Are These America’s 136 Greatest Novels? Discuss!

Here are more highlights from the list, categorized (by me): 

1. The hard-to-dispute inclusions

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929)

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)

Native Son by Richard Wright (1940)

Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White (1952)

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle (1962)

Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)

Some authors’ books were no-brainers, Beckerman notes: “There were certain books where it would have been almost crazy not to have them on the list. Can you have a list of the last 100 years of American novels that doesn’t have The Great Gatsby on it or that doesn’t have The Catcher in the Rye? Or Catch-22 or On the Road?”

Nope, so those are all on there, too. 

2. The more obscure and surprising

East Goes West by Younghill Kang (1937)

No-No Boy by John Okada (1957)

Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg (1993)

Under the Feet of Jesus by Helena Maria Viramontes (1995)

I, the Divine by Rabih Alameddine (2001)

“My hope is that people have a moment of discovery, of encountering books that they really haven’t heard of,” Beckerman says, pointing to Log of the S.S. the Mrs Unguentine by Stanley Crawford (1972), which was recommended by novelist Katie Kitamura. “I’d never heard of the book or the author before, but as soon as I started reading it, it was just the most original thing I’ve ever read. It’s sort of a surrealist story of this couple sailing on a boat and their marriage dissolving, but also reality is dissolving.” 

3. The modern classics

There There by Tommy Orange (2018)

Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson (2019)

No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood (2021)

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers (2021)

Biography of X by Catherine Lacey (2023)

Can you tell if a story is a classic — or “great” — when it’s only spent a few years or less in the world? The recent releases were the toughest books to evaluate, Beckerman says, “because we had to extend outside of ourselves in our own time and subjectivities to be able to say ... which of these books feel like they will actually be read in 15 years, 20 years, and stand the test of time.” They fall in the category, as the editors put it, of “recently published works that already feel indelible.” 

4. The omitted

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)

Wait, what? The book we all had to read in middle school? Its omission (the only one that surprised me) is not an oversight, Beckerman says, explaining that the editors’ debate over this iconic novel centered on “whether its literary merit has stood up. It was a book that had a great moral lesson, that was turned into a great movie … but whether it was really a book that was going to last in the same way [as some of the others]. People will debate that — and we want people to debate it. I will be happy for somebody to take up the Mockingbird fight. Tell us how wrong we are.”