What is the Great American Novel – and does it still matter?

One of the questions I’m endlessly fascinated by when it comes to literature is The Great American Novel.

It is so evocative, and carries such weight. It's more than a slogan — it signals ambition, scope, and the desire to say something profound about the American experience. But what exactly is it? Where did the term come from? Why do writers still chase it and why are we still talking about it.    

A national myth

The term was first coined by literary critic John William De Forest in 1868. Writing in The Nation, he called for a novel that would capture “the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence” — in essence, a work of fiction that painted the American soul.

It was a bold call, made in a bruised and fractured country. The Civil War had ended just three years earlier, and America was still in the throes of the Reconstruction Era. De Forest believed the U.S. needed a literary monument — something like War and Peace for Russia or Madame Bovary for France.

That idea stuck. More than 150 years later, people continue to chase it.

It’s worth noting that the “Great American Novel” doesn’t mean long. The Great Gatsby is barely 180 pages, but every one of those pages does what De Forest was talking about.

Over time, the phrase has become both an aspiration and a critical standard. To write the Great American Novel is to attempt something sweeping and definitive — a portrait of a nation in a single book.

What makes a novel “great”?

The “great” in Great American Novel does a lot of work. It implies literary excellence, yes — but also cultural reach and impact. These are books that bottle the spirit of the age. Something we could read 50 or 150 years later and still understand something vital about that moment in American life.

The best contenders tend to be:

• Ambitious in scope, tackling big themes like race, identity, war, politics, or the American Dream.

• Deeply rooted in a specific time and place.

• Populated by characters who reflect the nation’s contradictions and complexities.

• Written in a style that resonates beyond its era.

In short, a Great American Novel doesn’t just tell a story — it captures something essential.

The American-ness of it all

America is a vast, contradictory, often chaotic place. It stretches from coast to coast, through deserts, mountains, cities, and endless in-between spaces. The idea of a single book representing the whole country is absurd — and yet deeply compelling.

The U.S. is shaped by reinvention, migration, inequality, and mythology. The best novels that claim this mantle wrestle with these tensions: idealism versus disillusionment, individualism versus community, prosperity versus exclusion.

It’s also important to acknowledge that for decades, the canon of “Great American Novels” was overwhelmingly white and male. That’s slowly changing. New voices are expanding the conversation — and showing there are many ways to write about America.

Do we still need the Great American Novel?

That's a difficult question to answer. Some do not even think it is possible to write it. Norman Mailer, a giant of American literature for almost 60 years, didn't think so. 

Writing in 2004, Mailer, said, the Great American Novel is no longer writable. 

'We can’t do what John Dos Passos did. His trilogy on America came as close to the Great American Novel as anyone. You can’t cover all of America now. It’s too detailed. You couldn’t just stick someone in Tampa without knowing about Tampa. You couldn’t get away with it. People didn’t get upset if you were a little scanty on the details in the past. Now all the details get in the way of an expanse of a novel.'

It's worth noting that Mail wrote what many consider a Great American Novel, or at least a great war novel, with his brilliant book The Naked and The Dead. He wrote the book when he was only 25-years-old.

With that in mind, others like David Vann have posited that a great American novel can only be anti-American, focusing on the nation's greatest shames in the way that Cormac McCarthy's brilliant book Blood Meridian does.

'Blood Meridian...focuses on ...our genocides and our desire for war, contemplating in its final chapters the slaughter of the buffalo; also the slaughter of innocence in the form of a dancing bear, and the slaughter of any would-be penitents, including the kid. The last look west has to see nowhere else to go.' 

Perhaps the phrase, and even the idea, is in a modern sense outdated, but the impulse behind it still resonates. Writers still want to take on the big questions. They want to hold up a mirror to the nation and say: this is who we are — or who we were.

That said, the idea of a single, definitive novel feels less plausible today. America is too complex, too diverse, too fractured. But the desire behind the phrase hasn’t gone away.

When we ask “What is the Great American Novel?”, we’re really asking: Who are we? That question isn’t going anywhere. And neither is the urge to answer it on the page.

Next up: Ten novels that could claim the title: from The Great Gatsby to Beloved, plus a few unexpected picks that might just surprise you.

Notes

You can read the Norman Mailer interview in full here and the David Vann article here.