What have America’s greatest novelists wondered about their country? American literature has a strong tendency to deconstruct the national myth rather than celebrate it. Many of its great novels question, from different angles, the country’s triumphal narrative, and they themselves are part of its history.

Telling the 250-year history of the United States (1776-2026) through works considered part of the so-called “Great American Novel” not only allows us to discover memorable stories of enormous literary quality; it also offers a way to understand the country. More than a literary canon, these works constitute a mirror of the United States and helped define what it means to be American.

These novels are not only witnesses to history, but also builders of the image that the United States has of itself. Read consecutively, they compose an alternative history: not that of presidents or wars, but that of the moral, social, and cultural conflicts that their writers considered crucial to understanding the country.

Throughout this narrative, the same conflicts appear repeatedly:

• Puritanism and guilt;
• the conquest and extermination of Indigenous peoples;
• slavery;
• the Civil War;
• the violence of the conquest of the West;
• structural racism;
• the violence of capitalism;
• the exclusion of immigrants;
• the world wars;
• the Cold War;
• neocapitalism and social division;
• the contradictions of the democratic system.

This is not to claim that the history of the United States is solely a history of violence, but rather to observe that many of its great novels have found precisely in these conflicts the best material to explain how the country has been built: from the denial of its multicultural origins and racial discrimination to slavery, successive waves of immigration, and the gap between the democratic ideal and historical reality.

This literary survey prioritizes the themes, plots, and concerns of the novels over an analysis of their styles, structures, or narrative devices. The twenty-one selected works stand out both for their literary quality and for their authors’ ability to understand the past, interpret the present, and intuit the future of the country they portray.

The twenty-one novels follow the historical order of the events they narrate, not the order of their publication. In this way, they form a timeline that allows us to explore the history of the United States from a literary perspective and observe, in a cross-section, the major conflicts that have shaped the country from its origins to the present day.

It is fiction that explains the evolution of the country, especially in its moral, ethical, and social dimensions, and, at the same time, uses history to illuminate these works. The great American novels not only reflect the history of the United States; they have decisively contributed to imagining and discussing it.

This first part focuses on the birth and development of the United States:

Puritan Colonial Era: 1642-1649

The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)

The norms, injustices, and hypocrisy of a society that condemns Hester Prynne to wear the letter A, for adulteress, on her chest for having a daughter with a man she is not married to. She accepts the punishment and does not reveal the man’s identity. Marking, guilt, injustice, and stigma are the central themes with which Hawthorne questions a moral social system, religious fanaticism, and puritanism placed above the humanity that should prevail among people.

Excerpt:

“The founders of a new colony, whatever utopia of happiness and human virtue they may originally envision, always realize that one of their first practical needs is to demarcate two plots of virgin land, one for the cemetery and the other for the prison”.

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Seven Years’ War in Europe: 1757

The Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper (1826).

It is one of the first great novels by American authors. Colonialism, adventure, and the conflict of interracial coexistence unfold during the French and Indian War (1754-1763), a struggle between France and Great Britain for control of the northern colonies. The French sought collaborators among the Native American nations in their fight against the British, a conflict dramatized by the characters of Chingachgook, a Mohican warrior, and Hawkeye, an explorer. This conflict left more than a million dead and reshaped territorial power and dominance. The novel established important archetypes of the noble savage, the villainous colonists, the exploration of inhospitable lands, and a new perspective on the Western genre.

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Racism and Violence: 1833–1910

Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner (1936).

In the fictional territory of Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi, we see a glimpse of the United States ecosystem before, during, and after the Civil War (1861–1865), between the Northern states opposed to slavery and the Southern states that upheld it. The famous American dream turned into a nightmare by the unbridled ambition, power, violence, and cruelty of Thomas Sutpen: creating a plantation and founding a dynasty burdened by slavery and racism, leading to the destruction of the family. Faulkner uses four narrators, four points of view, four realities.

