American Literary Culture : your Tops & opinion

[Joyce E.]

Good morning all,

I'm a French student and I have to make a short presentation about the American literary Culture. I'd like to add real opinions - I mean people's opinion - about this topic.
Would you list me your...
1° the Top 5 books (or other writing), Top 5 authors and the literary movement YOU PREFER
2° a Top 5 books, Top 5 authors and 1 movement you've studied at School (under 18)
3° a Top 5 books, Top 5 authors and 1 movement you've studied at University
4° and, eventually, the same for what you suppose to be American Literary Culture generally speaking (you own preferences apart) ?

Obviously you may explain, add, contest, sum up, quote, and so forth :)

In return if you have questions about French Literature or literary Culture I'd be glad to answer you.

Thanks

[stlukesguild]

Top Five American Books (novels):

1. Herman Melville- Moby Dick
2. Mark Twain- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
3. William Faulkner- As I Lay Dying
4. F. Scott Fitzgerald- The Great Gatsby
5. Cormac McCarthy- Blood Meridian

Top Five American Books (short fiction)

1. Nathaniel Hawthorne- Collected Short Stories
2. Edgar Allen Poe- Collected Short Stories
3. Ambrose Bierce- Collected Short Stories
4. Ernest Hemingway- Collected Short Stories
5. Flannery O'Conner- Collected Short Stories

Top Five American Books (poetry)

1. Walt Whitman- Leaves of Grass (collected poems)
2. T.S. Eliot Collected Poems (especially The Wasteland & The Four Quartets)
3. Emily Dickinson- Collected POems
4. Wallace Stevens- Harmonium/Collected Poetry and Prose
5. Richard Wilbur- Collected Poems

Top Five American Books (non-fiction)

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson- Collected Essays
2. Henry David Thoreau- Walden
3. William James- The Principles of Psychology/The Varieties of Religious Experience
4. Norman Mailer- Advertisements for Myself
5. Gore Vidal- The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal/The Decline and Fall of the American Empire

(Alexis de Tocqueville- De la démocratie en Amérique)

Five Greatest American Writers:

1. Herman Melville
2. Walt Whitman
3. Ralph Waldo Emerson
4. Mark Twain
5. William Faulkner/T.S. Eliot

[seerseenbyseein]

your many aspected request is almost too much for me to read, let alone answer completely. Just let me say that Updike and Bellow belong among the great Americans, by my lights anyway, along with Hemmingway, Faulkner, et al.

[mortalterror]

Top Five American Books (novels):

1. Herman Melville- Moby Dick
2. Mark Twain- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
3. F. Scott Fitzgerald- The Great Gatsby
4. Ernest Hemingway- The Old Man and the Sea
5. Joseph Heller- Catch-22

Top Five American Books (short fiction)

1. Ernest Hemingway- The Snows of Kilimanjaro and other stories
2. Edgar Allen Poe- The Cask of Amontillado and other stories
3. Flannery O'Conner- Everything That Rises Must Converge
4. Nathaniel Hawthorne- Twice Told Tales
5. William Faulkner- Go Down, Moses

Top Five American Books (poetry)

1. T.S. Eliot- The Wasteland
2. Robert Frost- North of Boston
3. Emily Dickinson- Collected Poems
4. Ezra Pound- Posies 1917-1920
5. Carl Sandburg- Chicago Poems

Top Five American Books (non-fiction)

1. Hunter S. Thompson- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
2. Henry David Thoreau- Walden
3. Ernest Hemingway- A Moveable Feast
4. Michael Herr- Dispatches
5. Richard Wright- Black Boy

Five Greatest American Writers:

1. Ernest Hemingway
2. Mark Twain
3. T.S. Eliot
4. Edgar Allan Poe
5. Herman Melville

[Joyce E.]

Hello

I may not have been clear - I'm interested in American LITERARY Culture, not especially American Literature. It means I don't focus on American books and authors. I never asked for "American novels", "American short stories" and so forth.
Unless no one reads foreign literature or counts foreign writing among his/her bests ?
Is it clearer if I answer my first question writing that, to me, A Hundred Years of Solitude is one of my favourite books ? And it is not French literature, but could be part of French literary Culture for instance.

[Danik 2016]

Hi, Joyce,
Could you define what you mean by "American LITERARY Culture" so that we can help you?
When you use the adjective American are you referring to the whole continent or to the citizens from US?
For example, Madame Bovary is not a Brazilian novel, but is part of Brazilian literary culture.

[Joyce E.]

Hi, Joyce,
Could you define what you mean by "American LITERARY Culture" so that we can help you?
When you use the adjective American are you referring to the whole continent or to the citizens from US?
For example, Madame Bovary is not a Brazilian novel, but is part of Brazilian literary culture.

I would like to figure out US citizen's literary culture. Are Zola, Garcia Marquez, Dickens, Murakami, also part of your "fundamental" literary culture ? Who are the major authors for US people ? Major books ? When you think about literature, what comes to your mind ? Whar do you refer to ?

[Danik 2016]

Well, I am from Brazil, so I am out. But many people here are from US, so I think someone will certainly answer you, now that it is clear what you mean by literary culture.

[stlukesguild]

America's "Literary Culture" is largely Anglo-European. What do "we" think of as making up the foundation of literature in the US? Probably not much that is overly different from Western Europe... especially Britain. The Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, the British Romantics, Victor Hugo, Cervantes, Flaubert, James Joyce, Dante, Homer, Virgil, Dickens, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Oscar Wilde, and the American writers already. Your question is difficult because if I get your drift you are asking what writers from the whole of the world and from the whole of history are most important withing American literary culture. This depends largely on who is defining "American Literary Culture". Perhaps only the Bible and Shakespeare (and arguably the Brtitish Romantic poets and Dickens) have had an unquestionable impact upon American literary culture... and even American culture in a broader sense.

[mortalterror]

Yeah, I'm with StLuke on this one. American literary culture is largely based on the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Dickens, Dante, Homer, and the Greek dramatists. Poets are probably strongest influenced from British Romantics like Shelley, Keats, and Byron. There's also a strong Russian novelist strain: Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy especially.

[JCamilo]

Well, you certainly own a lot to french philosophers such as Rousseau or Montaigne, you cannot imagine Emerson without them. Hard to imagine Poe, Washington Irving, Hawthorne without the gothic writers , specially considering the short story form. (And Poe of course, brings with him a lot more of influences, from 1001 nights, Elizabeth Barrett). You have also the Andersen/Grimm and other fantasy writers that will be relevant for children and fantasy authors like L.Frank Baum or Robert Howard, and fiction writers as Verne for the science fiction and latter Doyle and Christie for the Detective tales, all that made the very american tradition of "pulp literature".

[Vota]

Moby Dick - Herman Melville
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway