Richard Russo has penned 10 novels, won the Pulitzer Prize, and collaborated on screen adaptations and TV series based on his work. In his latest book, "Under the Falls," Russo continues to revisit the community of his youth. Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown visited him for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.

Something happens to kids when they’re about 9 years old. Before then, they’re voracious little bookworms, with most of them saying they read for fun at least five days a week. After their ninth birthday, only 35 percent still do. 

Experts call this phenomenon “the decline by 9,” and they spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to stop it. They talk up and cherish the books that break through: the Harry Potters and the Percy Jacksons, which got so many kids to keep reading through those danger years and which sold so well through millennial and Gen Z childhoods. Publishers keep looking for new books compelling enough to keep kids away from their screens and glued to the page. 

But for the past 10 years, books for kids ages 8 to 12 (known as middle grade) have been selling less and less. 

“It had been happening for maybe a decade, very very slowly,” said Joanne O’Sullivan, a children’s book author and reporter for Publishers Weekly. What had been a gradual slope got dramatically worse in 2020. And in the years since the pandemic, publishers have shut down multiple middle-grade imprints, culminating in it happening twice this year. 

No one in publishing is entirely sure why kids books stopped selling, but there are two major theories. One says that children are no longer reading as much as they used to, because they are worse readers than previous generations were. The age group that used to happily devour Harry Potter is now distracted by iPads and YouTube shorts, so they never developed the ability to sit down and focus on a printed page. Their reading scores, which started falling in 2014, tell the tale.

The other theory says that the kids aren’t the ones who changed — publishers are. Starting in the 2000s, middle-grade books began getting long, with the average going from 174.5 pages in 2006 to 290 in 2016. According to this narrative, publishers flooded the market with books too difficult for their target audience. Kids responded by tuning out. 

Whichever theory is true, the fact remains that all those ravenous 8-year-old bookworms depend on middle-grade publishers to keep on reading after they turn 9. The publishers who sell these books have built massive businesses on their ability to supply kids with exciting, addictive stories. If they’re failing, what will kids turn to for entertainment instead?

Why did tweens lose interest in books?

Reading decline happens during the big transition all middle-grade readers go through: moving from short illustrated chapter books to fully fledged novels. It’s a pain point. 

“They’ve been doing short chapter books; they’ve been doing those leveled readers in the classroom; and, then, all of a sudden, what’s available to them is a lot chunkier, more challenging,” O’Sullivan said. She described the transition as “abrupt,” adding, “that’s not necessarily just for kids who are struggling with reading. That’s also for kids who like reading and are capable.” 

“If you have a kid who’s not a very confident reader, a long book is very intimidating,” Kelly Dickinson, a middle school librarian in Bethesda, Maryland, told Vox. “They just stall out before they can even pick one, because they look at it and they think, ‘I can’t read that.’” 

The shadow of Harry Potter, with its doorstopper volumes approaching a thousand pages, looms large here. Before Harry, a standard middle-grade novel might look like The Baby-Sitters Club volume The Truth About Stacey, which clocks in around 35,000 words. In a Substack post in April, Vicky Weber, an author, literary agent, and author coach for middle-grade books, pointed out that Sorcerer’s Stone was 76,944 words long, already pushing the limits of a middle-grade reader’s attention. After the books became phenomenons, they got much longer; Order of the Phoenix was 257,045 words, which is heftier than most adult novels. As publishers raced to catch up, their books began to expand, as well.  

“When something becomes really popular, other publishers try to replicate that success,” Weber told Vox. “I think one of the things we didn’t take into account is how many Harry Potter readers were adults.” 

While middle-grade books really did get longer, everyone I spoke to also acknowledges that kids’ reading scores really did drop, too. Kids have lost a lot of their unstructured play time to the grind of organized sports and music lessons, which means the empty childhood hours that are such perfect reading opportunities have vanished. “That time to just sit down and read is so truncated for a lot of kids, probably a lot of the kids who would have chosen to read a 400-page book if they had the time,” O’Sullivan said. 

Then, there was the trauma of Covid, which smashed right into kids’ reading habits. “There were factors like schools and libraries closing, not much time with peers, and plenty of screen time during the pandemic,” said Kristen McLean, who runs the thought leadership collective Circana Entertainment Knowledge Group. All these bad effects, McLean said, that essentially “broke the discovery chain” for middle-grade fiction, in what she describes as “a perfect storm for lower literacy.”

