List: Literary Books That Have Shaped American Life

I came across this list of “The books that have shaped American life” by Tracy Mumford from Minnesota Public Radio.  It’s a list of the most influential books that have shaped American life as voted by their listeners.  But more importantly, they got the inspiration to compile such a list from The Library of Congress, which put together list of “Books that have Shaped America.”  Their website doesn’t say how they compiled and discriminated to form this list, but it’s a much better list than the listener generated from Minnesota Public Radio.

Well, that gave me an idea of me putting together such a list from my perspective, and what better day than the Fourth of July to celebrate American literature.  What I listed here is what I perceived as the 50 most influential literary works of American literature.  They may not be the best literary works, but I think they had the most impact on American literary culture.  I limited myself to one work per author, and in some cases I listed collections put together posthumously.  I know; there may be some glaring omissions but I either have not read them or I did not perceive them to have had a cultural impact yet.

So without further ado, here are what I think are the 50 most influential literary works in American literature, in no particular order.

1.      The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

2.      The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

3.      Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

4.      Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

5.      Walden; or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau

6.      On the Road by Jack Kerouac

7.      Moby-Dick; or, the Whale by Herman Melville

8.      Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

9.      Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

10.  Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly by Harriet Beecher Stowe

11.  To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

12.  Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

13.  All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren

14.  The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

15.  Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

16.  The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

17.  The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

18.  The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

19.  The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

20.  Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass

21.  In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

22.  Poems by Emily Dickenson

23.  Long Day's Journey into Night by Eugene O'Neill

24.  The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

25.  The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

26.  The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin

27.  The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams

28.  The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

29.  Harmonium by Wallace Stevens

30.  Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

31.  A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

32.  The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson by Ralph Waldo Emerson

33.  The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X

34.  The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper

35.  Tales by Edgar Allan Poe

36.  Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

37.  My Ántonia by Willa Cather

38.  Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

39.  Beloved by Toni Morrison

40.  The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor

41.  Native Son by Richard Wright

42.  The Collected Stories of O. Henry by O. Henry

43.  Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

44.  Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe

45.  The Complete Tales of Washington Irving by Washington Irving

46.  The Poetry of Robert Frost by Robert Frost

47.  Collected Stories by Raymond Carver

48.  The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck

49.  Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis

50.  Rabbit, Run by John Updike

So, out of curiosity, what would you take off this list and what would you add?

Happy Fourth of July!