As I write this, my daily life has been radically altered by the coronavirus pandemic of 2020. (And let’s hope it won’t be necessary in the future for me to write something like “the outbreak of 2022” or “the contagion of 2025.”)
As a sports writer, I have much less to cover now that most sports events on the planet have been postponed or canceled, so it’s an excellent time to catch up on my reading.
My wife is a professor of American literature, and her first book, Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma, was recently published.
Since her book touches on some of the great American novels, it got me thinking about some of the books I might want to read during the coronapocalypse, and since I’m a fantasy sports writer/player and someone who tends to think in a hierarchical fashion, I thought it might be a fun exercise to rank the five greatest American novels of all time.
Is this list arbitrary?
Yes — but no more than any of my other random rankings.
In other words, this is the definitive, no-doubt best top-five list of American novels ever created.
But before we get to the official rankings, here’s a note on five authors who aren’t represented in the top five.
John Steinbeck
Yeah, Steiny won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962. Yeah, he won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1940.
Big deal.
I remember being punished with The Grapes of Wrath as a senior in high school. It was my own personal Great Depression.
Pretending to read that book once is enough for me.
As the saying goes, if a book isn’t worth rereading, it isn’t worth reading.
Of Mice and Men is great, but it’s not so much a novel as a novella …
… and as iconic as East of Eden is, I haven’t read it — because it’s not a top-five American novel. I’ll probably get to it one day. Maybe in 100 years or so.
Ernest Hemingway
I don’t want to piss off all the white guys who had a “Hemingway is God” phase when they were 17-31 years old, but Hemingway is supremely overrated and a smidgen misogynistic.
Plus, how do you choose between his four most popular books?
They’re all pretty much the same — because they’re all about an idealized version of Hemingway.
If you want to argue that he is a top-10 American writer who deserves to have four novels in the top 20, fine.
But neither Hemingway nor a novel of his is cracking my top five.
Jesmyn Ward
I’ll be honest: I haven’t read any of Ward’s work. Her first novel, Where the Line Bleeds, came out in 2008, when I was in graduate school and preparing for my major field exam on early-modern British drama, which is about as far away as you can get from contemporary American lit while staying underneath the English umbrella.
And then Ward’s second novel, Salvage the Bones, came out in 2011, when I was starting to do research for my dissertation on the death penalty in early-modern British literature and culture. Fun stuff, let me tell you.
There’s a reason I didn’t write it.
So I never got around to reading Ward’s early work, and by the time she published her third novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, in 2017, I was too busy with my work at The Action Network to read anything.
But from everything I’ve heard and read about her and her books, she’s an absolute master who already seems destined to be counted among the American greats.
At just 42 years old, she could have a prolific career ahead of her, and on the basis of just three novels — she has also written a memoir (Men We Reaped) and edited a collection of essays (The Fire This Time) — she has twice won the National Book Award for Fiction, becoming the first woman to do so, and she has received the MacArthur Fellowship.
I’m not putting her in the literary Hall of Fame yet, but she’s the Patrick Mahomes of modern-day American authors. She has the looks of a future HOFer.
Before rereading any of the books I have in the top five, I really should read at least one of Ward’s novels and probably all of them.
For what it’s worth — and to me it’s worth a lot — my wife thinks Sing, Unburied, Sing already deserves inclusion in the top five.
The odds are probably -200 (bet $200 to win $100) that the next fictional work I read will be by Ward.
Herman Melville
Name me any work written by Melville other than Moby Dick. You can’t do it. Almost no one can.
And there’s a reason for that.
Melville is boring.
Here are several thoughts on Melville’s magnum opus.
- I’ve never read Moby Dick.
- I’ll never read Moby Dick.
- You don’t need to read Moby Dick to know you don’t need to read Moby Dick.
- Only the people who haven’t read Moby Dick think it’s great.
If for some reason you ever find yourself wanting to read some Melville, I suggest checking out “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” It’s much shorter than Moby Dick, and Bartleby (a law clerk) is far less annoying than the blubber-obsessed Captain Ahab.
Whenever Bartleby’s boss asks him to do any work, he responds with “I would prefer not to.” He’s pretty much a 19th-century Peter Gibbons.
What a hero.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Scarlet Letter on a per-word basis might be the worst novel ever written.
Top Five American Novels of All Time
Without further ado, here they are …
Also: SPOILER ALERT
No. 5: To Kill A Mockingbird
A lot of people might put Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize winner in the No. 1 spot. I can’t quite do that, but Mockingbird was the first book I locked into my top-five shortlist, and I hold it in high regard.
A classic that appeals to all sorts of readers, Mockingbird has gotten something of a second life in recent years with the 2018 adaptation of the book to Broadway and the 2015 publication of Go Set a Watchman — an early draft of Mockingbird that was promoted as a sequel of sorts.
