America is too big for the Great American Novel

Map fans and book lovers: Now that’s a Venn diagram with a big overlap. Why? “Because, like books, maps contain stories. When you’re reading a map, in your head you’re imagining a narrative to go along with it,” Ben Gibson says. Big Think’s design director, Ben is also the co-founder of Pop Chart, where he gets to produce in poster format all the things that would otherwise keep bouncing around in his head. Like this incredible map about books. Double whammy!

Pinning more than 400 novels across the U.S. landscape, this Literary Map of the United States is a work of substance, a magnum opus — not just because it cost Ben many months and several sleepless nights to conceive, but because it is a text in its own right, one that, like a Pynchon novel, can be read in a multitude of ways.

In a previous article, I examined the “imaginative geography” encoded in the map: how literature tied to a specific location (real or fictitious) can capture our imaginations and, in doing so, transform those places. Like how Stephen King’s hair-raising tales have seeped into real-life Maine or how Cannery Row has come to forever echo John Steinbeck’s 1945 novel.

• The Scarlet Letter (1850) by Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • Explores the rigid moral landscape of Puritan New England.
• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) by Frederick Douglass
  • A firsthand account of the brutality of slavery and of escape to freedom.
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe
  • The 19th century’s best-selling novel, it helped galvanize Northern opposition to slavery.
• Moby-Dick (1851) by Herman Melville
  • Exploring ambition, fate, and obsession through the prism of 19th-century whale-hunting, this is a strong candidate for the ultimate GAN.
• Walden (1854) by Henry David Thoreau
  • A reflection on self-reliance and nature, a touchstone of transcendentalism, and a major influence on environmentalism.

This time, I’ve asked Ben to accompany me on a different kind of expedition in search of the Great American Novel. I did so knowing full well it would prove a wild goose chase — the Great American Novel does not exist. It’s a mirage we’ve been chasing since 1868, when the novelist and Civil War veteran John William De Forest coined the phrase in an eponymous essay. De Forest argued that the U.S. was in need of a literary work that would “paint the American soul” on a tableau large enough to encompass the entire nation. Humbly refusing to offer one of his own works for consideration, he concluded that the Great American Novel had yet to be written.

In the decades since, the quest for the GAN — a time-saving abbreviation popularized by Henry James — served as a proxy for a much larger question: What is America, and who gets to define it?

Plenty of attempts have been made to identify, or even write, the GAN. In the latter category, the two Sinclairs come to mind: The Jungle (1906) by Upton Sinclair and Babbitt (1922) by Sinclair Lewis. But the search devolved into something of a literary in-joke. In 1973, Philip Roth satirized the quest with a book simply called The Great American Novel — ironically one of his minor works.

• Leaves of Grass (1855) by Walt Whitman
  • A free-verse celebration of the human body, nature, and ordinary Americans in a bold and democratic voice.
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) by Mark Twain
  • A landmark of American realism and humor, its treatment of Southern racism and racial language has become increasingly controversial.
• The Red Badge of Courage (1895) by Stephen Crane
  • This realistic, unsentimental portrayal of Civil War combat reshaped American war literature.
• The Jungle (1906) by Upton Sinclair
  • Its depiction of unsanitary food production in Chicago’s meatpacking district sparked public outrage and helped spur federal food-safety laws.
• My Ántonia (1918) by Willa Cather
  • This is a defining portrait of immigrant life and Great Plains settlement.

At the heart of the inability to find this one Great American Novel is a wonderful paradox. The GAN is supposed to capture the whole American experience, but the defining characteristic of America is its plurality, its various regions, ethnicities, religions, ideologies, and identities all competing, clashing, and complementing each other.

America is too big and too diverse to be contained by a single book.

There isn’t a single time or place that can claim to encapsulate it all. New York City is a world away from the prairies of Wyoming, as far apart as the Jazz Age and the dot-com bubble. Yet all are American.

There are Great American Novels, plural. Each contains the definitive version — or at least an authoritative one — of an American era, attitude, place, or idea.

Should the proverbial aliens land tomorrow and have no concept of the United States, yet paradoxically have a working knowledge of the English language, which books would we recommend to help them get up to speed about the place where they landed?

