Great Novels

          I know I’ve written quite a bit about the books and series I’ve loved over the years, so forgive me if I repeat myself. My goal here is to point out what I consider are the best novels in American literature. I’m ignoring European novels because I, like many others, haven’t read some of the great ones, like War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, or those two confounding novels by James Joyce, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

But before I get there, I must once again explain my reading habits. From the very beginning, I’ve always found writers I like (love?) and then read all their works just as fast as I can, like a dog with rawhide knots, chewing and chomping until they’re all gone. When I was very young and first felt the bite of the reading bug, there was L. Frank Baum and his Oz series and Edgar Rice Burroughs and his Tarzan, Mars, Venus, and Pellucidar series. Later, in high school, I went from genre to genre, immersing myself in one type for a while, then moving on to another. In science fiction I read all of Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and others; in Westerns, mainly Luke Short and Max Brand (but never Zane Gray); in detectives, Mickey Spillane and Bret Halliday (but for some reason, not Dashiell Hammett); in historical fiction, Samuel Shellabarger and Thomas B. Costain. These were the four genres I read, but I also read an assortment of novels outside these boundaries, like the early James Michener and Arthur Hailey.

Much later I decided to catch up on the best and best-known writers of the first half of the twentieth century, all of Hemingway and John Steinbeck (but not William Faulkner because I wasn’t yet ready for him). Much later, I returned to the easy stuff, again like that hungry dog—Ian Fleming’s James Bond series, Dick Francis and his English horse racing novels, all of Stephen King’s massive production, John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series (three times), Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder series (two times), Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series (two times), James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheau series, and Ed McBain’s 87^th Precinct series (two times). Later still, John Sandford’s Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers series, Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch series, Jeffry Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme series, Robert Crais’s Elvis Cole series, Jonathan Kellerman’s Alex Delaware series, and Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series.

Now I can return to my original reason for this journey through popular American writing (with the exception of Dick Francis, the Englishman). Which do I consider the greatest American novels? My reading of literary fiction pretty much ended in 1970 or 1980. Too much work involved, too little time. I consider the 19^th century classics and find Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, which is considered great by many critics, but not me. Same for Melville’s Moby Dick. As Twain said, “Classic. A book which people praise and don’t read.” In the 20^th century there are Hemingway’s novels, but I think he’ll be considered a writer of great short stories, not great novels. In 1962 John Steinbeck, like Hemingway and Faulkner before him, won a Nobel Prize for Literature, but I’m convinced the Nobel Committee was looking for an American that year and Steinbeck was the best they could find. The Grapes of Wrath might be a great novel, but all the rest are pot boilers (with the possible exception of East of Eden). And back to Faulkner. I and others might praise him for his complex style and his complex creation of the generations who inhabited his Yoknapatawpha County, but other than The Sound and the Fury, most of his novels get lost in a Mississippi fog.

All right, here we go. Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage are the best of the 19^th century. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 are the best of the 20^th century. And their reverse order? 5. The Red Badge of Courage 4. The Catcher in the Rye 3. Catch-22 2. The Great Gatsby 1. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (with the probable European parallel, Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield).

That should do it for my reading habits. I promise I won’t ever again subject you to it.