M E R I D I A N     M A G A Z I N E

The Best American Novels
by Richard H. Cracroft

Thanks to all of you Noble Souls who sent e-mails expressing appreciation, astonishment, or anguish at missing titles in my list of "The 40 Best British Novelists, Novels" in the January "Classics Corner." Note that for wont of a single letter in my e-mail address, I did not receive any of your feed-back until late January. That error has been corrected, and all is swell, and I have now received all my mail. I thank all of you who responded; I enjoyed reading your comments. I wish I could respond personally-especially to you who are old friends (and former missionaries in the Swiss Mission) but I don't have that much Life left!

Your Assignment for March: Send Me Your Recommendations

Before continuing in our listing of suggestions for good reading additions to your home library, I propose, in the March "Classics Corner," to give a list of books, gleaned entirely from you readers, which have changed your life. Here is your opportunity to recommend to fellow Latter-day Saints, the book or books of fiction or non-fiction, biography or poetry, which have made a difference in your life. For this next list, let's look at works other than scripture which have changed your life. For example, I feel that way about some of C.S. Lewis's books, and I confess that I read Henry David Thoreau's Walden (my fifth Standard Work) every year for the refreshment it gives me; and Herman Melville's Moby Dick grips me very deeply-as does my regular re-reading and memorizing of poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins and Robert Frost. Please send me a title or titles of books which have changed your life-with a one-sentence (only) statement about what the book does to you (implying that it might do something similar for us). Please send them to me by February 22-George Washington's Birthday.

Introduction: The 112 Best of the American Novelists, Novels

Indulge me now as I once again stick out my tender neck and present the definitive, absolutely correct, only True and Living List of The Best American Novelists and Novels of All Time and Eternity (Kind Of). Again, admission to highest degree of the Telestial Kingdom is reserved for those who have read (and can pass a multiple-choice examination on) this list. After all, most of the writers will be on hand in the Telestial to answer any questions; it will be a pleasant way for some of us to while away Eternity-since we won't be doing much else.

Again, this list is one I've been shaping over my entire reading lifetime; I have consulted The Heath Top 100," Clifton Fadiman's "New Lifetime Reading Plan,""Fiction Books Cited as Significant by American English Teachers," "The BYU English Department Minimum Reading List for English Majors" [the list is now defunct-but the department is alive and well, thank you]; "The Top 100 English-Language Novels of the Twentieth Century," by the Editors of The Modern Library; "The 100 Greatest Novels in the English Language," by A. Edward Newton; and several other lists, including some in A Passion for Books (1999), by Harold Rabinowitz and Rob Kaplan. It is great fun to make such audacious lists-and impossible to get everyone's favorite onto the list. However, I believe I have incorporated all Reader Recommendations sent me via e-mail. Let me know of any egregious omissions.

My original list included about 130 authors. I pared it100 authors, then added a few popular novelists not included on most lists and included three LDS writers who deserve inclusion (see if you can pick them out), to bring the total to 112. In most instances I have listed only one representative novel by authors who have written several worth including; but in other instances I have included additional novels because they were all included in several of the lists I consulted, and I couldn't bear leaving them out. Although I have dropped from the list some well-known works of literature that didn't seem to me to be "of good report, or praiseworthy," or I simply didn't like them, I have included other works which may make some readers uncomfortable (so, don't read them) but nevertheless give representation to some voices in the cacophony our modern world which need to be listened to by Latter-day Saints--despite some discomfiture. Books, after all, are not only to confirm that which we already know but to open up to us other worlds and experience hitherto unknown to us; of course, we must be personally judicious in what we select to read and make part of our souls. As Lord Bacon said, "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested," and some, in my experience, are to be spat out forthwith. But there is often, to the inquiring mind, gold to be found amidst the dross. So, here's the list, which does not necessarily reflect the personal views of the editors of Meridian or myself-but is, I believe, a wonderful reflector of the rich variety of the American people-children of God, every one:

The List: The 112 Best of the American Novelists, Novels

Agee, James. A Death in the Family

Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women

Alger, Horatio, Ragged Dick, or, Street Life in New York

Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio

Atwood, Margaret. Cat's Eye, The Handmaid's Tale, The Robber Bride

Baldwin, James. Go Tell It On the Mountain

Barth, John. The Floating Opera, Giles Goat Boy

Bellow, Saul. Henderson the Rain King, The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, Humboldt's Gift, The Dean's December

