What are the top book recommendations for 'the great american novel'?

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#1

What do readers say about East of Eden?

captivating and thought-provoking beautiful and flawless

A masterpiece of Biblical scope, and the magnum opus of one of America's most enduring authors

In his journal, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck called East of Eden "the first book," and indeed it has the primordial power and simplicity of myth. Set ... More details on East of Eden

I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer—and what trees and seasons smelled like—how people looked an...
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#2

"DeLillo's swift, ironic, and witty cross-country American nightmare doesn't have a dull or an unoriginal line." -Rolling Stone

The first novel by Don DeLillo, author of White Noise (winner of the National Book Award) and The Silence

At twenty-eight,... More details on Americana

Then we came to the end of another dull and lurid year. Lights were strung across the front of every shop. Men selling chestnuts wheeled their smoky carts. In the evenings the crowds were immense and ...
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#3

What do readers say about American Pastoral?

overlong and wordy a novel of ideas

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

Here is Philip Roth's masterpiece-an elegy for the American century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Roth's protagonist is Swede Levov, a legendary athlete at his Newark high school, who grows up... More details on American Pastoral

THE SWEDE. During the war years, when I was still a grade school boy, this was a magical name in our Newark neighborhood, even to adults just a generation removed from the city’s old Prince Street ghe...
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#4

What do readers say about Moby Dick?

dense, luscious writing chasing the white whale

When the young Ishmael gets on board Captain Ahab's whaling ship, little does he suspect that the mission on which he is about to embark is the fulfilment of his master's obsessive desire for revenge on Moby Dick, a white whale who has already claime... More details on Moby Dick

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the w...
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#5

What do readers say about Blood Meridian?

gritty and gruesome macabre magical realism

An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridian brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild west."

Based on historical events that took place on the ... More details on Blood Meridian

See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few ...
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#6

What do readers say about The Grapes of Wrath?

short, thematic chapters a timeless classic

The Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression, a book that galvanized-and sometimes outraged-millions of readers. Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read

First published in 1939, Steinbeck's Pulitze... More details on The Grapes of Wrath

To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. The plows crossed and recrossed the rivulet marks. The last rains lifte...
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#7

What do readers say about The Great Gatsby?

lyrical and flowed short and deceptively simple

Invited to an extravagantly lavish party in a Long Island mansion, Nick Carraway, a young bachelor who has just settled in the neighbouring cottage, is intrigued by the mysterious host, Jay Gatsby, a flamboyant but reserved self-made man with murky b... More details on The Great Gatsby

He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgmen...
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#8

What do readers say about Lonesome Dove?

gentle humour and compassion a long story

The Pulitzer Prize--winning American classic of the American West that follows two aging Texas Rangers embarking on one last adventure. An epic of the frontier, Lonesome Dove is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness of Ame... More details on Lonesome Dove

WHEN AUGUSTUS CAME OUT on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake—not a very big one. It had probably just been crawling around looking for shade when it ran into the pigs. They were having ...
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#9

What do readers say about To Kill a Mockingbird?

fluid and prose beautiful crisp, wry, and spot-on

As seen through the eyes of his children, this is the legendary, wrenching story of lawyer Atticus Finch, who takes on a case that cuts deeply into the heart of racism in the 1930s Deep South. Mature content*

* Title may contain language or content c... More details on To Kill a Mockingbird

When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. When it healed, and Jem’s fears of never being able to play football were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious abou...
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#10

What do readers say about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?

humourous and satirical slavery in the south

Widely considered one of the greatest American novels, Adventures of Huckleberry

Finn tells the story of Huck Finn and his companion, the slave Jim, as they journey down the Mississippi river after running away from Huck's alcoholic father and Jim's... More details on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There w...
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