The graphic novel pivot

The good news is that kids didn’t stop reading entirely during the pandemic. A few categories spiked: illustrated books, graphic novels, and manga. Jackie De Leo, now the chief merchant and publisher at Scholastic, was a vice president at Barnes & Noble during the pandemic, and she describes seeing kids with an unquenchable thirst for manga all through 2020. 

“If you sat in a store and watched the manga section, you’d see little kids at lunch; you’d see them through the day; and, then, it would move into being adults,” De Leo said. “The only real constraint was actual inventory.” 

Now, O’Sullivan says she keeps hearing middle-grade publishers say, “Let’s meet them where they are.” In practice, that appears to mean they’re focusing on books like the wildly popular Dog Man, a graphic novel series featuring a hero with the head of a dog and the body of a police officer. 

“Dog Man is full color — so immersive,” De Leo said. “There’s these fun parts about the physical book, too, where you actually have to flap the pages and it makes an animation reel.” More importantly, she said, the books are funny. “Kids like things that are funny, and we were giving them some pretty serious things for a while — books for adults packaged as middle-grade books.”

The new ideal middle-grade book is short, punchy, and comedic and comes with a hefty dose of graphics. “Maybe it’s comics, maybe it’s illustrated novels,” O’Sullivan said. “Maybe, instead of just running text, they’ll have a panel with some text messages in it or something, just to break up the text to make the entire experience of reading less intimidating.” 

This focus on breaking up the text means that publishing isn’t going back to what middle-grade books looked like before Harry Potter: short, simple chapter books à la The Baby-Sitters Club and Encyclopedia Brown. Those series weren’t hefty or overly serious, but they were massive bestsellers on the strength of their words, not their images. (It’s also worth noting that Scholastic adapted a few of the BSC books into graphic novels in 2006 and, then, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, picked up the project again in 2021.)

I asked De Leo if she thought the industry’s shift to including more illustrations suggests that kids have lost an ability to handle pure text, even when it is short and sweet.

But De Leo said that reading graphic novels represents a “different type of literacy” from that required to read Encyclopedia Brown mysteries, not a lesser one. She said that when she reads a graphic novel, she has trouble forcing herself to look at the images, not just the words. When she sees kids focusing on the pictures with ease, she takes it as evidence of “a real visual literacy that they have that I am jealous of.”

Dickinson, the librarian, said she wishes that publishers would put out comedic fiction in more formats. “A lot of kids want funny books, and a lot of the funny books are the illustrated hybrid stuff,” she said. “There’s not enough other funny books, in my opinion.” 

Reenvisioning middle grade books

Experts are hopeful that publishers’ new direction will be enough to get kids reading again — and to get their parents to buy books. “This is probably the first year where I’ve heard people being optimistic and feeling excited about the new ideas that are coming,” O’Sullivan said. “People are beginning to be able to re-envision middle grade.” 

The publishing shutdowns reflect the industry’s new direction. One of the three people to survive the March closure of Dial Books for Young Readers was an editor specializing in picture books and graphic novels. Macmillan is replacing the now-defunct Roaring Brook Press imprint, which also closed in March, with a new imprint specializing in nonfiction and illustrated books for kids, although it’s not yet clear what age group the new imprint will cater to.

In the meantime, kids’ reading test scores have started to rebound. In 2025, 9-year-olds’ average reading scores went up four points from 2022 — back to where they were before the pandemic. 

With kids becoming stronger readers and books getting shorter, the hope is that they’ll meet in the middle. 

“Kids in the middle-grade age are extremely self-centered and view everything through how it impacts them. Developmentally, that’s very normal,” Dickinson said. “But also, they’re incredibly empathetic at this age.” Reading fiction, which allows us to imagine how other people’s minds work, can be deeply impactful for this malleable age if kids can hold onto their love of reading long enough to reap the benefits. 

“This is a time when reading habits and interest in reading can really die,” Dickinson said. “The hope is to help kids discover what kinds of books or what formats they like — and to show that there are ways in.”

Young American men are in trouble. They are the loneliest demographic in the Western world. Their social circles are shrinking. At all ages, they are significantly more likely to die by suicide than their female peers.

