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.
Christopher J. Scalia is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
