The 70 Best American Novels of the 20th Century
From "Martin Eden" and "The Great Gatsby" to "The Secret History" and "American Pastoral"
American literature of the last century has given the world hundreds of bright names and thousands of superbly written novels. Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Updike, Vonnegut — we pronounce the names of the authors and immediately remember the atmosphere of their books. We find ourselves in the southern states during the Civil War, then at a social event in New York of the Jazz Age, then in hippie California of the 60s... But the work of these writers is only the tip of a huge iceberg. Many authors have simply been forgotten, while some have been discovered only recently (as, for example, John Williams).
№
Name
Author
Year
1
"Octopus"
Frank Norris
1901
2
"Ambassadors"
Henry James
1903
3
"Kings and cabbage"
O. Henry
1904
4
«Martin Eden»
Jack London
1909
5
"In step!"
Sherwood Anderson
1917
6
"My Antonia"
Willa Kaser
1918
7
«The Age of Innocence»
Edith Wharton
1920
8
"Babbitt"
Sinclair Lewis
1922
9
«The Great Gatsby»
F. Scott Fitzgerald
1925
10
"Manhattan"
John Dos Passos
1925
11
«An American tragedy»
Theodore Dreiser
1925
12
"Oil!"
Upton Bill Sinclair
1927
13
"King Louis Bridge"
Thornton Wilder
1928
14
"A Farewell to Arms!"
Ernest Hemingway
1929
15
«Look at your house, angel»
Thomas Wolfe
1929
16
"Earth"
Pearl Buck
1931
17
"Light in August"
William Faulkner
1932
18
"Tropic of Cancer"
Henry Miller
1934
19
"Rendezvous in Samarra"
John O'Hara
1934
20
«Gone with the Wind»
Margaret Mitchell
1936
21
"Day of the Locust"
Nathanael West
1939
22
"Son of America"
Richard Wright
1940
23
"The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter"
Carson McCullers
1940
24
"The Human Comedy"
William Saroyan
1943
25
"All the King's Men"
Robert Penn Warren
1946
26
"The Naked and the Dead"
Norman Mailer
1948
27
«Over the Catcher in the Rye»
Jerome David Salinger
1951
28
"From now on and forever"
James Jones
1951
29
"Wise Blood"
Flannery O'Connor
1952
30
«451° Fahrenheit»
Ray Bradbury
1953
31
"Lolita"
Vladimir Nabokov
1955
32
"The Wapshots Family Chronicle"
John Cheever
1957
33
"On the Road"
Jack Kerouac
1957
34
"To Kill a Mockingbird"
Harper Lee
1960
35
"Rabbit, run"
John Updike
1960
36
"The winter of our anxiety"
John Steinbeck
1961
37
"Amendment-22"
Joseph Heller
1961
38
"Colored Worlds"
William Dubois
1961
39
«Over the cuckoo's nest»
Ken Kesey
1962
40
"Ship of Fools"
Catherine Ann Porter
1962
41
"Another country"
James Baldwin
1962
42
"Under the Glass Hood"
Sylvia Plath
1963
43
Stoner
John Williams
1965
44
"In Cold Blood"
Truman Capote
1966
45
"Master"
Bernard Malamud
1966
46
"Confessions of Nat Turner"
William Styron
1967
47
"The Garden of Earthly Joys"
Joyce Carol Oates
1967
48
"Slaughterhouse Five, or the Children's Crusade"
Kurt Vonnegut
1969
49
«Godfather»
Mario Puzo
1969
50
"Rich man, poor man"
Irwin Shaw
1970
51
"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"
Hunter S. Thompson
1971
52
«Post office»
Charles Bukowski
1971
53
"The Optimist's Daughter"
Eudora Welty
1972
54
"Rainbow of gravity"
Thomas Pynchon
1973
55
Ragtime
Edgar Lawrence Doctorow
1975
56
"A Gift from Humboldt"
Saul Bellow
1975
57
"Autumn Light"
John Gardner
1976
58
"Shosha"
Isaac Bashevis-Singer
1978
59
«The Mysterious Story of Billy Milligan»
Daniel Keyes
1981
60
"The color is purple"
Alice Walker
1982
61
"Winemakers' Rules"
John Irving
1985
62
"White noise"
Don DeLillo
1985
63
"In the Land of Outgoing Nature"
Paul Oster
1987
64
«Sweetheart»
Toni Morrison
1987
65
"The Secret History"
Donna Tartt
1992
66
"Horses, horses"
Cormac McCarthy
1992
67
"Fight Club"
Chuck Palahniuk
1996
68
"American Pastoral"
Philip Roth
1997
69
"The Clock"
Michael Cunningham
1998
70
"Amy and Isabel"
Elizabeth Strout
1998
Comments
Post a Comment