Canon of the USA

>>7882866
I'll skip the easy ones like Melville, Hemginway, Steinbeck, etc.

Controversial/unpopular ones:


Raymond Carver- pretty much everything
Raymond Chandler- at least a couple of his novels
Larry McMurtry- Last Picture Show and Lonesome Dove
James Welch- Winter in the Blood
Stephen King- The Stand
Nelson Algren- A Walk on the Wild Side
Samuel Shem- The House of God

my diary desu

Melville, Pynchon, Wolfe, DFW
Things I'm interested in but haven't yet read:
The recognitions
Miss macintosh, my darling

Henry James. Critically underrated on this board, probably because he wrote so many novels about women.

>>7882866
I'm too tired to list individual works, so I'll just list authors:
Gass, Gaddis, McElroy, Pynchon, Hawkes, Barthelme, Orlovitz, DFW, Faulkner, Pound, Crane, Ashbery, James, Theroux, Stein, McCarthy, Federman, Coover, Sorrentino, Dixon, DeLillo, Vollmann, Melville, Bellow, Burroughs.

>>7882866
Ayn Rand, Lovecraft, Poe?

Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams

>>7883805
>Critically underrated on this board, probably because he wrote so many novels about women.
this may be the dumbest opinion i've heard in my life

haven't read melville, hawthorne, or roth

thomas jefferson, mark twain, emerson, thoreau, gertrude stein, sherwood anderson, hemingway, steinbeck, thomas wolfe, kerouac, updike, thompson, tom wolfe, DFW, mary karr, bob dylan

Steinbeck would be number 1, he has a beautiful writing style

I feel like JR by William Gaddis is the quintessential American novel, but I haven't read it yet.

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Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Twain, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, Kerouac, Rand, Bob Dylan, Roth, and DeLillo

Y'know, there's a bunch of Big Murrican Writers who are very rarely mentioned on this Big Murican Writers loving board. I'm thinking Bellow, Mailer, Vidal, Updike, maybe Tom Wolfe. Is it a generational thing? Or are tees writers insufficiently memeworthy?

>>7884765
/lit/ has a preference for novelists and philosophers. Vidal wasn't an exceptional novelist, though his essays are great. Wolfe and Mailer remain legends in journalism. They were technical masters, but they aren't known for being novelists. Updike and Bellow ought to be mentioned more, though, I agree.

Twain - Huck Finn
Melville - Moby-Dick
Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury
Heller - Catch-22
Pynchon - Mason & Dixon

You guys are forgetting Gene Wolfe, the best sci-fi writer either living or dead

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James Fenimore Cooper
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emily Dickinson
Walt Whitman
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Herman Melville
Edgar Allan Poe
Henry David Thoreau
Louisa May Alcott
Stephen Crane
Henry James
Mark Twain
Edith Wharton
Ezra Pound
T. S. Eliot
E. E. cummings
F. Scott Fitzgerald
William Faulkner
Ernest Hemingway
John Steinbeck
Saul Bellow
Truman Capote
Vladimir Nabokov
J. D. Salinger
William Gaddis
Tennessee Williams
Arthur Miller
Raymond Carver
Don DeLillo
William H. Gass
Cormac McCarthy
Toni Morrison
Thomas Pynchon

>>7884872
This is missing a couple, but, otherwise, it's pretty decent.

>>7884750
If any of Gaddis' novels are the quintessential American novel, it's The Recognitions. That said, JR is still great.

>>7883805
This. Too bad /lit/ doesn't actually read.

>>7885001
Mind giving us the couple it's missing?

>>7885026
Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, Tom Wolfe, Gertrude Stein, John Hawkes, Gil Orlovitz, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Joseph McElroy, David Markson, Alexander Theroux, William T. Vollmann, William Burroughs, Robert Coover, Stephen Dixon, and Gilbert Sorrentino.

>>7885044
Thanks.

>>7885049
No problem, anon.

>>7882866
Robert Govard
Robert Sheckley
Harry Harrison
H. P. Lovecraft

These lists need more Dick.

Philip K. Dick, that is.

>>7882866

What is the Library of America collection?

Tao Lin