US Literature

I'm Australian and find that we hear more about English literature than American literature. This I have learned from Librarything. Two books I saw mentioned recently were A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and A Midwife's Tale (is it American?). I'm familiar with all of the "classic" American novels but what have I missed?

Is there a particular era in which you're interested?

For a (very worthwhile) challenge, I suggest the USA trilogy by John Dos Passos ... their usually found in one volume: U.S.A: I. The 42nd parallel. II. Nineteen nineteen. III. The big money.

The setting is the U.S. in the 1930s and covers a lot of different viewpoints.

John Steinbeck is a wonderful classic American author. I read The Grapes of Wrath and just loved it. It's a powerful portrayal of America during the "dust bowl" years (1930s), and a scathing social commentary.

Among the many worthy authors, I suggest Dorothy Parker, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, Eudora Welty, Willa Cather, Mary McCarthy, Carson McCullers, Susan Sontag, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Tama Janowitz, Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
OOOPPPSSS! Just realized they are all women...oh well, here are a few men.
Sinclair Lewis, Richard Wright, Henry James (obviously).
I don't know why some of the names do not touchstone.
I only mentioned the names because there are so many things they wrote, and so much to choose from...

amanda, depends on which Midwife's Tale you are referring to. The Laurel Thatcher Ulrich book is a beautiful mix of history and a midwife's diary from 18th century Maine. There is also a book of similar name by Chris Bohjalian which was/is very popular. It's another New England tale, but fiction.

If you can find Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights, it's well worth reading. (Before the relatively recent NYRB reprint it was difficult to find even in the US.) Not precisely a novel but not really a memoir either, it's an exquisite book that seems almost to create a literary category all its own.

If you like bright, witty, satirical novels with dangerously sharp edges, then you must read Dawn Powell. Most of her work, and certainly all of her best work, is set in New York, a city she lived in for nearly 45 years but where, she claimed, she was always "a permanent visitor." Perhaps this psychological status allowed her to observe the social world around her with a particularly keen and unsentimental eye. The wicked pavilion and The golden spur are brilliant evocations of the Bohemian scene in 1940s and '50s Greenwich Village, a scene she was very much a part of, while an earlier novel, Angels on Toast skewers the city's advertising industry. A major Powell "revival" began in the 1990s and many of her books were reprinted and are fairly easy to find in the US, but I have no idea what their availability in Australia might be.

Thnaks, guys. I am have read Carson McCullers and Henry James and the other big names.

I'll be writing down all your suggestions. If you think of more, please let me know.

Some more contemporary writers:

I am a big Philip Roth fan, although I don't like all his books. My favorite, and to my mind his masterpied, is American Pastoral, which is a complex story of disillusionment with the American dream.

I also like James Salter, but you have to like really stripped-down prose to enjoy his writing. The Hunters made me interested in something I never thought would be interesting -- the experience of a US fighter pilot in the Korean War. Light Years is a portrait of the break-down of a marriage and a family in what appears to be an idyllic setting.

E.L. Doctorow is another good US writer. I particularly like his more recent work, including The March and Sweet Land Stories.

Some other recent books by US writers I've enjoyed are The Testament of Yves Gundron and to a lesser extent Brookland by Emily Barton (both kind of strange quasi-historical novels) and The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez (a tale of the 60s).

Cormac McCarthy is, I think, America's most talented living writer. Nevermind all the Oprah nonsense.

William Vollmann writes erudite, extensively researched post-modern historical fiction (seven dreams series and Europe Central). Also gritty, fascinating novels about prostitutes (Whores for Gloria, The Royal Family) and sociological studies: Rising Up and Rising Down (on when violence is appropriate) and Poor People, a book in which he asks poor people all over the world why they think they're poor.

Paul Bowles. The Sheltering Sky.

There are some non-urban, western or rural writers that are very good: Flannery O'connor, Eudora Welty, Ivan Doig, Gap Creek by Rob Morgan, Wallace Stegner, Jim Harrison, Wendell Berry. Please ignore the touchstones.

#10 almigwin: these are names that ring a bell but are unknown to me. Thanks for that.

I like the short stories of Pam Houston, Annie Proulx and Sherman Alexie.

No one has mentioned William Faulkner. Very different; with stream of consciousness writing reminiscent of Joyce.

For something more contemporary Joyce Carol Oates is prolific, with much critical acclaim. I also like Louise Erdrich who writes about a fictional American Indian reservation much the way Faulkner writes about Yoknapowtawpna (or something like that) county in his novels. I think her novel Love Medicine should be a modern American 'classic.'

