The third part of the special feature The History of the United States Through Its Great Novels, commemorating 250 years of independence, focuses on works that portray the social, economic, political, and cultural changes as the world’s greatest power began to discover that its greatest challenge no longer came from abroad, but from its own internal fractures: economic, racial, cultural, political, and identity-related.

The United States confronting what it is, what it believes itself to be, what it aspires to be, and how the rest of the world perceives it is reflected in the following novels, which reveal the shattering of the American Dream, the difficult integration of multiculturalism, the ravages of capitalism, and new traumas:

American Pastoral, by Philip Roth (1997): social changes and the breakdown of the postwar consensus.

American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis (1991): financial capitalism and the culture of success.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz (2007): the integration of Latin American immigrants.

Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2013): the new multicultural society, race, and identity.

Falling Man, by Don DeLillo (2007): the trauma of 9/11 and the turn of the century.

Crossroads: The Key to All Mythologies, by Jonathan Franzen (2021 / trilogy in progress): the middle class and the roots of the moral, social, and political crises of today’s polarization.

The twenty-one novels in this special feature 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.

The first part of our journey through the history of the United States covers the period from colonization to the westward expansion, including slavery and the Civil War (Read Part One HERE):

The Making of a Nation

The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850): Puritanism and the moral origins of the United States.

The Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper (1826): The frontier and the conflict with Indigenous peoples.

Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner (1936): Violence, slavery, and the decline of the South.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (1884-85): Freedom, racism, and identity.

Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy (1985): The westward expansion, the massacre of Native Americans, and the foundational violence.

Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell (1936): the Civil War and the end of the Old South.

Beloved, by Toni Morrison (1987): the memory of slavery and its wounds.

The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton (1920): high society, the violence of hypocrisy, and urban modernization.

My Ántonia, by Willa Cather (1918): European immigration and the conquest of the Great Plains.

The second part addresses the construction of the American century: from the First World War to the Vietnam War, passing through the mirage of the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression after the 1929 stock market crash, and the Cold War, reflected in the following novels (Read the second part HERE):

From the Colonial Era to the Construction of the American Century

A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway (1929): the experience of the First World War.

The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925): the Roaring Twenties and the American Dream.

The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck (1939): the Great Depression.

Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut (1969): the trauma of World War II.

Underworld, by Don DeLillo (1997): the impact of the Cold War.

The Armies of the Night, by Norman Mailer (1968): Vietnam and protest.

If the novels in the first two installments narrated the construction of a nation and a superpower, those in this third volume show the moment when the United States begins to question the price of that success. It is no longer about conquering territory or leading the world, but about understanding the fractures that this journey has left in society and imagining what kind of country it wants to be in the future.

The 1960s and 1970s

American Pastoral, by Philip Roth (1997)

The “American Dream”, with all its shades of color, realities, and illusions, begins to crumble. The unfulfilled promises for the triumphant and prosperous postwar generation, those who came of age during decades of great change, such as the sixties and seventies, are laid bare. The whirlwind of those years sweeps up Seymour Levov, the Swede, a young and successful businessman, when his daughter Merry participates in a violent act against the Vietnam War. A succession of political, social, economic, and cultural events and changes erode those dreams. The United States begins to mutate. It is the crisis of American soil from within. It was awarded the 1998 Pulitzer Prize.

Excerpt:

“The Swede’s family had maintained their industrial operations in Newark for a long time, and feeling obligated to the veteran employees, most of whom were Black, the Swede had held on for six years after the 1967 riots. He had resisted as much as he could despite the economic realities of industry in general and his father’s imprecations, but when he found himself powerless to stop the erosion of the workforce, which had steadily deteriorated since the riots, he threw in the towel and managed to emerge relatively unscathed from the city’s industrial collapse. The damage suffered by the Newark Maid facility during the four days of rioting was limited to a few broken windows, although fifty meters from the loading dock entrance, on West Market Street, two other buildings were burned to the ground and abandoned”.

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1980s-1990s

American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis (1991)

With a lingering hangover from the events of the sixties and seventies, the United States takes its first steps toward the neoliberalism that will transform society. Bret Easton Ellis captured this era as a quintessential expression of Generation X, those born during the turbulent sixties. The novel is a social satire that follows Patrick Bateman, a Wall Street yuppie and murderer in Manhattan, the heart of the empire, in the late eighties. Superficiality, obsessions, new aesthetic standards, appearances, dubious values, suppressed frustrations, existential emptiness… The capitalist world accelerates its changes, the mentality shifts, and the protagonist’s mind is that of a maniac, revealing aspects of a hyper-materialistic society. A “corrosive critique of the selfishness and depravity of rampant capitalism: a bleak, ironic, and fiercely relevant portrait of a world on the brink of collapse in which we still live”. Unbridled capitalism and neoliberalism.

Excerpt:

“Life was like a blank canvas, a cliché, a soap opera. I felt lethal, on the verge of hysteria. My nocturnal bloodlust also flooded my days, and I had to leave the city. My mask of sanity threatened to disappear. For me, it was the hardest season, and I needed a vacation”.

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Second half of the 20th century

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz (2007)

A triumphant work by a Dominican raised in the United States. It traces the life of a migrant family from the 1940s, the trials of adapting to their new life, while the dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo wreaks havoc in the Dominican Republic. The difficulties of integration, identity, racism, social changes, mixed customs, language… But at its core, it deals with what every human being seeks: to be happy, and one path to this is through self-love and self-acceptance. A world personified above all in Oscar Wao, “a sweet, obese, and disastrous Dominican who lives with his mother and dysfunctional sister in a New Jersey ghetto”. And Junot Díaz crafts his critical narrative with humor. He won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2008.