And the 1962 movie with Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch is timeless. Everyone loves the scene in which Atticus makes his closing argument: “In the name of God, do your duty.”
I’m partial to the scene in which Tom Robinson is declared guilty.
“Your father’s passing.” That line just gets me.
Does this scene smell a little too strongly of “White Savior” sentimentality? Sure, and the novel does as well. And that’s why I can’t put it No. 1.
But it for damn sure is going in my top five.
No. 4: The Great Gatsby
Like Mockingbird, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel is No. 1 for a lot of readers. It has the allure of the Jazz Age and the underbelly of the prohibition era.
And it’s relatively short.
Win-win.
But here’s something that’s a little annoying: There have been at least four movies made out of the book — the most recent of which is the 2013 Baz Luhrmann version with Leonardo DiCaprio in the titular role — and not one of them holds up years later.
Also, what’s really at stake in this book? A rich white guy pines for his classist ex-girlfriend, who is married to another rich white guy? This novel is the literary embodiment of “White People Problems.”
The language in Gatsby is beautiful — it’s straight-up purple — and, like Mockingbird, this book is a no-doubter in the top five.
But I just can’t include it in the top three as a matter of principle. Doing so would be careless, and I ain’t no Tom or Daisy.
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
No. 3: Absalom, Absalom!
William Faulkner has a seat on the tripartite throne of American literature, and Absalom is his masterpiece.
Published in 1936, Absalom is the culmination of a seven-year run that saw Faulkner release six books, five of which (all of them set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County) have formed the center of his œuvre.
- 1929: The Sound and the Fury
- 1930: As I Lay Dying
- 1931: Sanctuary
- 1932: Light in August
- 1936: Absalom, Absalom!
It’s hard to articulate how literarily dominant Faulkner was in that seven-year window.
Think of Sandy Koufax, who was easily the best pitcher in baseball in 1961-66. And now imagine if, after averaging 285.5 strikeouts per season for six straight years, instead of retiring at the age of 31 he came back in 1967 — and struck out 500 batters.
That’s what Faulkner did with Absalom.
If he had never written it, he still would be one of the greatest American writers ever — but he did write it.
Let’s stretch this Koufax analogy a little further. Imagine that Koufax has this transcendent 1967 season — and then he goes on to pitch nine more years. And somehow, even though he’s clearly past his prime, he manages to win three more Cy Young Awards — one of them in his final season.
That’s what Faulkner did. After Absalom, he wrote nine more books, and out of the final six, two won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a third helped him win the Nobel Prize for Literature. It’s almost unthinkable.
Now let’s go back to the Koufax analogy: Imagine that he has closed his career with a remarkable nine-year run — and no one talks about it. No one praises him for it. In fact, people view it as a disappointment, because in no season after 1967 did he strike out even 400 batters.
That’s what happened to Faulkner. Literary scholars rarely talk about what he did after Absalom, even though he was successful by almost any measure in the second half of his career.
But why would scholars focus on Faulkner’s Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning books when they instead could talk about Absalom and the other early books that defined his career and made him a star?
I get it.
And what makes Absalom so great? It’s a multi-generational and multiracial epic set in Mississippi that touches on the Civil War, the fall of the South, and family legacy. Think Gone With the Wind (which was published just a year later) — but much less racist and much more expansive and complex.
And what’s more — because of Faulkner’s modernist style and narrative structure, you’re never entirely sure about the truth of the story you’ve read. So much of it is conjecture, pieced together years after the fact.
And here’s one more thing: Although he has no connection to the main events in the book, much of the story is revealed from the perspective of Quentin Compson — one of the main characters in The Sound and the Fury.
And so everything Quentin thinks, all of the conversations he has, and all of the interpretations he makes reflect back on Faulkner’s breakout text.
Essentially, in writing Absalom, Faulkner added an entirely new layer of meaning to the novel that launched his career seven years earlier.
It would be as if Quentin Tarantino had decided to tell the Kill Bill story from the perspective of not The Bride but Vincent Vega from Pulp Fiction — and as if he had done it so successfully that it made you decide to go back and rewatch the earlier film with a whole new level of appreciation for what Vega does in that movie.
If anyone had Absalom at No. 1, I would not argue at all.
No. 2: Beloved
This should probably be No. 1, if I’m being honest. The worst part of this book is that in 1998 it got made into a movie with Oprah Winfrey as the protagonist.
Com’on. This text is the American Hamlet.
I have nothing against Oprah, but how much better might the filmic adaptation have been if it had starred Angela Bassett or Viola Davis?
But that’s not the fault of Toni Morrison, who in 1987 published what might be the most moving exploration of American slavery ever.
