Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is regarded by many scholars and writers, including Ernest Hemingway, as the greatest American novel ever written. At the same time, it is also consistently one of the most banned books in America. Ironically, the primary reason for the attempts to ban the novel are due to charges of racism when, in fact, Twain set out to write a uniquely American story about the struggle for freedom and understanding.
Herman Melville took a little story about a sea captain on a search for an elusive white whale and transformed it into a book so heavily infused with symbolism and the ability to interpret meaning that everyone who reads Moby-Dick can come away with something unique and quite different. The whale represents many things to the characters, and so becomes the single greatest symbol in the long history of American novels.
Many high school students have complained about being forced to read the admittedly slow-moving Nathaniel Hawthorne novel The Scarlet Letter. Nevertheless, this novel certainly qualifies as a great American novel because it deals with the Puritan settlers of America and shines a spotlight on the strain of Puritanical ideas regarding sin and salvation that are still expressed as a major component of American political society.
John Steinbeck's novel about the exodus of farmers from the Midwest to California during the Great Depression is perhaps the finest novel ever written about that period in American history. Almost banned as often as Huck Finn, the book became a lightning rod for conservatives who objected to the portrait of unfair worker relations and the exploitation of the poor by the rich. The Grapes of Wrath won the Pulitzer Prize for Steinbeck and was singled out especially by the voters, who later awarded Steinbeck the Nobel Prize for Literature.
As of 2009, Harper Lee has published just one novel, but like Margaret Mitchell, whose only published novel was Gone with the Wind, that one novel was all she really needed. To Kill a Mockingbird has been banned and attacked on the basis that it is inappropriate reading material for schoolkids, due to the fact that rape plays a major part in the plot and that it uses offensive language. The story itself is about the the offensiveness of racism, prejudice and narrow-mindedness, leading to an ironic paradox about those who would use their power to keep others from reading this major American novel.
John Kennedy Toole committed suicide, and for the next eleven years his mother dedicated herself to getting his epic comedic novel published. The result was a posthumously awarded Pulitzer Prize and a cult following that grew so large the book is now a mainstream success. In the process, this great American novel introduced what is, only slightly arguably, the single most unforgettable character in American fiction: Ignatius J. Reilly.
This Toni Morrison novel was named the best American work of fiction of the past twenty-five years in a survey of writers conducted by the New York Times in 2006. It also received a Pulitzer Prize. The fact that Huck Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird and Beloved consistently appear on lists of the top-ten greatest American novels of all time points to realization that slavery and the subsequent treatment of race relations in America may well be the defining characteristic of what America is all about and, by connection, what all great American fiction is all about.