This book updates an earlier edition of the book, wherein the editors of the Book of the Month Club got together to decide what a well-stocked bookcase should include and then included a couple paragraphs of why they think so. The subtitle limits the conceit to 72 Enduring novels by Americans published between 1926 and 1998. The analysis of each book is much shorter than in Vintage Reading, as they more likely reflect the blurbs in the BOMC newsletter than actual news reviews.
So what do they think should be on your bookshelves? (I have italicized those I know I own and have bolded those I have already read.)
Title | Author | Year |
Accidental Tourist | Anne Tyler | 1985 |
Alias Grace | Margaret Atwood | 1996 |
All the King’s Men | Robert Warren | 1946 |
Angle of Repose | Wallace Stegner | 1971 |
Appointment in Samarra | John O’Hara | 1934 |
The Assistant | Bernard Malamud | 1957 |
Bastard Out Of Carolina | Dorothy Allison | 1992 |
Because It Is Bitter, And Because It Is My Heart | Joyce Carol Oates | 1990 |
The Bell Jar | Sylvia Plath | 1963 |
Beloved | Toni Morrison | 1987 |
The Bonfire of the Vanities | Tom Wolfe | 1987 |
Burr | Gore Vidal | 1973 |
Catch-22 | Joseph Heller | 1961 |
The Catcher in the Rye | J.D. Salinger | 1951 |
Cold Mountain | Charles Frazier | 1997 |
The Counterlife | Philip Roth | 1987 |
The Day of the Locust | Nathaniel West | 1939 |
Death Comes For The Archbishop | Willa Cather | 1927 |
Delta Wedding | Eudora Welty | 1946 |
Edwin Mulhouse | Steven Milhauser | 1972 |
A Fan’s Notes | Frederick Exley | 1968 |
A Farewell to Arms | Ernest Hemingway | 1929 |
A Flag for Sunrise | Robert Stone | 1981 |
From Here to Eternity | James Jones | 1951 |
Geek Love | Katherine Dunn | 1988 |
Gone with the Wind | Margaret Mitchell | 1936 |
The Grapes of Wrath | James Steinbeck | 1939 |
Guard of Honor | James Gould Cozzens | 1948 |
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter | Carson McCullers | 1940 |
Heaven’s My Destination | Thornton Wilder | 1935 |
Invisible Man | Ralph Ellison | 1952 |
The Joy Luck Club | Amy Tan | 1989 |
The Last Hurrah | Edwin O’Connor | 1956 |
The Late George Apley | John P. Marquand | 1937 |
Libra | Don DeLillo | 1988 |
Lie Down in Darkness | William Styron | 1952 |
Light in August | William Faulkner | 1932 |
Little Big Man | Thomas Berger | 1964 |
Lolita | Vladimir Nabakov | 1958 |
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne | Brian Moore | 1956 |
Look Homeward, Angel | Thomas Wolfe | 1929 |
The Magic Christian | Terry Southern | 1960 |
The Maltese Falcon | Dashiell Hammett | 1930 |
The Man with the Golden Arm | Nelson Algren | 1949 |
The Mountain Lion | Jean Stafford | 1947 |
The Moviegoer | Walker Percy | 1961 |
The Naked and the Dead | Norman Mailer | 1948 |
Nickel Mountain | John Gardner | 1973 |
Other Voices, Other Rooms | Truman Capote | 1948 |
The Postman Always Rings Twice | James M. Cain | 1934 |
Rabbit, Run | John Updike | 1960 |
Ragtime | E.L. Doctorow | 1975 |
The Recognitions | William Gaddis | 1955 |
Seize the Day | Saul Bellow | 1956 |
The Sheltering Sky | Paul Bowles | 1949 |
Slaughterhouse Five | Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. | 1969 |
Song of Solomon | Toni Morrison | 1977 |
The Sound and the Fury | William Faulkner | 1929 |
Studs Lonigan | James T. Farrell | 1932, 1934, 1935 |
The Sun Also Rises | Ernest Hemingway | 1926 |
Tales of the City | Armistead Maupin | 1978-1989 |
Tender is the Night | F. Scott Fitzgerald | 1934 |
Them | Joyce Carol Oates | 1969 |
To Kill A Mockingbird | Harper Lee | 1960 |
The Transit of Venus | Shirley Hazzard | 1980 |
The Trees/The Fields/The Town | Conrad Richter | 1940, 1946, 1950 |
U.S.A. | John Dos Passos | 1930, 1933, 1936 |
The Wall | John Hersey | 1950 |
The Wapshot Chronicle | John Cheever | 1957 |
What Makes Sammy Run? | Budd Schulberg | 1941 |
That Which Springeth Green | J.F. Powers | 1988 |
The World According to Garp | John Irving | 1978 |
Apparently, my bookshelves are not well-stocked. I must find another book fair, stat! Although it would not surprise me if I did not own more of these titles hidden among my to read shelves and forgotten.
The only one on the list I read but do not own is Catch-22, which I read the summer before my freshman year of college when the big Swedish mechanic next door taunted me for not having read much literary literature and planning to be an English major. He recommended it. Thanks, Mark!
The thing about this sort of popularity contest is that the list tends to be stacked toward more recent books. Or, in this case, books recent to a decade ago. You end up with a lot more “Who?” responses the later you get; I think the “classics” portion of this list really stops about 1960, and anything after it is very suspect. I mean, two books by Joyce Carol Oates? Really?
At any rate, it’s a quick read and hopefully has brushed me up a little about contemporary serious literature, but I’m not sure I’m going to remember anything new except that Carson McCullers is the author of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.
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