But if there’s one place where young American men are likely to congregate, regardless of race or political beliefs, it’s the world of video games. According to a 2017 Pew study, 72 percent of men under 30 say they play video games often or sometimes. The gaming world is a place they feel safe — which means it is full of untapped potential for building community, says video game expert George E. Osborn.

Osborn is the founder of Half-Space Consulting, which advises governments and NGOs on the social impact of video games. In his new book Power Play: Video Games, Politics, and the Battle for Global Influence, Osborn shows that anti-democratic powers and violent actors have been exploiting the video games space for decades. 

Most visibly in the US, a large community of gamers rallied together in 2014 to harass prominent female game developers and gaming journalists. They forced multiple women into hiding while claiming that they were fighting for ethics in gaming journalism. The campaign, which became known as Gamergate, made so much noise that it attracted the attention of Steve Bannon, who organized supportive coverage on Breitbart and treated it as a recruiting ground for the racist, misogynistic, and anti-democratic alt-right movement. As Osborn documents in Power Play, the communities that sprang up to organize Gamergate became pipelines to the communities that organized the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017.

“Bannon’s intuitive understanding of the power of toxic gamer communities created the digital-activist base, the tactical playbook and the strategic approach necessary for ‘mainstreaming’ populist far-right ideas within the online media ecosystem,” Osborn writes in Power Play. 

Yet Osborn also writes that there is a vast potential for good within gaming communities. He shows that gaming can help people understand pandemics and autocracies and climate change; that it can connect people to one another and make people less lonely.

I wanted to understand what those possibilities meant for the young men who are so invested in video games and are in so much trouble, so I called Osborn up to discuss. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You write in the book that there’s always been a wide audience for video games across demographics. But when people talk about gaming’s traditional audience, they’re mostly talking about young men. How does that happen?

In the 1980s and the 1990s, video games were not sold on the basis of who wants to play. They were sold on the basis of who buys technology. There were two primary audiences: families with kids, and young men buying tech.

Then a couple of things all happen at the same time: The introduction of the smartphone in about 2007; the emergence of digital storefronts like Steam and The App Store; the financial crash. Video games companies start to think, “We have done very well in a small number of markets. What happens if we start reaching a wider base?”

The number of people around the world playing video games goes from hundreds of millions to about the 3.6 billion that we see today. When you look at the gender split of players, roughly speaking, the gender split in the US is now nearly 50/50, and the average age of a player is much closer to late 30s, early 40s. It creates this space where that traditional audience of younger men start to feel left behind, like the industry is moving away from them. 

What’s really interesting, when you look at this in the context of the research that I’ve done, is that it creates a grievance culture amongst some of those younger men. That ultimately opens up the opportunity for someone to begin taking advantage of it. 

In the book, you talk about how there are a few different things that make gamers an attractive group for political actors to try to target. One of them was this idea that gamers are highly likely to act on their beliefs. What does that mean in this context?

The nature of play — I think it was actually the writer Naomi Alderman who talked about this — is that it encourages agency. If you compare it to other creative mediums, even the most linear of video games, a player [moves] through it in their own way. They don’t have exactly the same experience as everybody else.

It encourages people to really believe in themselves as participants in the medium. They are not solely consumers of the culture, and therefore they feel that they have a greater say over what happens.

Then it [also] creates a strong community tie between the people who are involved in play. The sheer breadth of choices available to you brings the community together to talk about how to play, and ultimately the way it makes them feel. [That’s] part of the reason why these information spaces are so powerful.

Along those lines, you document Steve Bannon getting interested in Gamergate and leveraging that phenomenon to help create the alt-right of the 2010s. A lot of the political groups you discuss who try to intervene with gamers use top-down propaganda, but it seems like Bannon’s really interested in them as a specific community, right? He’s not making didactic games about why they should support Trump. He’s talking about how they’re heroes fighting for ethics in gaming journalism. What’s the effect of that choice?

It creates a sense of power within those communities they may not have otherwise felt. If you compare it to the last US election, Kamala Harris’s campaign created an officially branded Fortnite experience. It promised players a chance to engage with the campaign’s key pillars. Which is exactly the kind of top-down, non-inclusive communication where you are going into someone else’s arena and putting something in there that would never emerge from that space organically. 