Berger, Thomas. Little Big Man

Bradbury, Ray. Dandelion Wine

Buck, Pearl S. The Good Earth

Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood

Card, Orson Scott. Ender's Game, Ender's Shadow, Seventh Son

Cather, Willa. Death Comes to the Archbishop, My Ántonia, O, Pioneers!, One of Ours, The Professor's House, Sapphira and the Slave Girl

Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep

Chopin, Kate. The Awakening

Cooper, James Fenimore. The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, The Deerslayer

Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage

Cronin, A.J. The Citadel, The Keys of the Kingdom

Dos Passos, John. U.S.A. (Trilogy)

Douglas, Lloyd A. The Robe, The Big Fisherman

Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie, An American Tragedy

Drury, Allen. Advise and Consent

Ellison, Ralph. The Invisible Man

Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, As I Lay Dying, Absolom, Absolom!, The Bear, Go Down Moses

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night

Flagg Fannie. Fried Green Tomatoes

Frazier, Charles. Cold Mountain

Gaines, Ernest J. A Gathering of Old Men

Guterson, David. Snow Falling on Cedars

Guthrie, A.B., Jr. The Big Sky

Haley, Alex. Roots

Hammett, Dashiell. The Maltese Falcon

Hamilton, Jane. A Map of the World

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Marble Faun, Twice-Told Tales

Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea

Howells, William Dean. The Rise of Silas Lapham, A Modern Instance

Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God

Irving, John. Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany

Irving, Washington. The Sketch-Book

James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl

Johnson, James Weldon. Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

Jones, James. From Here to Eternity

Kennedy, William. Ironweed

Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior

Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird

L'Engle, Madeleine. A Swiftly Tilting Planet, A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door

Lewis, Sinclair. Main Street, Babbitt

Lockridge, Ross, Jr. Raintree County

London, Jack. The Call of the Wild

Lund, Gerald N. The Work and the Glory

Maclean, Norman. A River Runs Through It

Mailer, Norman. The Naked and the Dead

Malamud, Bernard. The Assistant, The Fixer

McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain

McCullers, Carson. Ballad of the Sad Café, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

McMurtry, Larry. Lonesome Dove

Melville, Herman Moby-Dick, Billy Budd, "Bartleby the Scrivener"

Michener, James.The Novel, Hawaii

Momaday, N. Scott. House Made of Dawn

Morrison, Tony. Beloved

Mitchell, Margaret. Gone With the Wind

Nichols, John. The Milagro Beanfield War

Norris, Frank. McTeague

Oates, Joyce Carol. Foxfire

O'Brien, Tim. Going After Cacciato

O'Connor, Flannery. Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away

O'Hara, John. Appointment in Samarra

O. Henry [William S. Porter]. The Four Million

Olsen, Tillie. Yonnondio

Percy, Walker. The Moviegoer

Pirsig, Robert. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Fall of the House of Usher,""The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Black Cat"

Porter, Katherine Anne. Pale Horse, Pale Rider

Potok, Chaim. The Chosen, The Promise, My Name Is Asher Lev

Price, Reynolds Kate Vaiden

Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity's Rainbow

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead

Robinson, Marilynne. Housekeeping

Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye

Shaara, Michael. The Killer Angels

Shaw, Irwin. The Young Lions

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony

Smiley, Jane. The Greenlanders

Smith, Betty. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Stegner, Wallace. Angle of Repose, Crossing to Safety

Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, Cannery Row, The Pearl, The Winter of Our Discontent

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin

Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife

Tarkington, Booth. The Magnificent Ambersons

Taylor, Samuel W. Heaven Knows Why

Theroux, Paul. The Mosquito Coast

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden (unclassifiable masterpiece)

Twain, Mark [Samuel L. Clemens]. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventure of Tom Sawyer, The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, The Mysterious Stranger, The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg

Tyler, Anne. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Breathing Lessons, The Accidental Tourist

Updike, John. Rabbit Run (series)

Uris, Leonard. Exodus

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse Five

Walker, Alice. The Color Purple

Wallace, Lew. Ben-Hur

Warren, Robert Penn. All the King's Men

Waters, Frank. The Man Who Killed the Deer

Welty, Eudora. Losing Battles

Wharton, Edith. Ethan Frome, The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth

West, Nathanael. The Day of the Locust

Wilder, Thornton. The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Wister, Owen. The Virginian

Wolfe, Thomas. Look Homeward, Angel, You Can't Go Home Again, The Web and the Rock

Wouk, Herman. The Winds of War

Wright, Richard. Native Son

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