{"id":548,"date":"2026-07-01T10:38:16","date_gmt":"2026-07-01T10:38:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=548"},"modified":"2026-07-01T10:38:16","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T10:38:16","slug":"5-books-that-define-america-for-better-and-for-worse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=548","title":{"rendered":"5 books that define America \u2014 for better and for worse"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Some countries built their identities on their land. Some countries built their identities on a shared ethnic heritage. America, however, began with an idea on a piece of paper.<\/p>\n

Read more America\u2019s housing was built for a world we no longer live in<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cAmerica was an enlightenment experiment, and so that means we have to make our own identity,\u201d said Mark Graybill, a professor of English at Widener University who specializes in American literature. To do so, we need books: novels that articulate what it\u2019s like to live in this strange new land.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Lawrence Buell, the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Emeritus at Harvard, wrote a definitive study on this problem called The Dream of the Great American Novel<\/em>. Buell said that the calls to produce and recognize a national literature began in 1776, but they intensified throughout the 19th century. That was especially the case after the War of 1812, when America reaffirmed its independence from England. The widespread belief, said Buell, was that \u201cnow we are a mighty political entity, we should be a cultural force as well.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In 1868, the novelist John William DeForest coined the phrase \u201cgreat American novel\u201d in an essay that feared the genuine article had not yet been written.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Over time, readers, critics, scholars, and the people who build school curricula have developed a loose consensus on some of the books that might aspire to the title \u2014 books that are certainly great, certainly interested in America, and certainly novels, but which may or may not be the<\/em> great American novel. Buell has identified a collection of \u201crecipes\u201d that they all tend to follow. Among the key ingredients for one of the recipes, he said, are a \u201cdemocratic collective that\u2019s in distress in one way or another. A collectivity of people that are operating under great pressure, great anguish often. And in that collective crucible, you see national themes of one sort or another played out.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I talked to literary scholars and critics about five major contenders for the great American novel, all of which follow Buell\u2019s recipe. I wanted to understand what it was about these books that spoke to so many people, who decided that they were so important, and what their vision of the United States is.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Taken together, the national portrait these novels offer is darker than you might expect or than the people who helped canonize these books might have wanted. If they\u2019re united on one thing, it\u2019s the idea that America is not an innocent country.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Scarlet Letter<\/em> (1850): An American origin story<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Nathaniel Hawthorne\u2019s 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter<\/em> has long been a mainstay on school syllabi and is a perennial pick for the great American novel. \u201cIt first became acclaimed, almost overnight, as the first serious topnotch piece of long fiction yet written by an American,\u201d said Buell.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The<\/em> Scarlet Letter<\/em> tells the tale of virtuous adulteress Hester Prynne, forced by her 17th-century Puritan neighbors to wear a red \u201cA\u201d forever to mark her for her crime, even as she insists on her own dignity and integrity. It is endlessly useful as a metaphor for talking about American tendencies toward mob-mindedness and our prudishness around sex, a censorious impulse that keeps recurring \u2014 and, on the other hand, for talking about Hester\u2019s very American independence and self-determination. With its early colonial setting in the first days of Puritan Boston, it speaks to an America that had not yet become modern, and it functions as a kind of origin story.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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What the novel seems to insist upon most strongly, though, is the gloomy, dour Puritanism that began the American experiment. \u201cThe founders of a new colony,\u201d Hawthorne wrote in the opening paragraphs, \u201cwhatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.\u201d In The Scarlet Letter<\/em>, that is the United States: a utopian idea, a prison, and a graveyard.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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To say that The Scarlet Letter<\/em> is the great American novel, then, is to fear that our Puritan roots are inescapable, that we can never transcend the tomb and the penitentiary \u2014 and to hope that we can still, like Hester Prynne, redeem ourselves from our sins.