Obviously the message doesn’t work. It ends up reeking of elitism.

I think what Bannon realized is this group had its own things that it felt were important. Particularly within Gamergate — I think that they were talking about things that were toxic, lies, untrue. But it coalesced to create an identity around that group. Bannon realized that ultimately, if you promoted it upwards, then they would feel part of this wider community.

A lot of the most visible political activity associated with gamers in the US has been pretty dark and even quite violent. I’m thinking of not just Gamergate, but the Charlottesville riots and the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Is it possible to harness the energy of this community toward more constructive ends?

I just came back from Games for Change in New York. It’s a big festival in the US every year. There’s satellite events around the world. It looks at the way that these dynamics can be used for various social goods, provided that you are actually leaning into them. 

The UN’s Playing for the Planet Alliance reached hundreds of millions of people by asking game makers to create content on their behalf [about climate change]. It wasn’t a case of saying, “We need you to create games that do this specific thing.” It was much more, “Here is a theme. Create something that works for your community.” 

When more elite institutions chose to engage with games communities on their terms, they tended to achieve much bigger reach, at a much lower cost, and with much more positive outcomes than any of the hostile uses that I talk about in the book. And frankly, because these communities have often felt pushed to the side, they also feel particularly validated when someone comes into their space and says, “Actually, we do recognize your power. We would love to work with you to make the most of it.”

How do you know that the effects are so much bigger than something like Gamergate? Are there numbers you can cite?

One of the best examples was in 2022, when Epic Games did fundraisers for the Red Cross through things like Fortnite. Their game store raised more money for the charity and its work in places like Ukraine than were donated to it by the countries of France or Italy.

You’re talking about this potentially massive effect, but thus far it’s tended to be sporadic. When you compare it with a lot of the examples that I look at in the book, especially Saudi Arabia’s attempt to use video games within its soft power strategy, there’s clearly much more strategic thinking [from the Saudis] about the way to influence these communities. 

That’s one of the missing pieces of the puzzle in a lot of democracies. We have the ingredients for this to work really effectively, but at the moment it feels like we’ve not got anyone cooking.

I came away from this book with this sense that for a lot of young men, video game communities are a precious space where they feel seen in a way that they don’t in a lot of the rest of society right now. What makes this world so special to these men?

Video games have always been social. With young men in particular, because the medium has been so closely attuned to them, [many of them] are going to find their groups and communities within these worlds. 

This is me speaking more from British experience, of thinking what it’s like to be a man growing up in the UK. We’ve seen significant cutbacks in local investment into things like community groups, clubs, youth spaces. Online communities and online game communities have helped replace a lot of things taken out of civil society. 

The loss of investment in third spaces, especially for teens, is definitely something we’re seeing in the US as well.

You write about campaigning to combat the loneliness epidemic in the UK through gaming outreach. How did that initiative come together?

I was contacted by the government around April 2020, during the pandemic. I was working at the time as the head of campaigns and communications at Ukie, the video games trade association. 

Quite early into my job, I realized all of the different games companies that formed Ukie had very different cultures. You couldn’t tell them what to do, because frankly, it wouldn’t work. 

So I went in and said, “Okay, we’ve got an ask. We want you to encourage your communities to find one hour to sit down in their favorite online game with a friend, family member, or co-worker, and ask them how they’re doing.”

Different companies took part in the campaign. But they went out to their communities with different messages. Some of them were going out with streams from their community managers. Some of them were just replicating the messaging that we had. Some of them were doing more dedicated messages to players via games. 

It’s not particularly scientific, so take it with a pinch of salt. But afterwards, the polling firm Ipsos MORI found that across Europe, players in the UK were roughly 10 percentage points more likely to say that video games made them feel less lonely than other parts of the continent. 

Looking back on that, I can see that a lot of the ideas I’ve had, about how games can be an information ecosystem and about how you effectively communicate to it, can be found in that campaign. 

It’s about decentralizing the message. It’s allowing people to take it and run with it. That’s when it becomes really effective.

This story was originally published in The Highlight. To get access to member-exclusive stories like this every month, become a Vox Member today.

Some countries built their identities on their land. Some countries built their identities on a shared ethnic heritage. America, however, began with an idea on a piece of paper. 