• Babbitt (1922) by Sinclair Lewis
  • The novel satirizes a status-obsessed Midwestern businessman, offering up a wider critique of consumerism and middle-class conformity.
• The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • This book’s portrait of wealth and illusion amid Jazz Age excess made it a quintessential critique of the American Dream.
• The Grapes of Wrath (1939) by John Steinbeck
  • Depicting the Joad family’s migration from Oklahoma to California, Steinbeck’s Pulitzer-winning novel became a defining portrait of Dust Bowl suffering and resilience.
• The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J.D. Salinger
  • A candid portrayal of adolescent alienation and a defining novel of postwar youth culture.
• Invisible Man (1952) by Ralph Ellison
  • America’s institutions fail to perceive the black narrator as an individual, erasing his individuality while reducing him to his race.

All that time spent working on this map gave Ben an interesting insight: “Travel is an essential ingredient of American literature. That includes older classics like Moby-Dick and Grapes of Wrath, but also more recent ones, like The Road.”

For a previous project, Ben attempted to plot out the route followed by the unnamed man and boy in Cormac McCarthy’s bleak, post-apocalyptic allegory. “I got a lot of pushback from some McCarthy superfans. Despite the fact that all indications of place in the book are vague, abstract, and unnamed, they claimed to have figured out from the smallest of clues the exact route followed by the protagonists. And that didn’t match up with the one I had charted. (Laughs.)”

Whoever was right, the anecdote illustrates the importance of the road (and not just The Road) in the American literary imagination. “Travel stories are so typically American,” Ben says. “That’s because travel and exploration are baked into the American experience — literal, metaphysical, or both.”

• The Crucible (1953) by Arthur Miller
  • Set during the Salem witch trials, this veiled allegory of McCarthyism remains a parable of mob justice and political persecution.
• On the Road (1957) by Jack Kerouac
  • Its spontaneous style and rejection of conformity made it a foundational Beat and countercultural text.
• To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) by Harper Lee
  • Its moral clarity about racial injustice made it one of America’s most widely read and taught novels.
• The Fire Next Time (1963) by James Baldwin
  • Confronting America’s unresolved racism, this work’s prophetic voice made it a major work of the civil rights movement.
• Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut
  • A survivor of the Dresden firebombing becomes unstuck in time, reliving his life out of order. This fragmented dark comedy is a landmark of both postmodernism and anti-war fiction.

While building the Literary Map, Ben got intimately acquainted with some of the more obscure entries in the American canon, several of which piqued his interest and may soon migrate from the map to his bookshelf.

When asked to pick his favorite GAN, he says can’t pick just one — as is wholly permissible and understandable. “Moby-Dick and Grapes of Wrath are both up there,” Ben says. “But so is The Handmaid’s Tale and more recent books like The Underground Railroad.”

• Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970) by Dee Brown
  • The book chronicles the conquest of Native Americans during westward expansion, overturning traditional frontier narratives by centering Indigenous perspectives.
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) by Hunter S. Thompson
  • Its gonzo style captured the drug-fueled collapse of 1960s idealism and became a countercultural touchstone.
• The Right Stuff (1979) by Tom Wolfe
  • Its portrait of the daring and bravado of test pilots and astronauts became a defining account of the space race and postwar ambition.
• Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison
  • A formerly enslaved woman is haunted by the ghost of the daughter she killed to save her from slavery. This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a cornerstone of the American canon.
• Underworld (1997) by Don DeLillo
  • Spanning life from a 1951 Giants-Dodgers game to the Cold War’s end, the novel’s vast scope made it an important reflection on late-20th-century America.
• The Underground Railroad (2016) by Colson Whitehead
  • This genre-bending reimagining of slavery renewed fiction’s confrontation with the horrors of that legacy.

If you asked me for my Great American Novel, like Ben, I couldn’t stick to just one. In the spirit of America as a coat of many colors, you’ll find my selections throughout this article. Granted, not all are even novels, strictly speaking. There’s poetry, documentary, and autobiography, as well. Feel free to disagree and come up with your own list. For inspiration, check the Literary Map of the United States, or as you might also call it: The Library of Great American Novels.

This article is featured on Big Think.