Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury

“Do not insult me with the beheadings, finger‑choppings or the lung‑deflations you plan for my works. I need my head to shake or nod, my hand to wave or make into a fist, my lungs to shout or whisper with. I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted, to become a non‑book.” ‑‑ Ray Bradbury, in response to attempts to censor sections of Fahrenheit 451

When did science fiction first cross over from genre writing to the mainstream of American literature? Almost certainly it happened on October 19, 1953, when a young Californian named Ray Bradbury published a novel with the odd title of Fahrenheit 451. In a gripping story at once disturbing and poetic, Bradbury takes the materials of pulp fiction and transforms them into a visionary parable of a society gone awry, in which firemen burn books and the state suppresses learning. Meanwhile, the citizenry sits by in a drug-induced and media-saturated indifference. More relevant than ever a half-century later, Fahrenheit 451 has achieved the rare distinction of being both a literary classic and a perennial best seller.

My Ántonia
Willa Cather

“There was nothing but land . . . I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a familiar mountain ridge against it. But this was the complete dome of heaven.” ‑‑ from My Antonia

When Willa Cather’s editor first read the manuscript of My Ántonia, he experienced “the most thrilling shock of recognition of the real thing” in any manuscript he had ever read. I confess I feel almost the same way about this classic novel of the American immigrant experience.

Few books pack so much vibrantly real life into their pages as My Ántonia. The novel teems with romance, violence, tenderness, cruelty, comedy, and tragedy-all bustling side by side in a narrative at once compassionate and compelling.

The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Daisy began to sing with the music in a husky, rhythmic whisper, bringing out a meaning in each word that it had never had before and would never have again.” ‑‑ from The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby may be the most popular classic in modern American fiction. Since its publication in 1925, Fitzgerald’s masterpiece has become a touchstone for generations of readers and writers, many of whom reread it every few years as a ritual of imaginative renewal. The story of Jay Gatsby’s desperate quest to win back his first love reverberates with themes at once characteristically American and universally human, among them the importance of honesty, the temptations of wealth, and the struggle to escape the past. Though The Great Gatsby runs to fewer than two hundred pages, there is no bigger read in American literature.

A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway

“In stories about the war I try to show all the different sides of it, taking it slowly and honestly and examining it from many ways. So never think one story represents my viewpoint because it is much too complicated for that.” ‑‑ Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway is the notorious tough guy of modern American letters, but it would be hard to find a more tender and rapturous love story than A Farewell to Arms. It also would be hard to find a more harrowing American novel about World War I. Hemingway masterfully interweaves these dual narratives of love and war, joy and terror, and — ultimately — liberation and death.

Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston

“As early as I could remember it was the habit of men folks particularly to gather on the store porch of evenings and swap stories. Even the women folks would stop and break a breath with them at times. As a child when I was sent down to Joe Clarke’s store, I’d drag out my leaving as long as possible in order to hear more.” ‑‑ Zora Neale Hurston, from Dust Tracks on a Road

To call Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God an “African American feminist classic” may be an accurate statement – it is certainly a frequent statement — but it is a misleadingly narrow and rather dull way to introduce a vibrant and achingly human novel. The syncopated beauty of Hurston’s prose, her remarkable gift for comedy, the sheer visceral terror of the book’s climax, all transcend any label that critics have tried to put on this remarkable work. First published amid controversy in 1937, then rescued from obscurity four decades later, the novel narrates Janie Crawford’s ripening from a vibrant, but voiceless, teenage girl into a woman with her finger on the trigger of her own destiny. Although Hurston wrote the novel in only seven weeks, Their Eyes Were Watching God breathes and bleeds a whole life’s worth of urgent experience.

To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee

“The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.” ‑‑ To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is the rare American novel that can be discovered with excitement in adolescence and reread into adulthood without fear of disappointment. Few novels so appealingly evoke the daily world of childhood in a way that seems convincing whether you are sixteen or sixty-six.

Lee tells two deftly paired stories set in a small Southern town: one focused on lawyer Atticus Finch’s defense of an unjustly accused man, the other on his bright, bratty daughter’s gradual discovery of her own goodness. For many young people this novel becomes their first big read, the grown-up story that all later books will be measured against.

The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck

“The Grapes of Wrath] is coarse in spots, but life is coarse in spots, and the story is very beautiful in spots just as life is . . . Even from life’s sorrows some good must come. What could be a better illustration than the closing chapter of this book?” ‑‑ Eleanor RooseveltJohn Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is not merely a great American novel. It is also a significant event in our national history. Capturing the plight of millions of Americans whose lives had been crushed by the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, Steinbeck awakened the nation’s comprehension and compassion.