Twenty-six American classics

26 books · original English texts · free to read online

The list

1. Moby-Dick — Herman Melville, 1851. A novel that refuses to stay a novel: part adventure, part encyclopedia, part sermon.
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2. Leaves of Grass — Walt Whitman, 1855. The book that changed what an English poem was allowed to look like.
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3. The Scarlet Letter — Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850. A compact American classic about the difference between a rule and its consequences.
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4. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — Mark Twain, 1884. The novel Hemingway said all modern American writing comes from, and still the funniest serious book in the language.
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5. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer — Mark Twain, 1876. The great American boyhood novel, and the easiest way into Twain.
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6. The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925. The most perfectly constructed American novel of the twentieth century, and shorter than you remember.
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7. The Age of Innocence — Edith Wharton, 1920. Wharton's masterpiece, and the best novel about how a society enforces its rules without ever stating them.
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8. The House of Mirth — Edith Wharton, 1905. A controlled, painful novel about a woman with taste and no income.
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9. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets — Stephen Crane, 1893. The first American novel to treat the slums without sentiment, written by a twenty-one-year-old.
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10. Washington Square — Henry James, 1880. A small, perfect novel about a father, a daughter and the uses of intelligence.
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11. The Bostonians — Henry James, 1886. James on American reform movements, written with the cold eye he usually reserved for Europe.
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12. The Rise of Silas Lapham — William Dean Howells, 1885. The best American novel about business ethics, and a portrait of Boston looking down on new money.
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13. Sister Carrie — Theodore Dreiser, 1900. The first great American novel about a woman and money, written without moralising.
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14. The Jungle — Upton Sinclair, 1906. A muckraking novel whose images are still the reason people distrust industrial food.
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15. The Titan — Theodore Dreiser, 1914. The best American novel about financial power, and a portrait of Chicago being built by men on the make.
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16. The Awakening — Kate Chopin, 1899. The first great American novel about a woman's desire, and still one of the most radical.
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17. Life on the Mississippi — Mark Twain, 1883. The best book about learning a craft, and the source of Twain's voice.
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18. McTeague — Frank Norris, 1899. American naturalism at its most extreme, with an ending that is impossible to forget.
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19. Martin Eden — Jack London, 1909. The best novel about becoming a writer, and the worst one to read if you are looking for encouragement.
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20. The House of the Seven Gables — Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851. Hawthorne's Salem novel: a haunted house, a family curse, and a sharp eye for genteel poverty.
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21. Twice-Told Tales — Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1837. The best introduction to Hawthorne's shorter fiction, and to his habit of leaving the moral unresolved.
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22. Nature — Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1836. The founding text of American transcendentalism, and a bracing argument against secondhand experience.
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23. Essays: First Series — Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841. The most quotable book in American literature, and a permanent argument against conformity.
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24. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin — Benjamin Franklin, 1791. The founding text of American self-improvement, written by a man who knew exactly what he was doing.
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25. The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume 2 — Edgar Allan Poe, 1840. The core of Poe's fiction in one volume, including the first modern detective story.
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26. The Red Badge of Courage — Stephen Crane, 1895. The first modern American war novel, written by a man who had never seen a battle.
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