As a white guy born in 1983, I have always understood that slavery was a moral sin, and, as a person of Jewish heritage, I thought I fully appreciated the destructiveness of race-based domination.
But I believe it wasn’t until I read Beloved for the first time in graduate school that the horrors of slavery truly struck me. I can’t say, “Hey, I now know what it’s like to be a traumatized black woman” — that would be ridiculous — but I can say that Morrison’s book made me realize how incredibly fortunate I am and how bad so many people have had it in history through no fault of their own.
And perhaps more than any other book I’ve read, Beloved convinced me that dying on terms you can live with is better than living on terms that will kill you.
When the escaped Sethe learns that Schoolteacher has tracked her down and plans to return her to slavery, she kills her infant girl — her Beloved — so that she’ll never experience the dehumanization of bondage. In killing her baby, Sethe ensures that she will always be free.
It’s like Sophie’s Choice — but with only one child.
Beloved is difficult to get through because of its substance and also its style, but Morrison’s writing is majestic: At times its beauty almost overwhelms.
Imagine if Woody Allen didn’t make movies but instead wrote novels. Then imagine if every four years instead of putting out two bad works, one mediocre work, and one great work he released just one work — and it was phenomenal. And now imagine if he wrote about the struggles of American existence instead of older men who want to have sex with younger women.
That would be Morrison. She is an absolute master and the unquestioned queen. Even though she passed just recently in August 2019, she still reigns.
I’m not giving Beloved the top spot, but I consider Morrison to be the ruling monarch: On the three-seated throne of American literature, she sits in the center, flanked by two Southern gentlemen as her kings.
No. 1: Huckleberry Finn
If I had chosen any book other than Huck Finn, my inner child wouldn’t have been able to look me in the mirror and face the man I’ve become. I freely admit this is a nostalgia-driven pick.
But it’s also justifiable.
Beloved and Absalom are better, in much the same way that LeBron James and Michael Jordan are better than Wilt Chamberlain.
But would the NBA even exist today if not for what Wilt did for the league in the 1960s?
If not for Huck Finn in 1884, there’s no Beloved or Absalom. If not for Mark Twain, there’s no Morrison or Faulkner.
He’s the guy who rescued us from the boring — and amazingly inaccurate — realism of writers like James Fenimore Cooper and carried us into the 20th century.
He is the father of American literature.
And I know that Twain wasn’t perfect — his views on Native Americans are downright abominable — but for a white guy born in Missouri in 1935, he was amazingly ahead of his time.
He was an anti-imperialist and a vocal supporter of abolition, women’s suffrage, and the labor movement. And he was spiritually agnostic, but that was primarily because he loathed what he considered to be the hypocrisy of many practitioners of organized religion.
And that bent toward liberty for all can be seen in Huck Finn, which meanderingly tells the story of Huck and Jim — a white boy and an escaped slave — who raft down the Mississippi River so that Jim can find his way to freedom.
At one point in the book, Huck’s conscience tears at him because he believes he’s committing a mortal sin in helping Jim escape — because Jim is legally someone else’s property. Huck fears that breaking the law has put him at risk of eternal damnation.
So Huck finds a piece of paper and writes a letter to Jim’s owner, Miss Watson, telling her where she can find Jim. But after writing the letter, Huck thinks about his friendship with Jim and reflects on the man’s kindness. Huck specifically recalls when he saved Jim from slave hunters and how Jim responded.
He was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now, and then I happened to look around, and see that paper.
It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
“All right, then, I’ll go to hell” — and tore it up.
Fuck, yeah.
The world needs more Huck Finns. It needs more people willing to go to hell if that means doing what is actually right.
When I was a boy, Tom Sawyer was my favorite book. I couldn’t imagine anyone cooler than Tom. As for Huck — he was just Tom’s sidekick. The guy who helped him cause trouble.
And then, once I was older and read Huck Finn, the way I viewed Tom totally changed.
Huck is a better person. He grows. He struggles. He has interiority. Tom, meanwhile, is just a joker. A prankster. A scammer.
Think about that: Tom Sawyer is just a kid — but he’s still one of the coolest guys in American literature. He tricks others into paying him to let them do his work for him, he’s fearless in his disregard for authority, and he’s dating the cutest girl in town.
He’s everything George Costanza wishes he could be.
There’s a reason Rush wrote a song about him: He’s a fucking rockstar.
And in Huck Finn, that amazing guy — that walking embodiment of big dick energy — is revealed to be nothing but a small person next to Huck and the largesse of his humanity.
Twain is right there on the throne with Morrison and Faulkner, and, in my mind, Huck Finn is the true beginning of American literature. I can’t put any other book at No. 1.
But I’m still only in my 30s.
Maybe I’ll feel differently in 100 years.
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