I thought it might be interesting to come up with a national companion to the “California Canon.” Because of the date restriction no existing roster is quite suitable. Instead of trying to base the list on library holdings (which would have been way too much work), I relied on the Random House list of 100 best novels published in English since 1900. I needed to remove about half the books because their authors were not Americans. Then I added five titles from the 1890s (garnered from Annals of American Literature) and subtracted eight from after 1959. Finally, to obtain a round number of 50, I added three more titles (marked with asterisks) that often appear in lists of this sort. Because of the additions top-to-bottom rankings weren’t possible. So here goes:
Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (1919)
James Baldwin, Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953)
Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King (1959)
Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953)
Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky (1949)
James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934)
Erskine Caldwell, Tobacco Road (1932)
Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)
John Cheever, The Wapshot Chronicle (1957)
Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
John Dos Passos, U.S.A. (Trilogy) (1936)
Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy (1925)
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900)
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
James T. Farrell, The Studs Lonigan Trilogy (1935)
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930)
William Faulkner, Light in August (1932)
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night (1934)
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby(1925)
Hamlin Garland, Main-Travelled Roads (1891)
Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (1930)
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926)
William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890)
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God* (1937)
Henry James, The Ambassadors (1903)
Henry James, The Golden Bowl (1904)
James Jones, From Here to Eternity (1951)
Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)
Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (1920)
Jack London, The Call of the Wild (1903)
Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (1948)
Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940)
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (1934)
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
Frank Norris, McTeague (1899)
John O'Hara, Appointment in Samarra (1934)
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle* (1906)
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons (1918)
Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men (1946)
Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust (1939)
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920)
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905)
Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927)
Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel* (1929)
Richard Wright, Native Son (1940)
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