“America was an enlightenment experiment, and so that means we have to make our own identity,” said Mark Graybill, a professor of English at Widener University who specializes in American literature. To do so, we need books: novels that articulate what it’s like to live in this strange new land. 

Lawrence Buell, the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Emeritus at Harvard, wrote a definitive study on this problem called The Dream of the Great American Novel. Buell said that the calls to produce and recognize a national literature began in 1776, but they intensified throughout the 19th century. That was especially the case after the War of 1812, when America reaffirmed its independence from England. The widespread belief, said Buell, was that “now we are a mighty political entity, we should be a cultural force as well.” 

In 1868, the novelist John William DeForest coined the phrase “great American novel” in an essay that feared the genuine article had not yet been written. 

Over time, readers, critics, scholars, and the people who build school curricula have developed a loose consensus on some of the books that might aspire to the title — books that are certainly great, certainly interested in America, and certainly novels, but which may or may not be the great American novel. Buell has identified a collection of “recipes” that they all tend to follow. Among the key ingredients for one of the recipes, he said, are a “democratic collective that’s in distress in one way or another. A collectivity of people that are operating under great pressure, great anguish often. And in that collective crucible, you see national themes of one sort or another played out.” 

I talked to literary scholars and critics about five major contenders for the great American novel, all of which follow Buell’s recipe. I wanted to understand what it was about these books that spoke to so many people, who decided that they were so important, and what their vision of the United States is. 

Taken together, the national portrait these novels offer is darker than you might expect or than the people who helped canonize these books might have wanted. If they’re united on one thing, it’s the idea that America is not an innocent country. 

The Scarlet Letter (1850): An American origin story

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter has long been a mainstay on school syllabi and is a perennial pick for the great American novel. “It first became acclaimed, almost overnight, as the first serious topnotch piece of long fiction yet written by an American,” said Buell. 

The Scarlet Letter tells the tale of virtuous adulteress Hester Prynne, forced by her 17th-century Puritan neighbors to wear a red “A” forever to mark her for her crime, even as she insists on her own dignity and integrity. It is endlessly useful as a metaphor for talking about American tendencies toward mob-mindedness and our prudishness around sex, a censorious impulse that keeps recurring — and, on the other hand, for talking about Hester’s very American independence and self-determination. With its early colonial setting in the first days of Puritan Boston, it speaks to an America that had not yet become modern, and it functions as a kind of origin story. 

What the novel seems to insist upon most strongly, though, is the gloomy, dour Puritanism that began the American experiment. “The founders of a new colony,” Hawthorne wrote in the opening paragraphs, “whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.” In The Scarlet Letter, that is the United States: a utopian idea, a prison, and a graveyard.

To say that The Scarlet Letter is the great American novel, then, is to fear that our Puritan roots are inescapable, that we can never transcend the tomb and the penitentiary — and to hope that we can still, like Hester Prynne, redeem ourselves from our sins.

Moby-Dick (1851): A democracy at sea 

Herman Melville was close friends with Hawthorne, whom he considered a mentor and to whom he dedicated his 1851 opus, Moby-Dick, the story of a sea captain obsessed with the titular white whale. Yet, Melville, unlike Hawthorne, was not revered in his own lifetime. 

Moby-Dick wouldn’t have its revival until the 1920s and ’30s, when critics at Columbia University took it up. “Melville emerges as this voice speaking to the middle of the 20th century like a prophet,” said Jennifer Greiman, a professor of English at Wake Forest University and editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies. With its swirling, perplexing structure of digressions and asides — some chapters rendered as theatrical scripts and others as encyclopedia entries full of whale facts — Moby-Dick hadn’t made much sense as a 19th-century realistic novel. But it made a lot of sense to ambitious, boundary-pushing modernists. 

Greiman argued that Moby-Dick’s late adoption speaks to what is so American about it: the way it seems to have been written for a time that hasn’t yet arrived. “It’s that sense of it as a book that is speaking to something that’s going to come in the future,” Greiman said. 

Also distinctively American is Moby-Dick’s crew, made up of white and Black Americans, Native Americans, Africans, Indians, and Pacific Islanders. They make their collective fatal mistake early on in the novel, when Captain Ahab informs the men that he has no plans to fulfill the ship’s mission to harvest oil from whales. Instead, Ahab said, he wants to enact vengeance against Moby-Dick, the great white whale that took his leg — and the crew willingly signs on to his monomaniacal quest.

