After 150 years, readers and writers still wonder: Is there—or can there be—a Great American Novel?

The Great American Novel, that quixotism of American letters, is an idea originating in the efforts of a young country to define and distinguish both itself and its literature. Perhaps it is surprising, then, to find that the term has a concrete genesis: an article called (what else?) “The Great American Novel” and written by the Civil War novelist John William De Forest in the January 9, 1868, issue of The Nation.

De Forest argues that though the country was too young and green to produce an epic poem a la the Iliad or the Aeneid, America could possibly still produce a Great American Novel. He runs through a shortlist of possible authors:

• Washington Irving: “too cautious”
• James Fenimore Cooper: “shirked the experiment”
• Nathaniel Hawthorne: “staggered under the load of the American novel”
• Harriet Beecher Stowe: “the nearest approach to the desired phenomenon”
• Oliver Wendell Holmes: “hampered by his scientific theories”

De Forest asks, “Is there, in other words, a single tale which paints American life so broadly, truly, and sympathetically that every American of feeling and culture is forced to acknowledge the picture as a likeness of something which he knows?” He answers, “Not one!”

Since De Forest introduced the Great American Novel as a goal for American literature, many writers have made it the aim of their careers. In a 2009 article for Salon, Laura Miller refers to this preoccupation as the Great Literary American Novel Syndrome, or GLANS. Among its victims:

• Norman Mailer called the Great American Novel “the big one,” says The Independent in an article about his quest for it. He first announced his intention of writing one in 1957, toiling towards that goal for the next fifty years
• Ralph Ellison spent forty years working on a follow-up to Invisible Man, in which he aimed, according to Newsweek, “to do nothing less than plumb once and for all the mystery and dilemma of race and identity in American society.” He died before he could finish it.
• Truman Capote began Answered Prayers in 1958, intending it to be an American À la recherché du temps perdu. Its original publication date, in 1968, was delayed to 1972, then ‘75—when the first of four chapters ran in Esquire—then ’77 and ’81. It was published posthumously, in unfinished form, in 1987.

In 1973 Philip Roth published his mockingly titled The Great American Novel, a book about a failed major-league baseball league that pokes fun at (in the words of a reviewer in The New York Times) “the decorums of novel-writing and the frailer conventions of the national style.” Thirty years later, when a journalist effusively praised the book, Roth “laughed and said it’s usually the precocious teen sons of friends who tell him that. But he said no novel was more fun to write.”

A Wikipedia list, while hardly definitive, includes twenty candidates for Great American Novel and serves as an interesting starting point for discussion. Tell us what you think—is there, or can there be, a single novel of the type De Forest envisioned, a work that captures the American zeitgeist? And, in her Salon article, Miller highlights the question, “Why can’t a woman write the Great American Novel?” The Wikipedia list includes The Age of Innocence and To Kill a Mockingbird, but are there any candidates by women that have been unjustly neglected?

Related reading:

• De Forest and the Great American Novel (The American Literary Blog)
• “The Great American Novel,” John William De Forest, The Nation, January 9, 1868 (Google Books)

Related LOA volumes: Philip Roth: Novels 1973–1977

Truman Capote and Harper Lee: Immortalizing each other in fiction

One of American literature’s great partnerships is the forty-year friendship between Nelle Harper Lee, whose only novel is celebrating its fiftieth year as a perennial best-seller, and Truman Capote.

Born in New Orleans, Truman grew up in Monroeville, Alabama, and Nelle was the youngest daughter of the family next door. In Capote: A Biography Gerald Clarke captures them as children of seven and eight:

Harper [was] the tomboy on the block, a girl who ... could beat the steam out of most boys her age, or even a year or so older, as Truman was.... Neither had many other real friends. Nelle was too rough for most other girls, and Truman was too soft for most other boys.

Lee’s father was a lawyer and both children were fascinated by crime. “We went to trials instead of going to the movies,” Capote once reminisced. When Mr. Lee gave them a twenty-pound Underwood typewriter, they tapped out stories about their neighbors.

Two characters based on Lee appear in Capote’s fiction. In Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), his acclaimed first novel, tomboy Idabel Thompkins chides the main character Joel when he is embarrassed to undress in front of her:

“Son,” she said, and spit between her fingers, “what you’ve got in your britches is no news to me, and no concern of mine: hell, I’ve fooled around with nobody but boys since first grade. I never think like I’m a girl; you’ve got to remember that, or we can’t never be friends.”

Lee is also recognizable as Ann “Jumbo” Finchburg, “a sawed-off but solid tomboy with an all-hell-let-loose wrestling technique,” in Capote’s 1967 story “The Thanksgiving Visitor.”

Lee would return the favor by basing the child Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird on Capote:

He wore blue linen shorts that buttoned to his shirt, his hair was snow white and stuck to his head like dandruff; he was a year my senior but I towered over him. As he told us [an] old tale his blue eyes would lighten and darken; his laugh was sudden and happy.... We came to know [him] as a pocket Merlin, whose head teemed with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies.

Collaboration proved trickier. The two became joint investigators in crime in 1959 when Capote invited Lee to accompany him on a new project: interviewing everyone who knew a family murdered in a small town in Kansas. Lee had just turned in the manuscript of the novel she had been working on for ten years. “The crime intrigued him, and I'm intrigued with crime—and, boy, I wanted to go. It was deep calling to deep,” Lee remembered.

In Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee Charles J. Shields details what Lee contributed. Kansans didn’t know what to make of Capote but Lee “knew how farmers and inhabitants of small towns thought and talked.... [Her] gift for creating character sketches turned out to complement Truman’s ability to recall remarks.” Shields's research found that Lee wrote some 150 pages of notes but that Capote ignored her recommendations to make the victims more complex.

Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960 and won the Pulitzer Prize. (To date, it has sold more than 30 million copies.) A loyal friend, Lee returned with Capote to Kansas in 1963 to attend the trial of the accused killers. But three years later, when Lee saw the first edition of In Cold Blood, she was shocked that she shared the dedication with Capote’s lover, her contribution acknowledged as “secretarial help.” Their friendship would never be the same.

• Watch a CBS News report on the celebrations in Monroeville commemorating To Kill a Mockingbird's 50th anniversary
• Read George Plimpton’s interview with Truman Capote about In Cold Blood
• Watch an interview with Truman Capote about In Cold Blood

Related LOA works: American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s Until Now (includes Capote’s haunting, first published story "Miriam"); True Crime: An American Anthology (includes “Then It All Came Down,” Capote’s interview with Manson associate Robert Beausoleil)