The Great American Novelist Tournament: The Final 32 Writers

moray mair | Book reviews and writers | July 25, 2012

The Guardian newspaper have been running a ‘Great American Novelist Tournament’ and they are down to the last 32. One of the elimination rules is that they must have written at least four possible ‘greats’ books which is rather alot of ‘great’ books to have written and as a consequence has left out many ‘great’ writers such as; David Foster Wallace, Marilynne Robinson, Harper Lee, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Richard Yates and John Cheever. I’m not sure when the final adjudication will be made but i’ll keep you informed.

Now to the list:

1. William Faulkner
Light In August
As I lay Dying
The Sound and The Fury
Absalom, Absalom!

2. Saul Bellow
The Adventure of Augie March
Henderson The Rain King
Herzog
Humboldt’s Gift

3. Philip Roth
Operation Shylock
Sabbath’s Theatre
American Pastoral
The Human Stain

4. John Updike
Rabbit, Run
Rabbit Redux
Rabbit Is Rich
Rabbit At Rest

5. John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath
East of Eden
Cannery Row
Of Mice and Men

6. Sinclair Lewis
Babbit
Main Street
Arrowsmith
Elmer Gantry

7. Toni Morrison
The Bluest Eye
Sula
Song of Solomon
Beloved

8. Ernest Hemingway
The Sun Also Rises
To Have and To Have Not
A Farewell to Arms
The Garden of Eden

9. Edith Wharton
The Custom of the Country
Summer
The Age of Innocence
The Glimpses of the Moon

10. Cormac McCarthy
Suttree
Blood Meridian
All the Pretty Horses
The Road

11. Willa Cather
The Professor’s House
Death Comes for the Archbishop
A Lost Lady
One of Ours

12. Don DeLillo
White Noise
Libra
Mao II
Underworld

13. EL Doctorow
The Book of Daniel
Rag Time
Billy Bathgate
The March

14. Thomas Pynchon
The Crying of Lot 49
V
Gravity’s Rainbow
Mason and Dixon

15. Vladimir Nabokov
Pnin
Pale Fire
Lolita
Ada

16. Annie Proulx
Postcards
The Shipping News
Accordion Crimes
That Old Ace In The Hole

17. James Baldwin
Go Tell It On The Mountain
Just Above My Head
Giovanni’s Room
Another County

18. William S Burroughs
Naked Lunch
Exterminator!
Cities of the Red Knight
The Wildboys

19. Raymond Chandler
The Big Sleep
The Long Goodbye
Farewell My Lovely
The Lady in the Lake

20. John Dos Passos
The Manhattan Transfer
42nd Parallel
1919
The Big Money

21. John Fante
Wait Until Spring, Bandini
Ask the Dust
Dreams from Bunker Hill
The Brotherhood of the Grape

22. F Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise
The Beautiful and the Damned
The Great Gatsby
Tender is the Night

23. Richard Ford
Canada
Independence Day
The Sports Writer
The Lay of The Land

24. Wallace Stegner
Angle of Repose
Crossing To Safety
The Big Rock Candy Mountain
The Spectator Bird

25. William Gaddis
The Recognitions
JR
A Frolic Of His Own
Agape, Agape

26. Joseph Heller
Catch 22
Something Happened
Good as Gold
Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man

27. Ursula K Le Guin
The Left Hand of Darkness
A Wizard Of Earthsea
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
The Lathe of Heaven

28. Carson Mccullers
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Reflections in a Golden Eye
Member of the Wedding
Clock Without Hands

29. Joyce Carol Oates
Them
Blonde
We Were The Mulvaneys
The Grave Digger’s Daughter

30. William Styron
Sophie’s Choice
Confessions of Nat Turner
Lie Down in Darkness
The Long March

31. Paul Auster
The New York Trilogy
In the Country of Last Things
The Music of Chance
The Book of Illusions

32. Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse-Five
Sirens of Titan
Breakfast of Champions
Cat’s Cradle

Please let me know what you think of the list and who you’d vote for

Via The Guardian