Oops in that case I rescind that suggestion and replace it with To Kill a Mockingbird.
The Best American Novel of the 20th Century?
- Thread starter Xylene
- Start date
Oops in that case I rescind that suggestion and replace it with To Kill a Mockingbird.
what is american? they are all immigrants.
Either a naturalized citizen or holding citizenship by birth.
Unless you want to restrict it to native American authors, in which case, that narrows the field significantly. I've not read it yet, but the only thing that comes to mind is Ceremony by Leslie Silko
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lets restrict it then, because narrowing options creates innovation.
superstring01
Moderator
Being a sci-fi geek, I'd chose "Dune" by Frank Herbert.
Damn. It's on my list. I hear good things about it... but then again I heard GREAT things about Ana Kostova's "The Historian" which was wretched on a level that approaches the unimaginable.
That one be one of my tops.
And this one too.
~String
Damn. It's on my list. I hear good things about it... but then again I heard GREAT things about Ana Kostova's "The Historian" which was wretched on a level that approaches the unimaginable.
That one be one of my tops.
And this one too.
~String
Charles buckowski wins with two fingers up his nose.
All books mentioned so far are pretentious drivel.
All books mentioned so far are pretentious drivel.
Mrs.Lucysnow
Valued Senior Member
Yeah but Bukowski hasn't really written any great novels but he is one of the best poets and master of the short story.
Carcano
Valued Senior Member
Its a bit short, technically a novella, but my vote goes to 'At The Mountains of Madness' by H.P. Lovecraft.
This is the first major work to deal seriously with aliens and the origins of life on earth...way ahead of its time for 1931. I cannot think of any other book with such a perfect balance of philosophy, science and mystical poetry!
Plot Summary:
The story is written in first-person perspective by the geologist William Dyer, a professor from Miskatonic University. He writes to disclose hitherto unknown and closely kept secrets in the hope that he can deter a planned and much publicized scientific expedition to Antarctica. On a previous expedition there, a party of scholars from Miskatonic University, led by Dyer, discovered fantastic and horrific ruins and a dangerous secret beyond a range of mountains taller than the Himalaya.
The group that discovered and crossed the mountains found the remains of fourteen ancient life forms, completely unknown to science and unidentifiable as either plants or animals, after discovering an underground cave while boring for ice cores. Six of the specimens are badly damaged, the others uncannily pristine. Their highly-evolved features are problematic: their stratum location puts them at a point on the geologic time scale much too early for such features to have naturally evolved yet. Because of their resemblance to creatures of myth mentioned in the Necronomicon, they are dubbed the "Elder Things".
When the main expedition loses contact with this party, Dyer and the rest of his colleagues travel to their camp to investigate. The camp is devastated and both the men and the dogs slaughtered, with only one of each missing. Near the camp they find six star-shaped snow mounds, and a damaged Elder Thing buried under each. They discover that the better preserved life forms have vanished, and that some form of experiment has been done, though they are only able to speculate on the subject, and the possibility that it is the missing man and dog. Dyer elects to close off the area from which they took their samples.
Dyer and a student named Danforth fly an airplane over the mountains, which they soon realize are the outer wall of a huge, abandoned stone city of cubes and cones, utterly alien compared with any human architecture. By exploring these fantastic structures, the men are able to learn the history of the Elder Things by interpreting their magnificent hieroglyphic murals: The Elder Things first came to Earth shortly after the Moon was pulled loose from the planet and were the creators of life. They built their cities with the help of "Shoggoths", things created to perform any task, assume any form, and reflect any thought. As more buildings are explored, a fantastic vista opens of the history of races beyond the scope of man's understanding, including the Elder Things' conflicts with the Star-spawn of Cthulhu and the Mi-Go who arrived on Earth some time after the Elder Things themselves. Uncannily, the images also reflect a degradation in the order of this civilization, as the Shoggoths gain independence. As more resources are applied to maintaining order, the etchings become haphazard and primitive. The murals also allude to some unnamed evil in an even larger mountain range just past their city which even they fear greatly. Eventually, as Antarctica became uninhabitable even for the Elder Things, they migrated into a large, subterranean ocean.