“It’s often read as a democratic tragedy,” said Greiman. “Because you have this multi-racial crew, and one of the first things they do together is hand over all of their power to Ahab and doom themselves.” 

In the crucible of Moby-Dick, we see the weakness of democracy under the sway of a charismatic despot. We see the enormous and chaotic forward-seeking ambition of America, and the possibility that it may yet find that its great experiment is impossible, and its quest will end in tragedy.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884): Taking on America’s original sin

Like The Scarlet Letter, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was an immediate hit. Twain was a literary celebrity, and his books were widely popular. But Huck Finn, the tale of troublemaking 13-year-old Huck rafting down the Mississippi with a runaway enslaved man named Jim, wasn’t considered especially important. “It’s not singled out until after his death,” said Matt Seybold, scholar in residence at the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College.

It would be Ernest Hemingway who enshrined it in the canon, writing in 1935 that “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” By the 1970s, said Seybold, it had become “probably the single most assigned work of literature in American classrooms.” 

Today, Huck Finn is assigned less often, especially at younger grade levels, Seybold said, in large part due to Twain’s frequent use of the n-word. Yet, it remains active and alive in the American imagination, enough so that Percival Everett won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer for his 2024 novel James, which re-imagined Huck Finn from Jim’s point of view.

Huck’s relationship with Jim is, for most readers, the heart of the novel. Huck believes it to be his duty to return Jim to the elderly woman who enslaved him, but he also loves Jim and wants him to be free. In the novel’s most celebrated passage, Huck decides to go against what the world has taught him is right and help Jim escape, announcing boldly, “All right then, I’ll go to hell.” 

Seybold said this scene is frequently read as “America overcoming the sins of its inception;” Huck’s redemptive love for Jim is enough to help him transcend the hypocritical moralism of the slave-owning south where he grew up. But, Seybold notes, Huck Finn doesn’t end with that glorious moment. It goes on for another 50 pages and features a lengthy episode in which Huck toys with Jim’s freedom as though playing a game, while Jim is re-enslaved and dehumanized. 

Seybold agreed with Toni Morrison’s read of the ending as a metaphor for Reconstruction — the promise of freedom abruptly reduced and turned into something contingent. Twain, Seybold said, was radicalized by a Frederick Douglass speech in which Douglass describes sharecropping as being nearly as bad as slavery. 

In this context, Huck Finn is a bold statement on one of America’s great failures. “Twain takes us back into the cruelty, the absurdity of antebellum America,” said Seybold. “That’s also America, right?”

The Great Gatsby (1925): A bleak look at the American dream

Like Hawthorne and Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald was a literary celebrity. When he published Great Gatsby in 1925, it was a critical success, but its sales were modest. “I always tell my students, if you want to be a writer, just think about the fact that Fitzgerald’s last royalty check was for $13.13,” said Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air, Georgetown professor of literary criticism, and author of So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures.

It took steady campaigning from Fitzgerald’s friends and publisher for Gatsby to be remembered. It started to become an institution during World War II, when the US army shipped copies of the book out to soldiers for morale and, then, was further bolstered by its widespread adoption as a high school text. Now, generations of American school children have grown up reading about Jay Gatsby, the poor boy who became a millionaire by mysterious means, all to win the love of the untouchable Daisy Buchanan.

This was around the same time that academics stopped talking about the idea of the great American novel singular, but it remained an effective marketing tool for publishers and an aspiration for authors, said Buell. Gatsby benefitted greatly from that marketing tool, in large part thanks to its status as a book that took seriously America’s class divides. 

In The Dream of the Great American Novel, Buell writes that the idea of the American bootstrapper stretches back to the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Gatsby makes that ideal sinister through Gatsby’s mysterious and ill-gotten gains and hollow as untouchable Daisy proves unable to live up to Gatsby’s image of her. Yet, Fitzgerald’s writing is at its most lyrical and lovely when he describes Gatsby’s longing. One of the indelible images of the novel is that of Gatsby standing alone at the end of his dock, stretching out his hands toward the green light of Daisy’s house. You know the things Gatsby is working for aren’t worth it, but Fitzgerald makes it beautiful to watch him try.