I recommend The Brother's K by David James Duncan it's my favorite American book, one of the best novels of all time and I feel it really gets the spirit of Americans down.

I also love Alice Walker The color purple is her classic but I like the sequel The Temple of My Familiar even better.

Faulkner is No. 1 with me, as I have mentioned (maybe ad nauseam ) elsewhere. When someone says they are familiar with all the classic American novels, I assume they are including him, as well as Hemingway and Twain, who haven't been mentioned either. (Only a very small percentage of what Faulkner wrote could be called "stream of consciousness"; a lot of it is much more straight-forward and approachable. I think the comparison to Joyce frightens some people away from Faulkner unnecessarily.)

I highly recommend Louise Erdrich; Barbara Kingsolver;Robert Penn Warren (especially All the King's Men);Reynolds Price and Andre Dubus the elder.

I loved Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Body & Soul by Frank Conroy.

I second the Kesey recommendation. Sometimes a Great Notion is a terrific read. And what's more American than a family of independent, in-your-face loggers in the mighty Pacific Northwest, battling nature and time and big business and government ...Yeah, that one should be high on the list.

Oh, and I forgot Susan Minot One of her books was just made into a movie, "Evening" There was an article on it in the Sunday New York Times today.

I would add T.R. Pearson say Cry Me A River and Michael Malone Handling Sin or Time's Witness as well as Larry McMurtry, John O'Hara Herman Wouk and Willa Cather .

Contemporary recs:
Anything by Alice Walker; almost anything by Toni Morrison (especially earlier ones); Louise Erdrich, who writes wonderfully about contemporary Native Americans; anything by Barbara Kingsolver; anything by David James Duncan; Gloria Naylor, especially Mama Day.

I think the Song of Solomon is Toni Morrison's best book. Also Ragtime by Doctorow.

I liked The Bluest Eye by Morrison, although I hesitate to say it's her best as I haven't read them all.

I would also add Saul Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March, Ravelstein, Henderson the Rain King), James Baldwin (Another Country, Giovanni's Room, Go Tell it on the Mountain), and Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior, China Men, The Fifth Book of Peace) to this fine list.

There's yet another The Midwife's Tale also, it's by Gretchen Moran Laskas and was a surprisingly good read for me. (I say surprisingly because I normally try to avoid reading the works of acquaintances as most of my acquaintances can't necessarily write too well.)

I've not seen his work mentioned, but Robert Stone is a modern American writer worth reading. I recommend A Flag for Sunrise, set in South America during America's somewhat covert and long running involvement in the civil wars there, and Outerbridge Reach, a less political, more personal tale. Stone has identified a particular American type -- the tragic paranoid. His characters struggle with moral dilemmas and dreams gone awry. Very American.

Don Dellillo also deserves a place on your list. His White Noise is a contemporary classic. You will see some of the same themes as you see in Stone, but the stylistics and approach are different. Delillo is more urbane, with less machismo (often the source of Stone's tragedies).

The other writers mentioned in this group are also worthy of reading, obviously (obvious to me, at any rate). But I thought I'd throw in a word for a couple of our modern masters to go along with Bellow, Morrison, McCarthy, and all the rest.

I haven't seen it mentioned here how American writing is often "regional," in the sense of speaking from the perspective of particular American subcultures. Walker, Morrison, Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Faulkner -- all influenced by Southern culture with all of its broad strains (race, religion, populism). Bellow, Roth, Doctorow -- all influenced by the urban, intellectual American experience. I'm not sure who I would pick as a representative, quintessential American author who can speak coast to coast. Twain? I guess that's a discussion for an American Lit group.

I assume you included To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee in "all the classics". Having just re-read it for the first time in 20 years, I was reminded how, to me, it is the quintessential great American novel.

#25, Yes Robert Stone is a good modern US writer; I would recommend Dog Soldiers: a novel, a brilliant picture of the Vietnam era, both there and in the US.

I suggest Russell Banks. Rule of the Bone and Sweet Hereafter are two of his best books. He is one those that I have hunted out everything he has written.

Ford Madox Ford has been left out, perhaps because he was British, but he lived in the south with the Allen Tate, Carolyn Gordon crowd. He wrote the good soldier, parade's end, and the fifth gueen.I think he is a most underappreciated writer.

If anyone is interested in American Lit generally, I would recommend the book Literature in America: an illustrated history by Peter Conn. It was published in 1989, so I don't know if it is still in print. While providing a nice overview of the history of American Literature, it also connects to what's going on in the other fine arts at the time. The connections are pretty amazing sometimes. It's a good-sized book, fairly heavy - I read it cover to cover when it first came out (got it from the library) and was so delighted with it I bought a copy - at a time when I had absolutely no money to buy books.