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Moby-Dick<\/em> (1851): A democracy at sea <\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Herman Melville was close friends with Hawthorne, whom he considered a mentor and to whom he dedicated his 1851 opus, Moby-Dick<\/em>, the story of a sea captain obsessed with the titular white whale. Yet, Melville, unlike Hawthorne, was not revered in his own lifetime.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Moby-Dick<\/em> wouldn\u2019t have its revival until the 1920s and \u201930s, when critics at Columbia University took it up. \u201cMelville emerges as this voice speaking to the middle of the 20th century like a prophet,\u201d said Jennifer Greiman, a professor of English at Wake Forest University and editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies<\/em>. With its swirling, perplexing structure of digressions and asides \u2014 some chapters rendered as theatrical scripts and others as encyclopedia entries full of whale facts \u2014 Moby-Dick<\/em> hadn\u2019t made much sense as a 19th-century realistic novel. But it made a lot of sense to ambitious, boundary-pushing modernists.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Greiman argued that Moby-Dick<\/em>\u2019s late adoption speaks to what is so American about it: the way it seems to have been written for a time that hasn\u2019t yet arrived. \u201cIt\u2019s that sense of it as a book that is speaking to something that\u2019s going to come in the future,\u201d Greiman said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Also distinctively American is Moby-Dick<\/em>\u2019s crew, made up of white and Black Americans, Native Americans, Africans, Indians, and Pacific Islanders. They make their collective fatal mistake early on in the novel, when Captain Ahab informs the men that he has no plans to fulfill the ship\u2019s mission to harvest oil from whales. Instead, Ahab said, he wants to enact vengeance against Moby-Dick, the great white whale that took his leg \u2014 and the crew willingly signs on to his monomaniacal quest.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIt\u2019s often read as a democratic tragedy,\u201d said Greiman. \u201cBecause you have this multi-racial crew, and one of the first things they do together is hand over all of their power to Ahab and doom themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In the crucible of Moby-Dick<\/em>, we see the weakness of democracy under the sway of a charismatic despot. We see the enormous and chaotic forward-seeking ambition of America, and the possibility that it may yet find that its great experiment is impossible, and its quest will end in tragedy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn<\/em> (1884): Taking on America\u2019s original sin<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Like The Scarlet Letter<\/em>, Mark Twain\u2019s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn<\/em> was an immediate hit. Twain was a literary celebrity, and his books were widely popular. But Huck Finn<\/em>, the tale of troublemaking 13-year-old Huck rafting down the Mississippi with a runaway enslaved man named Jim, wasn\u2019t considered especially important. \u201cIt\u2019s not singled out until after his death,\u201d said Matt Seybold, scholar in residence at the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It would be Ernest Hemingway who enshrined it in the canon, writing in 1935 that \u201call modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn<\/em>.\u201d By the 1970s, said Seybold, it had become \u201cprobably the single most assigned work of literature in American classrooms.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Today, Huck Finn<\/em> is assigned less often, especially at younger grade levels, Seybold said, in large part due to Twain\u2019s frequent use of the n-word. Yet, it remains active and alive in the American imagination, enough so that Percival Everett won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer for his 2024 novel James<\/em>, which re-imagined Huck Finn<\/em> from Jim\u2019s point of view.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Huck\u2019s relationship with Jim is, for most readers, the heart of the novel. Huck believes it to be his duty to return Jim to the elderly woman who enslaved him, but he also loves Jim and wants him to be free. In the novel\u2019s most celebrated passage, Huck decides to go against what the world has taught him is right and help Jim escape, announcing boldly, \u201cAll right then, I\u2019ll go<\/em> to hell.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Seybold said this scene is frequently read as \u201cAmerica overcoming the sins of its inception;\u201d Huck\u2019s redemptive love for Jim is enough to help him transcend the hypocritical moralism of the slave-owning south where he grew up. But, Seybold notes, Huck Finn<\/em> doesn\u2019t end with that glorious moment. It goes on for another 50 pages and features a lengthy episode in which Huck toys with Jim\u2019s freedom as though playing a game, while Jim is re-enslaved and dehumanized.<\/p>\n

