F Scott Fitzgerald is one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century I feel. I've read each of his books except for Tender is the Night, as well as several of his short stories, and there really don't seem to be very many people who can write on the level that he did.
Hmm...I'll definiately have to think more about it, but for starters, if I had control over what it was and everyone had to listen, I would pick a crappy book. That way, when everyone looked at it, they'd be like, "What?" Discombublating.
I have an idea. Since so many of us have so many ideas about what the essential novels of American literature are, let's make a list of what books we all feel are essential to read for the best holistic understanding of American literature. Once this list is made, we could use a poll to weed out the books that we most disagree upon. We could set the goal at a total of 30 books as a final result. One rule should be related to the maximum amount of books on the list per author. I would suggest 2 by each author as the maximum. All in favor?
I say let's go for it. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut On the Road by Jack Kerouac The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs East of Eden by John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck Lolita by Vladimir Nabakov (Yeah, he's Russian, but he wrote this in America.) Catch-22 by Joseph Heller A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson Moby Dick by Herman Melville (I haven't actually read all of this one, but I really liked what I've read, and I've been made to believe that this is one of the greatest novels ever written by quite a few people.) I can't really think of anything else that I've read which I would call canonical.
Most I agree with. A few others... In Cold Blood by Truman Capote The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway The Awakening by Kate Chopin The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper That's all I can think of for now...have to go to class.
Best American novels, in my opinion i would think that The Red Badge of Courage would be way up there in terms of the anti-war approach to novels.
