -22
Hard for me to choose between those two.
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smoogatz Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-12-07 05:07 PM
Response to Reply #8
16. Both masterpieces, IMO.
"Catch-22" is the great American comic novel, I think.
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displacedtexan Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-12-07 04:48 PM
Response to Original message
9. "An American Tragedy"
by Theodore Dreiser
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Nay Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-12-07 06:13 PM
Response to Reply #9
30. Another favorite of mine, got to reread that one soon.
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MasonJar Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-12-07 04:50 PM
Response to Original message
10. Most of my favorite novels are British, but what a striking idea for a blog.
I think my all time favorite is Gone With the Wind ( I've read it several times.) I am also very partial to Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men or East of Eden. The Great Gatsby is amazing as is Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. I personally do not like it, but I have to say that the greatest American novel might be Moby Dick.
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SheilaT Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-12-07 04:50 PM
Response to Original message
11. When She Was Good and Henry and Clara
"When She Was Good" by Philip Roth, his first full-length novel, is absolutely wonderful, in my opinion. It seems to still be in print, but most people don't know about it. It's about life in post WWII America, and the consequences of our actions. The main character, Lucy Nelson, is a captive of her gender and circumstances. I wish Roth had written more books like this one.

"Henry and Clara" by Thomas Mallon is a fictionalized account of the two people who were with President and Mrs. Lincoln that night in Ford's Theater. The story of their lives -- and I'd never heard of them before reading this book -- is absolutely amazing. You learn who they were, how they came to be at the theater that night, and what eventually happened to them. I'm constantly selling it to people when I'm in a bookstore and get mistaken for an employee.
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tibbiit Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-12-07 04:55 PM
Response to Original message
12. The Sot Weed Factor
By J Barth
tib
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pitohui Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Feb-13-07 10:29 PM
Response to Reply #12
33. yeah that's a good pick too
the sotweed factor, that's a hell of a story

i guess people can tell i like thriller or adventure influenced classics!
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Bumblebee Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-12-07 04:55 PM
Response to Original message
13. GREAT GATSBY AND LOLITA
Edited on Mon Feb-12-07 04:57 PM by Bumblebee
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smoogatz Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-12-07 05:09 PM
Response to Reply #13
18. "Lolita" is an interesting choice--it's a very European novel
set in America by a non-American. Why not?
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patrice Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-12-07 06:07 PM
Response to Reply #18
28. Right Nabokov is/was? Russian.
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AngryOldDem Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Feb-23-07 12:38 AM
Response to Reply #13
39. I second "Gatsby." n/t
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The Blue Flower Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-12-07 04:58 PM
Response to Original message
14. Elmer Gantry
n/t
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idealistMO Donating Member (40 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-12-07 05:01 PM
Response to Original message
15. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is my pick...
According to Ernest Hemingway, it was the one book from which all modern American literature came, and contemporary critics and scholars have treated it as one of the greatest American works of art.

In 1885 it was banished from the shelves of the Concord Massachusetts Public Library

It is still frequently in the news, as various schools and school systems across the country either ban it from or restore it to their classrooms.

I like to read from the "Banned Book Club"....Huck Fin and Uncle Toms Cabin are 2 great American works ..... but Huck Finn is top of my leader board of Great Banned Books.
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smoogatz Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-12-07 05:14 PM
Response to Reply #15
20. Yep.
It's a great one: it captures the period with laser acuity, I think. Twain's best by miles. One of the several great American novels, I think--although isn't having more than one cheating?
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MethuenProgressive Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-12-07 05:08 PM
Response to Original message
17. Rabble in Arms by Kenneth Roberts.
Or Arundel. Or Northwest Passage.
Nothing in the last 50 years even comes close.
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idealistMO Donating Member (40 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-12-07 05:36 PM
Response to Reply #17
25. Ken. Roberts.
I spent 2 years going through the "Used Book Stores" in the Boston area buying the complete collectin of K. Roberts books. (Early 19990s)