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Seybold agreed with of the ending as a metaphor for Reconstruction \u2014 the promise of freedom abruptly reduced and turned into something contingent. Twain, Seybold said, was radicalized by a Frederick Douglass speech in which Douglass describes sharecropping as being nearly as bad as slavery.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In this context, Huck Finn<\/em> is a bold statement on one of America\u2019s great failures. \u201cTwain takes us back into the cruelty, the absurdity of antebellum America,\u201d said Seybold. \u201cThat\u2019s also America, right?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Great Gatsby<\/em> (1925): A bleak look at the American dream<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Like Hawthorne and Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald was a literary celebrity. When he published Great Gatsby<\/em> in 1925, it was a critical success, but its sales were modest. \u201cI always tell my students, if you want to be a writer, just think about the fact that Fitzgerald\u2019s last royalty check was for $13.13,\u201d said Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR\u2019s Fresh Air, Georgetown professor of literary criticism, and author of So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It took steady campaigning from Fitzgerald\u2019s friends and publisher for Gatsby<\/em> to be remembered. It started to become an institution during World War II, when the US army shipped copies of the book out to soldiers for morale and, then, was further bolstered by its widespread adoption as a high school text. Now, generations of American school children have grown up reading about Jay Gatsby, the poor boy who became a millionaire by mysterious means, all to win the love of the untouchable Daisy Buchanan.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This was around the same time that academics stopped talking about the idea of the great American novel singular, but it remained an effective marketing tool for publishers and an aspiration for authors, said Buell. Gatsby<\/em> benefitted greatly from that marketing tool, in large part thanks to its status as a book that took seriously America\u2019s class divides.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In The Dream of the Great American Novel<\/em>, Buell writes that the idea of the American bootstrapper stretches back to the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Gatsby<\/em> makes that ideal sinister through Gatsby\u2019s mysterious and ill-gotten gains and hollow as untouchable Daisy proves unable to live up to Gatsby\u2019s image of her. Yet, Fitzgerald\u2019s writing is at its most lyrical and lovely when he describes Gatsby\u2019s longing. One of the indelible images of the novel is that of Gatsby standing alone at the end of his dock, stretching out his hands toward the green light of Daisy\u2019s house. You know the things Gatsby is working for aren\u2019t worth it, but Fitzgerald makes it beautiful to watch him try.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIt\u2019s that idea of aspiration, of yearning, of trying even in the face of knowing that sometimes the game is rigged,\u201d said Corrigan. \u201cThis is a novel that deeply questions the idea of an American meritocracy.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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To say Gatsby<\/em> is the great American novel is to say that America is a place of capitalist striving and that the dream of striving is beautiful. It\u2019s also to posit that there is no clean way to make money, and whatever redemptive power you think you\u2019ll claim at the end of your hard work will disappoint you.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Beloved<\/em> (1987): The haunting of America<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Starting in the 1960s, rebellions from within the academy started to break the canon apart. Feminist scholars were pushing for recognition of books by women; scholars of African-American culture were pushing for recognition of works by Black people. \u201cThat theory of a canonicity being bogus really gets rolled out in the 1980s,\u201d said Buell.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Into this atmosphere came Toni Morrison, a Black woman who made it impossible to interpret her writing as an apologia for America.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In Morrison\u2019s books, it is clear that America has never overcome its sins. Never is that more the case than in her 1987 novel Beloved<\/em>, about a formerly enslaved woman who is haunted by the ghost of the baby she killed to save from slavery.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Beloved<\/em> was published to enormous acclaim, but it did not win that year\u2019s National Book Award, despite being a finalist. The Black literary scene rallied around Morrison in response, with 48 critics, writers, and activists publishing an open letter in the New York Times in praise of Morrison\u2019s accomplishment and registering their disappointment with the National Book Foundation. Later that year, Morrison would win the Pulitzer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cFor a lot of novels that become these cultural touchstones, there has to be a campaign behind them. There have to be people who are making cultural arguments for why it matters,\u201d said Jeffrey Lawrence, an American literature scholar at Rutgers University. \u201cAnd in Morrison\u2019s case, this happened relatively quickly.\u201d In 1993, five years after Beloved<\/em> was published, Morrison won the Nobel Prize for literature. That, said Lawrence, is when Beloved<\/em> \u201cstarts to be considered the<\/em> classic work of the late 20th century.