Nick Rennison - 100 Must-Read American Novels: Discover Your Next Great Read...

BLOOMSBURY GOOD READING GUIDES

100 MUST-READ
AMERICAN NOVELS

Nick Rennison and Ed Wood

A & C Black Publishers Ltd

First published in 2010

A & C Black Publishers Ltd
36 Soho Square
London W1D 3QY
www.acblack.com.

Copyright Nick Rennison and Ed Wood 2010

Nick Rennison and Ed have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

eISBN: 978-1-40813-091-9

CONTENTS

THEMATIC ENTRIES

This book is not intended to provide a list of the one hundred best American novels ever published. Given the sheer range of fiction Americans have written in the last two centuries and the unpredictability of individual taste, any such definitive list is an impossibility. Instead we have chosen one hundred books to read which we think will provide some sense of the enormous variety of novels that can be shelved under the heading of American Fiction. We have picked almost exclusively novels but we have also included two collections of short stories by writers (Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Carver) whose finest work was undoubtedly in the shorter format.

The individual entries in the guide are arranged A to Z by author. They describe the chosen books as concisely as possible (while aiming to avoid too many spoilers) and say something briefly about the writer and his or her life and career. Significant film versions of the books (with dates of release) are noted where applicable, followed by Read on lists comprising books by the same author, books by stylistically similar writers or books on a theme relevant to the main entry. Scattered throughout the text there are also Read on a Theme menus which list between six and a dozen titles united by a common theme. The symbol before an author name indicates that the author is one of those covered in the A to Z entries.

When did the writing of American fiction begin? In the colonial period, the novels that existed were English novels, imported from the mother country or printed in cheap (and usually pirated) editions on the printing presses of Boston and Philadelphia. There is scholarly debate about which was the very first American novel but the accolade is usually granted to William Hill Browns The Power of Sympathy which was published in Boston in 1789. Browns epistolary novel was a pale reflection of the sentimental novel so popular on the other side of the Atlantic and, for the next few decades, the problem with the limited number of American novels that found their way into print was that they struggled to find any indigenous subject for their stories. They were all pale reflections of English originals. Susanna Rowsons Charlotte Temple, the story of a young woman seduced and brought to America only to be abandoned there, may have been the most popular American bestseller before Uncle Toms Cabin but it followed an English model, was written by a woman who spent long periods of her life in England and was first published in London in 1791, three years before the first American edition appeared in Philadelphia. Charles Brockden Brown, sometimes cited as the first professional American author, was an accomplished novelist and can still be read with interest today but Wieland, his best-known work, published in 1798, is clearly based on English originals, most notably William Godwins Caleb Williams.

The two writers who found a way to escape the cultural cringe of early American fiction were Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper. Irving was a great Anglophile but he was also interested in folk tales and the stories that were told in the villages and towns of New England. The results of this interest were Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane. Coopers Leatherstocking Tales, which began to appear in the 1820s, were an offshoot of the historical fiction that proliferated in the wake of Sir Walter Scott. The difference was that Cooper went in search of American history that would provide the same kind of plot potential Scott found in the Middle Ages or the Jacobite Rebellions. He found it in the French and Indian War. One of the consequences was that he (like Irving) became popular in Europe. For the first time, fiction was travelling across the Atlantic from West to East rather than the other way about.

Another writer who found an audience in Europe (although sadly not until after his death) was Edgar Allan Poe. Famously, the French poet Baudelaire was bowled over by the heady atmosphere of Poes poetry and short fiction and spent much energy in the 1850s translating them into French. For years, Poes influence abroad was significantly higher than it was in the USA. In the 1830s, when Poe was just beginning his struggle to survive on the income he could gather from publishing his work, another novelist was, like Fenimore Cooper, looking to American history for his subject matter. Nathaniel Hawthorne was to find it in the Puritan inheritance of New England and stories in Twice-Told Tales (1837) such as The Ministers Black Veil and The May-Pole of Merry Mount explored the American past with a sophistication and intelligence far beyond anything that Cooper had ever been able to muster. Thirteen years after the publication of Twice-Told Tales, Hawthorne produced his masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter, which once again found its story in the Puritan past that the author, a direct descendant of one of the judges in the Salem witch trials, found such a painful legacy to contemplate. At the same time Hawthornes friend Herman Melville was working on Moby-Dick which was published the year after The Scarlet Letter. In the story of Captain Ahabs obsessive search for the whale, Melville found a way of combining the material he had gathered during his days at sea with the brooding allegory and psychological intensity that Hawthorne had manufactured from his Puritan history to produce what was probably the first (and arguably the best) candidate for the much-disputed title of the Great American Novel.

There have been plenty of other claimants to the title down the years. Mark Twains greatest works appeared a quarter of a century and more after the publication of Moby-Dick, at a time when Melville, spurned by the literary world, was working as a customs inspector in New York. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn would be on most peoples list of Great American Novels, although Twain himself might have mocked the portentousness and pretensions inherent in the use of capital letters. Certainly, by using a first-person narrative in such a distinctively American voice, Twain opened up new ways of telling American stories and he also raised issues most particularly race that have been exercising novelists in the USA ever since.

Twain was at pains to emphasise the realism of the accents and voices he gave to his characters in Huckleberry Finn and realism, although defined in very different ways, was the new watchword of the American novel. William Dean Howells, often described as the father of American realism, published The Rise of Silas Lapham in 1885. This story of the fluctuating fortunes, both financial and moral, of a self-made millionaire in upper-class Boston, was Howells antidote to the sentimentality with which he believed much of American fiction was afflicted. As the powerful editor of