When The Grapes of Wrath appeared in 1939, it was received as a political document as much as a novel, inspiring fury from California’s agricultural interests and bringing its author before a Congressional investigation. It is indeed a political novel-passionately, unapologetically so-but Steinbeck’s art transforms polemic into something that outlives its immediate occasion and achieves…
John Steinbeck called East of Eden his “big book” and “the book I have always wanted and was afraid to write.” Published in 1952, it is indeed his most ambitious work: a multigenerational family saga set in California’s Salinas Valley from the Civil War through the First World War, consciously modeled on the Genesis story…
J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye appeared in 1951 and immediately divided critics and readers in ways it has never entirely stopped doing. Holden Caulfield, its sixteen-year-old narrator, has become one of the most recognized voices in American fiction-and one of the most contested. His disdain for “phoniness,” his sensitivity, his grief, and his…
Gabriel García Márquez begins One Hundred Years of Solitude at the moment of its ending and ends at the moment of its beginning, and in that circular structure contains the entire cosmology of a fictional world so fully realized it has permanently enlarged the possibilities of the novel as a form. Published in Spanish in…
Published in 1927, To the Lighthouse is Virginia Woolf’s most formally audacious novel and arguably her most personal. The book is organized around a single postponed journey-the Ramsay family’s plan to visit the lighthouse on the Isle of Skye-and uses that deferrment to excavate the nature of time, loss, and the impossibility of perfect understanding…
Virginia Woolf’s fourth novel, published in 1925, takes place in a single London day-June 1923, sometime after the Armistice-and in that day contains what feels like a lifetime, or several lifetimes, or the texture of consciousness itself trying to hold a lifetime together. Mrs. Dalloway is the book in which Woolf fully developed what she…
When Toni Morrison published Song of Solomon in 1977, it announced-before Beloved, before her Nobel Prize-the full scale of her literary ambition. The novel is sprawling, mythic, and wildly alive: a bildungsroman that reaches back through African American history and forward into something like redemption. It is Morrison at her most exuberant, and that exuberance…
Toni Morrison published Beloved in 1987, her fifth novel, and the one that would change her career and American literature along with it. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 and played a significant role in Morrison’s Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Set in Cincinnati in 1873, eight years after the…
F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby in 1925 to modest commercial reception and mixed reviews. He would not live to see it become what it is today: perhaps the single most taught, most argued-over, most cinematically adapted American novel ever written. That posthumous ascension is itself a kind of Gatsbyian story-the dream achieved too…
Harper Lee’s debut novel arrived in 1960 like a thunderclap over the American literary landscape, and more than six decades later it has not lost a single volt of its moral electricity. Set in the fictional Alabama town of Maycomb during the Great Depression, the novel unfolds through the eyes of young Scout Finch, whose…
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