10 books

American Classics

American classic literature spans from Hawthorne and Melville in the mid-nineteenth century through the modernists of the 1920s and 30s, producing a body of work defined by its engagement with freedom, identity, race, and the gap between the American Dream and American reality. The voices are diverse — vernacular and formal, southern and northern, optimistic and devastating.

American literature is the literature of a country that has been arguing about what it means since its founding — and that argument is still unresolved. These novels are essential primary sources for understanding the United States, and many of them are also simply very good books.

›The American Dream as aspiration and critique
›Vernacular voices and regional dialects that shaped the language
›Race, freedom, and identity as central moral concerns
›Short novels with enormous compression — Fitzgerald and Hemingway especially

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The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1925

Jay Gatsby throws parties at his Long Island mansion every weekend hoping that one night she will walk through the door. She is across the bay, a green light at the end of her dock, and married to someone else. Fitzgerald wrote the American Dream's obituary and dressed it in a white suit.

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