List of classic American novels

Set in the waning years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the first volume in The Transylvanian Trilogy is a moody, atmospheric masterpiece, replete with misty mountains, dense forests, magnificent castles, and a cast of misbehaving aristocrats struggling with themselves, one another, and the violent, inexorable passing of an age.

The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

These beguiling stories, by one of the 20th-century’s masters of short fiction, may seem like mere fairy tales, but they are darker, bloodier, and more complex and psychologically intense than almost anything one might encounter in that genre. These terrifying miniatures will chill and arouse all at once.

I Am One of You Forever by Fred Chappell

This slim, Southern Gothic picaresque novel recalls Gabriel García Márquez’s magical realism in the form of tall tales swapped on a front porch. Whiskey-swilling uncles relive Greek myths in the presence of the 10-year-old narrator who is beginning to comprehend the nature of God and of unconditional love.

by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

Arguably the greatest novel by the Brazilian master Machado de Assis, this darkly comic and psychologically penetrating book features one of the great unreliable narrators in world literature: the paranoid, jealous Bento Santiago, who begins to think that his child is not his own, but rather the result of an adulterous relationship between his closest friend and his wife.

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

The title of Gaskell’s brilliant, perceptive social novel, set in the industrial north of England, was not her own. Charles Dickens, whose contemporaneous Hard Times was direct competition, insisted on the title. Gaskell had wanted to call the book “Margaret Hale” after her protagonist, a girl of the south whose feelings about the north are challenged when she is forced to move there, into the heart of the cotton manufacturing country. A classic novel about the many crises brought about by industrialization.

Aleck Maury, Sportsman by Caroline Gordon
Gordon’s beautiful elegy to a lost world is set in the rural South of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and takes the form of the fictional memoirs of Aleck Maury—gentleman, classical scholar—whose great passion in life is the pursuit of pristine fields and streams in which to hunt and fish. A heartbreaking novel that depicts a man beholden to his ideals, who sees the world around him irreparably change and his own life pass him by.

Reveille in Washington: 1860-1865 by Margaret Leech

Winner of the 1942 Pulitzer Prize, this history of the nation’s capital during the Civil War is a rich, beautifully written narrative. Consider this passage on the death of Elmer Ellsworth, the North’s first casualty: “From the capital, sorrow spread in a wave over the Union. It was as if the people of the republic, so inexperienced in war, had closed their eyes to the purpose for which their young men had been sent to Washington; as if Ellsworth’s death had for a moment undeceived them, and a premonition passed, like a shudder, over all their hearts.”