PW: ‘Essential American Literature’ list
To celebrate America’s 250th anniversary, Publishers Weekly asked its staff, freelance reviewers, and members of the National Book Critics Circle to vote on the 15 most essential works of American literature published since 1776. The result, raises important questions about gender, cultural identity, and the ways literary canons continue to reinforce traditional ideas about whose stories matter most.
Of the fifteen books selected, ten were written by men and only five by women.
The male authors include Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Ralph Ellison, Cormac McCarthy, Art Spiegelman, and Percival Everett.
The women represented are Harper Lee, Ursula K. Le Guin, Sylvia Plath, Octavia Butler, and Toni Morrison.
That means 67% of the list is male-authored, despite the enormous contributions women have made to American literature over the last two centuries.
Even more striking are the names absent. Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, Louise Erdrich, Sandra Cisneros, Marilynne Robinson, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Harjo, and Jesmyn Ward all fail to make the list.
The message is that the “essential” great American novel is written from the male POV.
The list largely embraces a bias vision of America: grand novels about nationhood, expansion, masculinity, violence, ambition, and moral conflict.
Even the books that challenge American myths, Invisible Man, Beloved, James, and Kindred, do so within an established framework of what critics have long considered “serious” literature.
Missing are many perspectives that reflect the realities of modern America:
Indigenous literary traditions
Immigrant experiences outside the Black American narrative
Latino and Asian American classics
Contemporary women’s fiction
Popular genre fiction beyond a single science-fiction entry
Works that examine caregiving, domestic life, and community as central American experiences
The result is a portrait of America painted by the select few.
No list of fifteen books could ever represent the entirety of American literature. But the choices we make reveal our assumptions about which voices are universal.
When books by men are treated as stories about America itself, while books by women are often categorized as stories about women, we reproduce the same hierarchies that these literary institutions were built on.
Perhaps the more interesting question isn’t, “What are the fifteen essential works of American literature?”
Perhaps it’s, “Who gets to decide what America means in the first place?”
Because a truly representative American canon would be far messier, more diverse, and far more difficult to fit into a neat list of fifteen.
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