The New York Review has been publishing, in installments, selections from Norman Mailer's letters on writing. The last installment includes a letter in which Mailer, responding to a query, lists his ten favorite American novels. Here's his list. (I'm not sure whether the order in which he set them down was meant to signify anything, but I'm preserving it.)
U.S.A. John Dos Passos
Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain
Studs Lonigan James T. Farrell
Look Homeward, Angel Thomas Wolfe
The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck
The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway
Appointment in Samarra John O'Hara
The Postman Always Rings Twice James M. Cain
Moby-Dick Herman Melville
"They're all selections from the mainstream of American novels," wrote Mailer, "not a surprise on the list, which separates me, I suspect, from my colleagues."
Ahem. Not a surprise on the list? The letter is dated January 16, 1988, so one of the surprises is that he did not name any of his own books. Naturally one begins making emendations. Mailer mentioned that, excepting Huckleberry Finn, he read all the novels on his list as a freshman at Harvard, a year made "luminous because of these books." I find that my own "surprise entries," too, probably are explained by biographical details, especially the impressionable age at which I first read some of them. Here goes. My rule is that no author gets more than one book. The order is significant only in that those shared with Mailer come first. The six others are in the order in which they were first published.
Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain
The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway
Moby-Dick Herman Melville
An American Tragedy Theodore Dreiser
Native Son Richard Wright
The Adventures of Augie March Saul Bellow
The Executioner's Song Norman Mailer
Rabbit is Rich John Updike
The Sportswriter Richard Ford
Suppose that I could not duplicate any of Mailer's choices--titles or authors. Then I'd add these four.
Babbitt Sinclair Lewis
Miss Lonelyhearts Nathanael West
It Looked Like For Ever Mark Harris
Everyman Philip Roth
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