The 25 Greatest Works of American Literature

Melville's vast meditation on obsession, God, and the white whale, the great American novel, ignored in its time, recovered as a masterpiece in the twentieth century.

Eliot's 1922 poem fractured modernist poetry open, 434 lines of collage, allusion, and ruin that became the signature literary artifact of its century.

Faulkner's Mississippi masterpiece tells one story four times, each from a different consciousness, American modernism's most ambitious formal experiment.

Widely considered the greatest American biography ever written, Robert Caro's Pulitzer-winning anatomy of Robert Moses is really a study of how unelected power reshaped a city, and the modern benchmark for biography as literature.

McCarthy's novel of scalp-hunters in the 1850s borderlands, the most violent and most beautifully written American novel of the late twentieth century.

Emerson's Nature and Essays are the founding documents of American Transcendentalism, the intellectual declaration of independence that made an American literature possible.

Whitman's 1855 collection invented American poetry, free verse, democratic embrace, and a barbaric yawp that every later American poet has either answered or imitated.

Henry James's 1881 masterpiece and the summit of psychological realism, Isabel Archer is one of literature's most fully realized female consciousnesses.

Twain's 1884 novel, "All modern American literature comes from" it, Hemingway said, a raft trip down the Mississippi that confronted slavery more honestly than any book of its century.

Fitzgerald's 1925 dissection of the American Dream, Jay Gatsby's doomed pursuit of Daisy, wealth, and reinvention, told in the most lyrical prose in American fiction.

Eliot's 1943 philosophical poem cycle, four meditations on time, history, and redemption, generally considered the supreme achievement in twentieth-century religious poetry.

Ellison's 1952 novel, a young Black man moving through America as though socially transparent, is the founding masterpiece of African-American literary modernism.

Nabokov's 1955 novel, brilliant, morally appalling, impossibly well-written, the most famous unreliable narrator in world fiction and the apex of English prose style.

Lee's 1960 Pulitzer winner, Atticus Finch defending a Black man falsely accused of rape, the American novel most widely read in schools and most persistently beloved.

Rawls's 1971 treatise, the veil of ignorance, justice as fairness, the most important work of political philosophy since Marx and the foundational text of postwar liberalism.

Pynchon's 1973 novel, the German V-2 rocket as the organizing principle of postwar civilization, the supreme achievement of postmodern fiction.

Morrison's 1987 novel confronts slavery's lasting trauma through the ghost of a child a mother killed to save from bondage, the novel that secured Morrison's Nobel and the American canon's reckoning with its founding wound.

Poe invented the modern short story, the detective genre, and psychological horror, "The Raven," "Usher," "Rue Morgue," the founding American fantastical imagination.

Thoreau's 1854 account of two years of simplified living, the founding text of American individualism, environmentalism, and (via "Civil Disobedience") nonviolent political resistance.

Emily Dickinson's nearly 1,800 poems, almost entirely unpublished in her lifetime, the most original female poetic voice in American literature and one of its greatest regardless of gender.

The collected lyrics of Emily Dickinson, compressed, enigmatic, deploying slant rhyme and dashes to capture metaphysical insight at a density no American poet has matched since.

Pound's lifelong attempt at a modern epic, multilingual, encyclopedic, sometimes crazy, sometimes sublime; Pound was also the midwife of every major modernist other than himself.

Salinger's 1951 novel, Holden Caulfield's voice of adolescent disillusionment, the book that has shaped how American teenagers sound in fiction for seventy years.

Steinbeck's multigenerational California saga, his most ambitious novel and the one he considered his magnum opus, transposing Cain and Abel onto the Salinas Valley.

O'Neill's autobiographical tragedy and his Aeschylean trilogy, the peak of American drama, from the only American playwright ever awarded the Nobel.