5 books that define America — for better and for worse

A country built on a piece of paper

Mark Graybill, a professor of English at Widener University, frames the American literary project in unusually blunt terms: "America was an enlightenment experiment, and so that means we have to make our own identity." Unlike nations anchored to land or ethnic lineage, the United States began as an idea written down, and so the country has had to keep writing itself into being. The novel, as a form, has done much of that labor, articulating what it is like to live inside an ongoing experiment in self-definition.

The pressure to produce a distinctly American literature dates back to 1776, according to Lawrence Buell, the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Emeritus at Harvard. The call intensified after the War of 1812, when a newly confident political class demanded cultural equivalents to its geopolitical standing. Buell summarizes the period's attitude: "now we are a mighty political entity, we should be a cultural force as well." That demand produced not one agreed-upon masterpiece but a centuries-long argument about what a national novel would even look like.

The recipe for a 'national' novel

In his book The Dream of the Great American Novel, Buell identifies recurring "recipes" that the most credible candidates tend to follow. The core ingredients are a democratic collective in distress, a community "operating under great pressure, great anguish often," and a crucible in which "national themes of one sort or another" are played out. The Scarlet Letter, the entry the essay begins to develop, fits that formula by treating Puritan New England not as a clean origin story but as the scene of the country's original sin, marked by adultery, shame, and the violence of public judgment.

The phrase "great American novel" itself was coined in 1868 by John William DeForest, who complained in an essay that the genuine article had not yet been written. The five books Grady examines all descend from DeForest's challenge, and the essay treats them as a single body of work rather than a ranked list, asking what each vision of the United States reveals and what it has been used to justify.

The uninnocent country

The article's through-line is a contrarian one for a nation fond of its origin myths. Read together, the five contenders do not flatter the United States. They insist, in Grady's phrase, that "America is not an innocent country." The list of "other canon" picks, including Ellison's Invisible Man, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Orange's There There, and Lockwood's No One Is Talking About This, pushes the same argument into the present, suggesting the national novel is still being rewritten to include voices and traumas the original recipes left out.

That darker portrait is, the essay implies, precisely what makes these books feel national rather than provincial. The novels canonized as the great American candidates are the ones that refused to let the country off the hook, and they endure because each generation finds new reasons to read them that way.