Best American Veeky Forums

Someone on the tinychat gave this to me. How well does this cover essential American literature? What's it missing?

this is really honestly emberassing, disregard it completely op, i really don't mean to troll

They did it as a joke, these are all meme authors (although some of them definitely are important in american literature).
Just look into famous or acclaimed or canonical american writers, find a book that interests you and read it - if you find it too difficult move onto something that is easier and then return the previous work later. You don't need all these flowcharts to tell you exactly what to read, just use them as a way to find similar works to the ones you enjoy.

Isn't Infinite Jest post-pomo ?

post-homo?

Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, James Brahs, Crane, Twain, Dickinson, Whitman, Cather, Dreiser, West, O'Connor, Fitzgerald, Hem, Faulkner, Frost, Eliot, Welty, Mccullers, Penn Warren, Morrison, Salinger, Robinson, McCarthy, Updike, Bellow, Delillo, Pinecone

Why is white noise even in there lol

Those are good books but categorized bizzarely.

haha

Whittier, Longfellow, Poe, Bierce, Pound, Williams, Stevens, Aiken, Stein, Miller, Crane, Moore, Toomer, Ransom, Cheever, Mailer, Ellison, Barth, Styron, Mailer, Lowell, Berryman, Bishop, Malamud, Dickey, Yates

I'd sub out Updike or Mailer for Roth

Too exhaustive for a "tour" of American Veeky Forums

this made me laugh out loud.

good bait 8/10

as if i needed more reason to avoid the tinychat

>american
>literature

>seven books
>tour of American literature
Is this a tour for illiterate ants?

Meme me once shame on you, meme me twice, won't get memed again.

Explain yourself.

Meme or not, is it a good guide?

That's exactly what my problem with it is, there is absolutely no logical "flow" from one of those books to the next

...

what's the tc?

Gassposter here. As much as I love that Gass is on here, it's missing the vast majority of great American writers, like Melville, Wolfe, Hawthorne, Twain, McElroy, Hawkes, Barth, Theroux, Coover
and, most importantly--really the only completely unforgivable absence--William Gaddis.

As much as I like those writers, I wouldn't say that McElroy, Hawkes, or Theroux are anywhere near important enough for a brief survey of American lit. They're of secondary importance to a small subset of American lit.

They are all good books that get spammed on Veeky Forums. Kind of like how ITAOTS has achieved meme-status on /mu/ despite being a solid album. They're really good but calling them "the greatest" or presenting them as all you need to get a handle on modern american literature is the troll in the image. If you haven't read them yet, you should. Stoner is probably one of the best books of all time.

I can see why you say that about
Theroux (though I still emphasize his importance), and, to a far lesser extent, I can see why you would say that about McElroy, but Hawkes is, in every way that Gaddis is, a great American writer, and is deserving of the same amount of adoration Gaddis gets as well.

Is The Tunnel that good of a book? I've never looked closely at it but I thought it was famous for bring autistically detailed and stuff because it took many years to write. Lately I've been seeing it on charts.
Is it a hard read?

>white noise
No.

Sound and the fury is so so good

Yes, it is good--very good, in fact, if it's your kind of thing. Chances are, though, you won't like it, because, yes, it is hard, and yes, it is very detailed; so, despite how much I love it--and I love it quite a lot--I wouldn't really recommend it unless you enjoy long, delightfully written, unhinged, plotless, difficult, vulgar, highly experimental novels.

>Song of Solomon

pls no

Here you go OP

I'm not very familiar with 19th century American literature. For the 20th century, however, I think you have to include Hemingway, Faulkner, Henry James, Cather, Wharton, Steinbeck, Lewis, Sinclair, Bellow, Roth, Pynchon, Gaddis, Heller, and Gass (I'm not very familiar with the second half of the 20th century).

Good European lit

Who the fuck is James Brahs

Oh you mean William & Henry, nm

>Wolfe
Hope you mean Thomas Wolfe

White Noise should be somewhere much earlier, and in it's current place should be The Recognitions, considering how much Gaddis influenced Wallace and the like.