Excerpt:

“Do you want a final answer to the Warren Commission’s question of who killed JFK? Let me, your humble Observer, reveal to you once and for all the Sacred and Only Truth: it wasn’t the Mafia, or LBJ, or the ghost of that f***ing Marilyn Monroe. Not aliens, the KGB, or some lone gunman. It wasn’t the Hunt brothers from Texas, or Lee Harvey, or the Trilateral Commission. It was Trujillo; it was the f***ing. Where the hell do you think the supposed Kennedy Curse comes from? And Vietnam? Why do you think the most powerful country in the world lost its first war against a Third World country like Vietnam? For God’s sake, my people, for God’s sake. Perhaps it will be interesting to note that while the United States was becoming more involved in Vietnam, LBJ launched the illegal invasion of the Dominican Republic (on May 24, 1989). 1965). (Santo Domingo was Iraq before Iraq was Iraq.) It turned out to be a resounding military success for the United States, and many of the same units and intelligence teams that participated in the “democratization” of Santo Domingo were immediately sent to Saigon. And what do you think those soldiers, technicians, and spies carried with them—in their backpacks, suitcases, shirt pockets, nose hairs, or the mud on the soles of their shoes? Just a little gift from my people, a small act of revenge for an unjust war. That’s how it was, my people. Fukú”.

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Late 20th Century, Early 21st Century

Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2013)

While in a New Jersey hair salon, Ifemelu, a Nigerian woman who left her country on a university scholarship, reflects on her life in Nigeria and in the United States. Thus unfold a series of family, emotional, economic, professional, social, and political episodes, along with the life perspective of a young woman at the turn of the century. Her identity is constantly forming and transforming, her race plays a role, she searches for love, friendships are strained, culture shock arises, she navigates integration into a changing world, and she struggles to understand who she truly is and who she wants to be. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2014.

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Early 21st Century

Falling Man, by Don DeLillo (2007)

After the trauma of the Vietnam War and the changes it brought about in every aspect of American life, the next major disruption was the Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. This event redefined the country: the nightmare of that day, embodied in the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York and its effects on society, politics, the economy, and people’s daily lives, and, a few years later, in a climate of growing uncertainty that would also lead to the great global financial crisis. Don DeLillo intertwines these two events through the story of a survivor of the Twin Towers: Keith Neudecker. A man covered in ash wanders with a briefcase in hand until he reaches the home of his estranged wife and son.

The world was never the same again. From then on, the war on terror, insecurity, the financial crisis, the technological revolution, and the growing political polarization fueled the feeling that the country was entering a period of uncertainty.

Excerpt:

“The roar lingered in the air, the din of the collapse. This was the world now. Smoke and ash came rolling through the streets, turning corners, swirling at street corners, seismic waves of smoke, with flashes of office paper, ordinary sheets with sharp edges, skimming past, fluttering, things not of this world in the funereal blanket of the morning…”.

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The roots of the present 21st century

Crossroads. The Key to All Mythologies. Jonathan Franzen (2021 / trilogy in progress)

If Philip Roth portrayed the beginnings of the cracks in the American Dream, Franzen has been the one who has best followed its evolution over the last few decades. He writes about the crisis of the family and modern society, drifting ideals, romantic and sexual relationships on an individual and social level, and the tension between the individual and society with its overwhelming changes.

His last four novels fit this stage of American society, four portraits that could almost be seen as a tetrad: The Corrections, Freedom, Purity, and Crossroads. In them, he observes the mechanisms of the individual and society with which he creates a vivid map of the reality of the United States and the causes that generate it. Morality, ethics, desire, politics, economics—all intertwined.

But it is Crossroads that is his most promising novel: it is the first part of the trilogy The Key to All Mythologies. Franzen recreates the last half-century of the United States through the lens of a family in the 1970s, but the other two books extend to the present day. He revealed one of the keys to his literary and personal project in a 2022 interview with WMagazín:

“This abandonment of reason in which we live is striking, this lack of… connection with reason in exchange for belief; this blind faith in what we simply cannot prove. The ultimate proof that this is the case is that we are in a clear situation of climate change and we are doing nothing to change it”.

Excerpt:

“She had come to Russ seeking advice on how to cope with grief, another facet of his priestly work, though not his favorite, because the most painful loss he had suffered to date was that of Skipper, his childhood dog. He was reassured to hear that Frances’s biggest complaint, a year after her husband’s gruesome death in Texas, was a feeling of emptiness. When he suggested she join one of the women’s groups at the First Reformed Church, she made an impatient gesture with her hand”.

Twenty-one novels that reveal the metamorphosis of a country and the price its people have paid: their diverse dreams, violence, abilities, injustices, illusions, potential, pride, fractures, unrecognized multiculturalism, and uncertainties about the future.

This anthology is not a history of American literature nor a political history of the United States, but rather a history of the country told through the novels that best captured each moment.

Twenty-one portraits that form a vivid mosaic, not so much of macro history as of everything that builds history from its foundation: the people. It explores how major decisions impacted individuals and society, delving into the crux of moral, social, and cultural conflicts that their writers considered crucial to understanding the country.

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 Construction 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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