Great American Novel

Send us Fan Mail The Great American Novel podcast is an ongoing discussion about the novels we hold up as significant achievements in our American literary culture.  Additionally, we sometimes suggest novels who should break into the sometimes problematical canon and at other times we’ll suggest books which can be dropped from such lofty consideration.  Your hosts are Kirk Curnutt and Scott Yarbro...

Send us Fan Mail John's Steinbeck's 1939 tale of an "Oakie" family who crosses Route 66 seeking to escape the Dust Bowl only to discover California isn't the paradise it's been advertised as is one of the most iconic Great American Novels in our literary history. Its impact was profound and immediate: rarely has a novel been so viciously denounced simply for promoting...

Send us Fan Mail The 14th episode is a ride into the evening redness in the west as your hosts consider one of the more notorious books on our short list: Cormac McCarthy’s epic subversive western, BLOOD MERIDIAN, or, The Evening Redness in the West.  This 1985 tome of McCarthy’s has engaged constant discussion and speculation due to the high poetry of its language and the stark horror of its viol...

Send us Fan Mail Willa Cather's most famous novel was published only two months before the Armistice ended the bloodshed of the Great War, and in its powerfully imagistic portrait of Midwestern homesteading, it offered readers an emotional connection to the nation's founding myth of pioneer fortitude. Yet My Ántonia wasn't just a story about pilgrims' progress across the prairi...

Send us Fan Mail The Great American Novel podcast is an ongoing discussion about the novels we hold up as significant achievements in our American literary culture.  Additionally, we sometimes suggest novels who should break into the sometimes problematical canon and at other times we’ll suggest books which can be dropped from such lofty consideration.  Your hosts are Kirk Curnutt and Scott Yarbro...

Send us Fan Mail Our eleventh episode explores the most recent novel on our list of celebrated Great American Novels, Marilynne Robinson's 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning exploration of Christian humanism, GILEAD. Set in a fictional small Iowa town in 1956, this deceptively lowkey narrative about a dying minister, John Ames, and the sudden reappearance of the town's prodigal son, Jack Bought...

Send us Fan Mail The Great American Novel podcast is an ongoing discussion about the novels we hold up as significant achievements in our American literary culture.  Additionally, we sometimes suggest novels who should break into the sometimes problematical canon and at other times we’ll suggest books which can be dropped from such lofty consideration.  Your hosts are Kirk Curnutt and Scott Yarbro...

Send us Fan Mail In this installment we look at another of the most iconic of GANs, Mark Twain's 1885 "bad boy" novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . Written over an eight-year period, what began as a sequel to the mischievous "bad boy" book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer  (1876) steepened into a caustic interrogation of racism in the United States. Twain's depiction...

Send us Fan Mail The Great American Novel podcast is an ongoing discussion about the novels we hold up as significant achievements in our American literary culture.  Additionally, we sometimes suggest novels who should break into the sometimes problematical canon and at other times we’ll suggest books which can be dropped from such lofty consideration.  Your hosts are Kirk Curnutt and Scott Yarbro...

Send us Fan Mail In our seventh episode we explore a Great American Novel that's so ubiquitous it's almost hard to believe there was a time when the media wasn't full of contrast, random references to The Great Gatsby. The story of a mysterious millionaire who turns up on Long Island, throwing lavish parties and spinning fables as transparently invented as they are enthralling, capt...

Send us Fan Mail The Great American Novel podcast is an ongoing discussion about the novels we hold up as significant achievements in our American literary culture.  Additionally, we sometimes suggest novels who should break into the sometimes problematical canon and at other times we’ll suggest books which can be dropped from such lofty consideration.  Your hosts are Kirk Curnutt and Scott Yarbro...

Send us Fan Mail William Faulkner's dizzyingly complex, Lost Cause-dismantling 1936 novel about the rise and fall of a Southern plantation owner who "outraged the land" amid the Civil War is perhaps the most formidable Great American Novel one can tackle: it has the distinction of making Moby-Dick look accessible! But Absalom, Absalom! is not only a tour-de-force of modernist experi...

Send us Fan Mail The Great American Novel podcast is an ongoing discussion about the novels we hold up as significant achievements in our American literary culture.  Additionally, we sometimes suggest novels who should break into the sometimes problematical canon and at other times we’ll suggest books which can be dropped from such lofty consideration.  Your hosts are Kirk Curnutt and Scott Yarbro...

Send us Fan Mail On the eve of its seventieth birthday, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) occupies a unique place in the American canon. On the one hand, it was instantly heralded as a Great American Novel---indeed, as Lawrence Buell notes in his study of GANs, it was the first novel by an African American to be universally admitted to the pantheon of important national fiction. At the sam...

Send us Fan Mail The Great American Novel podcast is an ongoing discussion about the novels we hold up as significant achievements in our American literary culture.  Additionally, we sometimes suggest novels who should break into the sometimes problematical canon and at other times we’ll suggest books which can be dropped from such lofty consideration.  Your hosts are Kirk Curnutt and Scott Yarbro...

Send us Fan Mail Ever since J. W. DeForest popularized the phrase "Great American Novel" in 1868 commentators have debated the limits of all three of its components. Does "great" necessarily mean a big "doorstop" book or is concision a worthy goal? Whose version America are we talking? And why the novel not a poem, play, or short story? In our inaugural episode we pre...