They are all quit an adventure and I enjoyed reading every one of them. I managed to get a few 1st edition autographs in my collection. I am glad to find someone else who appreciates Keneth Roberts. That's some good stuff. I probably have a few titles that are hard to find...."Battle of the Cowpens??" and a couple schollarly titles, that I cannot remember right now....
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Phredicles Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-12-07 05:20 PM
Response to Original message
22. A Confederacy of Dunces.
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smoogatz Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-12-07 06:06 PM
Response to Reply #22
27. It's the great New Orleans novel, anyway.
My theory always was that it was written by Walker Percy--his juvenalia. But apparently the John Kennedy Toole story is true. Great book.
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Benhurst Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-12-07 05:22 PM
Response to Original message
23. My Pet Goat
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kimmerspixelated Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-12-07 05:26 PM
Response to Original message
24. Sometimes it's hard to know what to pick
I agree with An American Tragedy and Gatsby and GWTW. But I was totally blown away with THE Poisonwood Bible (I guess most of it takes place not in the US), and J Irving's- A Prayer For Owen Meaney, and I absolutely love Wally Lamb and his second one-I Know This Much Is True. Cannot WAIT if he ever comes out with another one. Also I thought Ann Tyler's , An Amatuer Marriage was poignant in that it covered several decades in America. Whew! So many books, so little time!!
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applegrove Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-12-07 06:01 PM
Response to Original message
26. Cannery Row was great too!
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Mz Pip Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-12-07 10:15 PM
Response to Original message
31. Main Street
Sinclair Lewis.

Ver few novels have passages in them that make me cry. This one did. Has is all - great characters, great writing and a sense of time and place.

Mz Pip
:dem:
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pitohui Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Feb-13-07 10:25 PM
Response to Original message
32. libra by don delillo

what's so mind-blowing about libra is that the source material is so over-the-top that it's almost unbelievable that it wouldn't be over-written, a marine defects to russia and back at a time when it just wasn't done, you have spies and counterspies, you have jack ruby and cancer and strippers and somebody who was being trained (or not) to shoot a beloved american president, you have the president's disappearing brain, you have everything you could ever want from every thriller ever written

and yet it's utterly believable, every minute of it, i will never forget oswald's mother as described in this novel, you get her life sideways as it were and yet you know you've met this woman, the accuracy is just dead-on


for "money and sex and class and cars and drinking" i think fitzgerald has long been surpassed by joyce carol oates, but she's devoted a lot of decades to that material -- "blonde" is one i'd recommend to anyone who liked "gatsby" -- it's very very dark but then all her stuff is dark, she doesn't think too much of human nature, methinks
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saltpoint Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Mar-30-07 02:26 AM
Response to Reply #32
47. LIBRA is a very impressive choice.
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hiaasenrocks Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Feb-13-07 11:37 PM
Response to Original message
34. Good pick. Mine would be a book that is compared to TGG.
Edited on Tue Feb-13-07 11:39 PM by hiaasenrocks
It has been said of Nelson DeMille's "The Gold Coast" that it's "The Great Gatsby" meets "The Godfather."

DeMille's intro to the new edition of the novel explains how he came up with the idea and discusses reactions he got when the book was released. I'd have to agree with the many reviewers who said it is better than the two books it's compared to.

For anyone who has read this and enjoyed it, you might be interested to know that DeMille is working on a sequel as we speak...
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greatauntoftriplets Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Feb-15-07 09:13 PM
Response to Reply #34
37. That's good news.
That was a great read.
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YankeyMCC Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Feb-14-07 08:17 AM
Response to Original message
35. "Of Mice and Men" I think is my pick
I'd like to say "Moby Dick" in a way I think it speaks more fundamentally to the American mythos but it's such a difficult read and I think part of the criteria has to be accessibility. But then maybe that's just my own limitation.
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jannyk Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Feb-15-07 03:37 AM
Response to Original message
36. Another vote for Grapes of Wrath but..
would also be happy with most of Steinbeck's writings.
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Rowdyboy Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Feb-16-07 12:47 AM
Response to Original message
38. The Sotweed Factor by John Barth....
Edited on Fri Feb-16-07 12:56 AM by Rowdyboy
Here's a clip from "Sotweed"'s Amazon review

In the meandering first sentence, Barth introduces his hero as a fop and a fool -- a caricature, rather than a character, someone to laugh at rather than sympathize with; and the deliberately antiquated humor seems, at best, far-fetched. Who but a scholar would enjoy making fun of bad poetry from 1700?

