Earlier this month, to commemorate . . . well, it’s not clear what, The Atlantic released a list of 136 great American novels of the past 100 years. A brief introductory essay explains that the magazine sought to establish the “new American canon” by identifying “novels that say something intriguing about the world and do it distinctively, in intentional, artful prose.” In the process, the list-makers wanted to “single out those classics that stand the test of time” while also drawing attention to “the unexpected, the unfairly forgotten, and the recently published works that already feel indelible. We aimed for comprehensiveness, rigor, and open-mindedness.”
You’ll find plenty of the usual suspects rounded up here, including The Great Gatsby and Invisible Man, The Catcher in the Rye and Catch-22, The Sound and the Fury and Slaughterhouse-Five, Beloved and Underworld. If you keep up with contemporary fiction, you won’t be surprised to see authors like Lauren Groff, Percival Everett, and Jonathan Franzen. You may even like that the list-makers’ open-mindedness encompasses three children’s novels and three graphic novels, or that novels from the past 25 years compose almost a third of the list.
There are, however, many glaring omissions. Neither Tom nor Thomas Wolfe was invited. William Styron and Wallace Stegner, once regulars on lists like this, are on the outside looking in. Ernest Hemingway and John Updike both appear only once. Ditto Saul Bellow, the only author to win the National Book Award three times.
Dead white men—reliably culled during canonical and curricular revisions—are by no means an endangered species in The Atlantic’s list. William Faulkner and Philip Roth both have two works included, for example. But it’s clear that one purpose of the list was to, in progressive parlance, decolonize the canon. The marginalized move toward the center of the page; the subaltern approaches superiority. Toni Morrison stands alone as the only author with three novels selected.
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