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In Beloved<\/em>, Morrison was able to \u201cunpack the difficulties of slavery\u2026in so many different ways,\u201d said Dana A. Williams, a professor of African American Literature at Howard University. \u201cIt showed the history of the institution, yes, but it showed it from so many different perspectives.\u201d Morrison depicted the way slavery left scars on both Sethe, her heroine; on Sethe\u2019s entire family; and even on Sethe\u2019s enslavers. Even the land seems haunted. There is not a part of America that isn\u2019t damaged by the horrors of both slavery and by the effort to disavow, deny, and forget it ever happened.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cUltimately, I think it also forced us to think very seriously about how we have articulated humanity in this country,\u201d added Williams. \u201cLike who\u2019s alive, who\u2019s dead.\u201d Sethe is based on a real woman named Margaret Garner, whose case involved a debate over whether to charge her with murder or destruction of property for the killing of her baby. \u201cIt really did question: What is humanity and who has the right to it? Who has access to it?\u201d said Williams. \u201cIs it really an unalienable right?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Part of Morrison\u2019s project is to show that slavery has haunted America\u2019s legacy from the beginning \u2014 that no matter what we say about ourselves, we are not an innocent country. In Beloved<\/em>, that becomes painfully, inarguably clear.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Closing the book<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Let\u2019s return to Buell\u2019s idea that the great American novel is often about a democratic collective in peril. In the books we\u2019ve talked about here, the threat is always a problem embedded in America\u2019s national character: a mob-minded censoriousness; a weakness in the face of a charismatic leader; the sin, trauma, and whitewashing of slavery; the emptiness of capitalist striving. These are texts that tell us that America is a nation of ideas \u2014 beautiful ideas \u2014 and that it constantly struggles and fails to live up to those ideas.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThe novel as a genre really exists to critique the society that it is writing about, in a way that allows us to ask questions and to answer questions that only fiction can allow us to do,\u201d Williams said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But what\u2019s sort of lovely is that, as critical and merciless as they can be, and as imperfect as America still is, these books are still the ones we have enshrined and celebrated and cherished over the past 250 years. We teach them in schools and turn them into movies. We make sure that our people know about them, are warned at an early age that America\u2019s innocence is a farce.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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So, perhaps, the great American value that these novels enshrine is clear-eyed self-knowledge. Every country is prone to self-propagandizing and empty puffery, especially around an occasion like the 250th anniversary of one of its founding documents. But it\u2019s comforting to know that the centuries-long American quest to define our national identity through texts has led to a canon of novels that tell us the ugly truth about who we are.<\/p>\n

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See More:<\/span><\/p>\n
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  • Books<\/li>\n
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  • The Highlight<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    5 books that define America \u2014 for better and for worse<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":547,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"yoast_head":"\n5 books that define America \u2014 for better and for worse - American Living Report<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=548\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"5 books that define America \u2014 for better and for worse - American Living Report\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"5 books that define America \u2014 for better and for worse\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=548\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"American Living Report\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-07-01T10:38:16+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"14 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=548#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=548\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/7b970e3bc484fe2e26860a4380d70de8\"},\"headline\":\"5 books that define America \u2014 for better and for worse\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-07-01T10:38:16+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=548\"},\"wordCount\":2815,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=548#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/03f5193845668188d72bb69138301fb7.webp\",\"articleSection\":[\"Interesting\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=548#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=548\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=548\",\"name\":\"5 books that define America \u2014 for better and for worse - 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