"In the last years of the seventeenth century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educated at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point." (p. 13)

But, miraculously and brilliantly, the author succeeds. We believe. We get involved. And we relish every wild twist of story. The impossible becomes possible. Deliberately outlandish figures become vulnerable, mortal, and lovable. The wild coincidences of the fast-moving and delightfully complex plot cease to be the arbitrary fancies of the author, and become instead part and parcel of this crazy ever-changeable, ever-unpredictable world that we all live in.

"What a shameless, marvelous dramatist is Life, that daily plots coincidences e'ev Chaucer would not dare and ventures complications too knotty for Boccacce!" (p. 680)
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Flying Dream Blues Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Feb-23-07 05:31 PM
Response to Original message
40. I think it's too hard to pick just one. But I think Lonesome Dove
may be in the mix. It's completely American with an epic story and hilarious to boot. I think "the" American novel should have a good dose of humor. Tragedy is so "European". :)
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WCGreen Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Feb-23-07 11:01 PM
Response to Original message
41. That's funny....
I just read The Great Gatsby and found it a bit tiresome...

FSF seemed to be trying to write the Great American Novel and show off his vocabulary ...

The story was good but his prose was a bit over the top for me...

No wonder he and Hemingway didn't get along...


I would have to go with the Winter of My Discontent...
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leftyladyfrommo Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Feb-24-07 09:42 AM
Response to Original message
42. Faulkner is my favorite. Light in August. n/t
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LWolf Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Mar-20-07 06:59 AM
Response to Original message
43. The Bean Trees
Also in the running:
1000 Acres
Moo
Fried Green Tomatoes
Beloved
Catch 22
Catcher in the Rye
Slaughterhouse 5
To Kill a Mockingbird
Johnny Got His Gun
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Critters2 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Mar-20-07 07:05 PM
Response to Original message
44. Huckleberry Finn nt
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catbert836 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Mar-24-07 11:18 PM
Response to Original message
45. No Hemingway yet?
Ah well. My personal favorites are "The Old Man and the Sea" and "For Whom the Bell Tolls", but for great American novel, I'd have to say "The Sun Also Rises".
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gauguin57 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Mar-25-07 09:34 PM
Response to Original message
46. Great Gatsby.
It describes the American character so well. Could have been written yesterday.
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saltpoint Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Mar-30-07 02:27 AM
Response to Original message
48. Moby Dick is a contender because Melville takes on everything and
everybody. It's a huge sweep of an idea.

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saltpoint Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Mar-30-07 02:30 AM
Response to Original message
49. I like Larry McMurtry's trilogy -- THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, TEXASVILLE,
and DUANE'S DEPRESSED. He follows the same characters through several years and the text is alternately hilarious and profoundly sad.

McMurtry can really slap ya around when he wants to, and by god, it feels great.
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BlueIris Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Mar-31-07 11:25 AM
Response to Original message
50. Toss up between "A Separate Peace," and "Bright Lights, Big City."
Oh, how I love "Bright Lights, Big City."
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Forkboy Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Mar-31-07 01:34 PM
Response to Original message
51. Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas
It has everything The Great Gasby has plus it's funnier. ;)
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saltpoint Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Apr-02-07 12:34 AM
Response to Reply #51
53. For me, it's the funniest book ever by an American author.
I made the mistake of beginning it in a flight from O'Hare back to New York.

By the time the plane lifted off, I was weeping with laughter. It was a business-hour flight and a lot of people in suits with calculators on their laps were looking at me, wondering what my problem was.

What a great book.
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smoogatz Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Mar-31-07 09:18 PM
Response to Original message
52. I might have to disagree with myself, or at least append a runner-up:
Charles Baxter's "The Feast of Love" is a hell of a good book.
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