What Classic American Novels argues

• A century of the American novel, from Cooper’s frontier (1826) to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha (1929): the record of a new nation inventing its own literature.
• The chamber traces the great arcs of American fiction — romance to realism to naturalism to modernism — through the books that defined each turn.
• Its recurring subjects are the ones the country could not stop arguing about: the frontier, slavery, the sea, money, small towns, and the promise and cost of self-invention.

Primary works in Classic American Novels (34)

• James Fenimore Cooper — The Last of the Mohicans (1826) — Book
• Nathaniel Hawthorne — The Scarlet Letter (1850) — Book
• Herman Melville — Moby Dick (1851) — Book
• Harriet Beecher Stowe — Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) — Book
• Louisa May Alcott — Little Women (1868) — Book
• Mark Twain — The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) — Book
• Henry James — The Portrait of a Lady (1881) — Book
• Mark Twain — Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) — Book
• Stephen Crane — The Red Badge of Courage (1895) — Book
• Henry James — The Turn of the Screw (1898) — Book
• Kate Chopin — The Awakening (1899) — Book
• Frank Norris — McTeague (1899) — Book
• Theodore Dreiser — Sister Carrie (1900) — Book
• Owen Wister — The Virginian (1902) — Book
• Jack London — The Call of the Wild (1903) — Book
• Edith Wharton — The House of Mirth (1905) — Book
• Upton Sinclair — The Jungle (1906) — Book
• Jack London — White Fang (1906) — Book
• Edith Wharton — Ethan Frome (1911) — Book
• Zane Grey — Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) — Book
• Willa Cather — O Pioneers! (1913) — Book
• Willa Cather — My Ántonia (1918) — Book
• Sherwood Anderson — Winesburg, Ohio (1919) — Book
• Sinclair Lewis — Main Street (1920) — Book
• Edith Wharton — The Age of Innocence (1920) — Book
• Sinclair Lewis — Babbitt (1922) — Book
• F. Scott Fitzgerald — The Great Gatsby (1925) — Book
• John Dos Passos — Manhattan Transfer (1925) — Book
• Ernest Hemingway — The Sun Also Rises (1926) — Book
• Willa Cather — Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) — Book
• Ernest Hemingway — A Farewell to Arms (1929) — Book
• William Faulkner — The Sound and the Fury (1929) — Book
• William Faulkner — As I Lay Dying (1929) — Book
• John Steinbeck — Cup of Gold (1929) — Book

Chambers connected to Classic American Novels

• First Novels — The American novel inherits the English form — Cooper answered Scott, Hawthorne answered the romance — then bends it to a new continent.
• Adventure Novels — Melville’s whale hunt and London’s Klondike are the American wing of the adventure tradition; the same books shelve in both rooms.
• Women's Literature — Alcott, Chopin, and Wharton wrote American classics that are also cornerstones of the women’s-literature chamber.
• Satire — Twain’s river books and Lewis’s Main Street run on satire — the American novel’s sharpest instrument of self-criticism.