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Slavery, racism, anti-racism, identity: 1830-1840

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (1884-1885)

A journey into individual human consciousness through the exploration of life and its inequalities leads the protagonist, Huck, to the conquest of physical freedom and, above all, freedom of thought. A tableau of slavery and Southern racism is criticized and satirized here. This is what the friend of the protagonist of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) achieves, another window into the United States after the Civil War, in this continuation or fork of that world. It is one of the first novels written in American vernacular English, primarily due to the narrator’s style.

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Massacre of Native Americans: 1833-1870

Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy (1985)

The campaign to massacre the Apache Indians on the border between the United States and Mexico, between 1849 and 1850, takes on a human dimension in this novel, even amidst its cruelty. A young fugitive joins a band of mercenaries, while a judge promotes the violence. What begins as the extermination of Native Americans ends in the indiscriminate slaughter of citizens. The young man, called “the boy”, experiences his own journey through the violence, survives it, and grows into an adult who returns to the judge, and whose brutality and inhumanity consume him.

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Civil War: 1861-1873

Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell (1936)

How to survive the ravages of the Civil War through the life of Scarlett O’Hara, a wealthy and capricious young woman whose Georgia family is ruined, and who takes it upon herself to rebuild, at all costs, the plantation: Tara. Along the way, she encounters love, heartbreak, the traps and privileges of slave society. Rhett Butler is the man who courts her, but whom she detests, and whom she eventually marries for convenience. Scarlett’s personal transformation unfolds in parallel with the changing realities of the United States. He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1937.

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Slavery and Memory: 1873

Beloved, by Toni Morrison (1987)

“In 124th Street there was a curse: all the poison of a baby”. Thus begins Toni Morrison’s story about slavery, racism, injustice, and the poisoned and rotten roots of a society. It is inspired by the life of African American slave Margaret Garner, who escapes her enslavement but faces an order to recapture her under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The writer narrates with lyricism and depth the journey of the slave who chooses to kill her two-year-old daughter rather than let her suffer what she endured. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988.

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Gilded Age: 1870-1900

The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton (1920)

The origins of the New York aristocracy in the second half of the 19th century and the formation of societal rules, prejudices, and traditions, as well as the inequalities between men and women. A world of conventions that ultimately breeds underlying violence. Here, through the life of Countess Ellen Olenska, who lives in Europe and seeks a divorce, and Newland Archer, a lawyer from a wealthy family who falls in love with her but is engaged to May Welland, the Countess’s cousin. The human condition, its betrayals, its hypocrisy, its masks, and the duty of responsibility that sacrifices true desire and love. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921.

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Conquest of the West: 1880-1910

My Ántonia,by Willa Cather (1918)

This is a re-creation of the harsh life of the pioneers of the Old West through the settlers of Nebraska and the crucial, silent role that women played in that conquest of the territory. The narrator is Jim Burden, an adult man who recalls when and how he arrived on those prairies and befriended Ántonia, one of the daughters of Czech immigrants. A glimpse into the multiculturalism that makes up the United States.

This first part of this anthology has explored the formation and construction of the United States through:

• Puritanism.
• The Frontier.
• Conquest of the territory.
• Indigenous extermination. Slavery.
• Civil War.
• Reconstruction.

Immigration and colonization of the Midwest. The nation is already built, but it is not yet the world power it will become. World War I will open a new chapter in which the United States will cease to look solely inward and become a protagonist of 20th-century history. This second part will feature novels that portray the consumer society of the 1920s, the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, the struggle for civil rights, and the challenges of contemporary America.

SPECIAL

Part One: The History of the United States Through Its Great Novels (1): From the Colonial Era to the Building of a Nation

Part Two: The History of the United States Through Its Great Novels (2): The Building of the American Century

Part Three: The History of the United States Through Its Great Novels (3): The Fractures of the American Dream and the Uncertainty of the 21st Century

• With translation assistance from Robert Lienhard.

All articles from our English edition are available HERE

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