“It’s that idea of aspiration, of yearning, of trying even in the face of knowing that sometimes the game is rigged,” said Corrigan. “This is a novel that deeply questions the idea of an American meritocracy.” 

To say Gatsby is the great American novel is to say that America is a place of capitalist striving and that the dream of striving is beautiful. It’s also to posit that there is no clean way to make money, and whatever redemptive power you think you’ll claim at the end of your hard work will disappoint you.

Beloved (1987): The haunting of America

Starting in the 1960s, rebellions from within the academy started to break the canon apart. Feminist scholars were pushing for recognition of books by women; scholars of African-American culture were pushing for recognition of works by Black people. “That theory of a canonicity being bogus really gets rolled out in the 1980s,” said Buell.

Into this atmosphere came Toni Morrison, a Black woman who made it impossible to interpret her writing as an apologia for America. 

In Morrison’s books, it is clear that America has never overcome its sins. Never is that more the case than in her 1987 novel Beloved, about a formerly enslaved woman who is haunted by the ghost of the baby she killed to save from slavery. 

Beloved was published to enormous acclaim, but it did not win that year’s National Book Award, despite being a finalist. The Black literary scene rallied around Morrison in response, with 48 critics, writers, and activists publishing an open letter in the New York Times in praise of Morrison’s accomplishment and registering their disappointment with the National Book Foundation. Later that year, Morrison would win the Pulitzer.

“For a lot of novels that become these cultural touchstones, there has to be a campaign behind them. There have to be people who are making cultural arguments for why it matters,” said Jeffrey Lawrence, an American literature scholar at Rutgers University. “And in Morrison’s case, this happened relatively quickly.” In 1993, five years after Beloved was published, Morrison won the Nobel Prize for literature. That, said Lawrence, is when Beloved “starts to be considered the classic work of the late 20th century.” 

In Beloved, Morrison was able to “unpack the difficulties of slavery…in so many different ways,” said Dana A. Williams, a professor of African American Literature at Howard University.  “It showed the history of the institution, yes, but it showed it from so many different perspectives.” Morrison depicted the way slavery left scars on both Sethe, her heroine; on Sethe’s entire family; and even on Sethe’s enslavers. Even the land seems haunted. There is not a part of America that isn’t damaged by the horrors of both slavery and by the effort to disavow, deny, and forget it ever happened.

“Ultimately, I think it also forced us to think very seriously about how we have articulated humanity in this country,” added Williams. “Like who’s alive, who’s dead.” Sethe is based on a real woman named Margaret Garner, whose case involved a debate over whether to charge her with murder or destruction of property for the killing of her baby. “It really did question: What is humanity and who has the right to it? Who has access to it?” said Williams. “Is it really an unalienable right?”

Part of Morrison’s project is to show that slavery has haunted America’s legacy from the beginning — that no matter what we say about ourselves, we are not an innocent country. In Beloved, that becomes painfully, inarguably clear. 

Closing the book

Let’s return to Buell’s idea that the great American novel is often about a democratic collective in peril. In the books we’ve talked about here, the threat is always a problem embedded in America’s national character: a mob-minded censoriousness; a weakness in the face of a charismatic leader; the sin, trauma, and whitewashing of slavery; the emptiness of capitalist striving. These are texts that tell us that America is a nation of ideas — beautiful ideas — and that it constantly struggles and fails to live up to those ideas. 

“The novel as a genre really exists to critique the society that it is writing about, in a way that allows us to ask questions and to answer questions that only fiction can allow us to do,” Williams said.

But what’s sort of lovely is that, as critical and merciless as they can be, and as imperfect as America still is, these books are still the ones we have enshrined and celebrated and cherished over the past 250 years. We teach them in schools and turn them into movies. We make sure that our people know about them, are warned at an early age that America’s innocence is a farce.

So, perhaps, the great American value that these novels enshrine is clear-eyed self-knowledge. Every country is prone to self-propagandizing and empty puffery, especially around an occasion like the 250th anniversary of one of its founding documents. But it’s comforting to know that the centuries-long American quest to define our national identity through texts has led to a canon of novels that tell us the ugly truth about who we are.