I noticed that Theodore Dreiser was left off the list of novelists, and no philosophers or poets were discussed.
For poets:
Amy Lowell
Sara Teasdale
Emily dickinson
henry wadsworth Longfellow
Walt Whitman
James Merrill
Richard Wilbur
Elizabeth Bishop
Marianne Moore
Hilda doolittle
Pound and Eliot
allen Ginsburg
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
William Carlos Williams
Robert Lowell
John Ashberry
John Berryman
Theodore Roethke
Anne Sexton
Sylvia Plath
Adrienne Rich
Diane Wakowski
Carolyn Forche

I probably forgot some important ones, but this is a start.

For philosophers, please remember Emerson and Thoreau, and John Dewey, and Charles Pierce.

I'm not sure if anyone's mentioned Raymond Carver. I can also recommend William Maxwell, Richard Yates, Katherine Anne Porter and Richard Ford. Kay Boyle is an interesting writer too.

I second the suggestions of #32 and would like to add Martha Gellhorn.She was a war correspondent, and an ex-wife of Hemingway. We seem to have forgotten Edith Wharton and the playwrights:

Tennessee Williams
Arthur Miller
Eugene O'Neill
Clifford Odets
Tony Kushner
Lillian Hellmann
Maxwell Anderson
S.N. Behrman
August Wilson
Lorraine Hansberry
Wendy Wasserstein
Sam Shepard
A.R. Gurney
Thornton Wilder
Horton Foote

#8- regarding Doctorow his ultimate American novel is probably Ragtime.

i also add Kerouac's On THe Road as a unique and representative American novel.

I second Doctorow, particularly Ragtime. And Raymond Carver's short stories; I was absolutely blown away the first tieme I read "Cathedral."

Sherman Alexie is a wonderful Native American writer.

Amy Tan writes about generational conflicts in the Chinese-American family.

Since you say you've read James, I assume you've also read Edith Wharton; if not The House of Mirth is a must.

Willa Cather is another American classic.

John Patrick Shanley has written some remarkable plays, notably Doubt.

Sherman Alexie was interviewed on NPR this morning about his new book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14586575

NPR has a whole web site devoted to the American novel:

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americannovel/topnovel/index.html

But, while we're at it, please don't forget the leading edge modernist women, H.D. and Djuna Barnes.

And no touchstones yet for Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville? How about our greatest poet, Dr. Seuss? And until you've read the little gems by Nathaniel West, you really haven't plumbed American (and especially Hollywood) "culture".

Very few African-American writers have been named - James Baldwin, Langston Hughes and Harriet Beacher Stowe should be on the list. And I.B. Singer ought to be added to the list of great emigre writers.

There's also a lot of great genre writing, like James Cain. Great for a quick read.

Oh, so many, many things to read!!

Harriet Beecher Stowe was African-American? I don't think so . . . even if she did write Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Alice Walker
Zora Neal Hurston
August Wilson
Ralph Ellison--The Invisible Man
Leroi Jones, aka Amiri Baraka
Edward P. Jones
Ernest J. Gaines--A Lesson Before Dying

Harriet Beecher Stowe was the daughter of the famous New England clergyman & writer Henry Ward Beecher He wrote a great deal about the evils of slavery & was a leader in the abolitionist movement. Harriet grew up in this atmosphere but it wasn't until she & her husband moved to Cincinnati & she met & helped slaves escaping across the Ohio river that she was able to write Uncle Tom's Cabin which as Lincoln remarked "started the civil war."

For an old novel, there is The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. An American classic

A novel written some 25 years ago about 1890's New York, there is A Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin. Has lements of fantasy, but richly written.

For an old novel, there is The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. An American classic

A novel written some 25 years ago about 1890's New York, there is A Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin. Has elements of fantasy, but richly written.

Of course - thanks - typing too fast, thinking too slow!

I see that my message got posted twice. #40 has the word "elements" spelled wrong, which I thought I could fix while waiting for either my slow connection or the LT server to respond. Obviously not: hence #41 came along.

Some favourite US authors of mine are Michael Chabon, and John Steinbeck and Paul Auster, with a vote for Susan Sontag for essays.

However, I am not well qualified to comment, as I have not read US titles extensively.

I just finished a fabulous novel written in 2000 by Jeffery Lent In the Fall -- uniquely American in that it is about slavery's legacy and post Civil War New England. It is not post-modernist; just a straightforward narrative -- but it really gripped me. Better than many of the American classics I have read and I am surprised it didn't receive more recognition. I would highly recommend it.

jhowell, Lent has a new novel just out, but the title escapes me. His Lost Nation was pretty good also.