Greatest Novel of All-Time

[waterytart]

I'm always disappointed when Babbitt isn't on these lists. Also, I will challenge to a fist fight the next one who denigrates Steinbeck. In the end, I would vote for a F. Scott Fitzgerald novel ...

I compensate for denigrating Steinbeck by never having finished Catcher in the Rye, despite three or four attempts. Feel free to consider me an outlier.

 

[Azrael]

This is coincidentally the new hotness over at TinHouse. Moby deck in pictures.

www.tinhouse.com/books/fiction-poetry/moby-deck-in-pictures.html

 

[RubberSoul1979]

I was working in California's Central Valley when I first read The Grapes of Wrath. Wow. Still my favorite. It's dark, full of emotional twists and turns, altogether very much unlike the Henry Fonda movie.

I don't think many people actually living through the Depression would have preferred a "Grapes" screen version that accurately reflected the one in print. They went to the movies to escape reality. That said, I would love for today's Hollywood to bring it to life the way Steinbeck wrote it.

 

[JR]

I think what's canonical and not canonical is the work of years, not lists or even mainstream critics. Has a lot to do with what gets taught, and therefore the academy, rather than a popular audience.

That is certainly true, especially with American lit where you have a guy like Melville who kills his own career by writing Moby deck (to the point he was begging Nathanial Hawthorne to ask his old college buddy the President for a government job) and yet 80 years later it was regarded as one of the greatest novels ever.
The bigger problem with the American cannon is that it was put together by Ivy League professors in the late 19th century who primarily looked at fellow New Englanders with Twain sneaking in there on the strength of living in Connecticut at the time. In the 20th century that view has been expanded by Midwesterners like Fitzgerald and Hemmingway, but prior to 1900, who are the great American writers from outside the Northeast?

Maybe that's because that's where most of the writers lived--in the east.

I think you also have to remember that book publishing at the time was an entirely New York/Boston enterprise.

I don't think it's really a question of cronerie. I think it's just a reflection of the times.

And I don't know the history of US universities but how many were there with literature departments in 1900?

I suspect Ivy League universities decided on the canon because there were not many other alternatives.

 

[Pete Wevurski]

I'm with Versatile on Catch-22.

 

[Azrael]

Trouble is, if we're doing all novels across the whole history of novels on a list of 16, 'Catch-22' is going to get bumped by something foreign. As good an American novel as it is, it's less important to world literature than 'A House for Mr. Biswas' or 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' or 'The Trial' or 'The Stranger' or 'A Remembrance of Things Past.'

 

[Zeke12]

Be gone, J. Evans Pritchard, Ph.D!

 

[Uncle.Ruckus]

Be gone, J. Evans Pritchard, Ph.D!

Very good.

 

[John]

A glaring lack of Faulkner on that list. Not saying one of his is the greatest, but surely one makes the top 16.

 

[waterytart]

And I don't know the history of US universities but how many were there with literature departments in 1900?

The notion of college as glorified job training is relatively recent.

There might not have been literature departments at West Point and Annapolis; I don't know. But, given the notion of "an officer and a gentleman", I wouldn't be surprised to find them there, also.

 

[Azrael]

Be gone, J. Evans Pritchard, Ph.D!

Very good.

But what will become of all the years I spent in graduate school perfecting my Marxist / Jungian / transgender reading of the folk tales of 18th century Silesia? What?

 

[waterytart]

Adjunct. Community college.