As the two progress further into the city, they are ultimately drawn to a massive, ominous entrance which is the opening of a tunnel which they believe leads into the subterranean region described in the murals. Compulsively they are drawn in, finding further horrors: evidence of dead Elder Things caught in a brutal struggle and blind six-foot-tall penguins wandering around placidly. They are confronted with an immense, ululating horror which they identify as a Shoggoth. They escape with their lives using luck and diversion. On the plane high above the plateau, Danforth looks back and sees something that causes him to lose his sanity. He refuses to tell anyone (even Dyer) what he saw, though it is implied that it has something to do with what lies beyond the larger mountain range that even the Elder Things feared.
Professor Dyer concludes that the Elder Things and their civilization were destroyed by the Shoggoths they created and that this entity has sustained itself on the enormous penguins since eons past. He begs the planners of the next proposed Antarctic expedition to stay away from things that should not be loosed on this Earth.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
-H.P. Lovecraft
This is the first major work to deal seriously with aliens and the origins of life on earth...way ahead of its time for 1931. I cannot think of any other book with such a perfect balance of philosophy, science and mystical poetry!
Plot Summary:
The story is written in first-person perspective by the geologist William Dyer, a professor from Miskatonic University. He writes to disclose hitherto unknown and closely kept secrets in the hope that he can deter a planned and much publicized scientific expedition to Antarctica. On a previous expedition there, a party of scholars from Miskatonic University, led by Dyer, discovered fantastic and horrific ruins and a dangerous secret beyond a range of mountains taller than the Himalaya.
The group that discovered and crossed the mountains found the remains of fourteen ancient life forms, completely unknown to science and unidentifiable as either plants or animals, after discovering an underground cave while boring for ice cores. Six of the specimens are badly damaged, the others uncannily pristine. Their highly-evolved features are problematic: their stratum location puts them at a point on the geologic time scale much too early for such features to have naturally evolved yet. Because of their resemblance to creatures of myth mentioned in the Necronomicon, they are dubbed the "Elder Things".
When the main expedition loses contact with this party, Dyer and the rest of his colleagues travel to their camp to investigate. The camp is devastated and both the men and the dogs slaughtered, with only one of each missing. Near the camp they find six star-shaped snow mounds, and a damaged Elder Thing buried under each. They discover that the better preserved life forms have vanished, and that some form of experiment has been done, though they are only able to speculate on the subject, and the possibility that it is the missing man and dog. Dyer elects to close off the area from which they took their samples.
Dyer and a student named Danforth fly an airplane over the mountains, which they soon realize are the outer wall of a huge, abandoned stone city of cubes and cones, utterly alien compared with any human architecture. By exploring these fantastic structures, the men are able to learn the history of the Elder Things by interpreting their magnificent hieroglyphic murals: The Elder Things first came to Earth shortly after the Moon was pulled loose from the planet and were the creators of life. They built their cities with the help of "Shoggoths", things created to perform any task, assume any form, and reflect any thought. As more buildings are explored, a fantastic vista opens of the history of races beyond the scope of man's understanding, including the Elder Things' conflicts with the Star-spawn of Cthulhu and the Mi-Go who arrived on Earth some time after the Elder Things themselves. Uncannily, the images also reflect a degradation in the order of this civilization, as the Shoggoths gain independence. As more resources are applied to maintaining order, the etchings become haphazard and primitive. The murals also allude to some unnamed evil in an even larger mountain range just past their city which even they fear greatly. Eventually, as Antarctica became uninhabitable even for the Elder Things, they migrated into a large, subterranean ocean.
As the two progress further into the city, they are ultimately drawn to a massive, ominous entrance which is the opening of a tunnel which they believe leads into the subterranean region described in the murals. Compulsively they are drawn in, finding further horrors: evidence of dead Elder Things caught in a brutal struggle and blind six-foot-tall penguins wandering around placidly. They are confronted with an immense, ululating horror which they identify as a Shoggoth. They escape with their lives using luck and diversion. On the plane high above the plateau, Danforth looks back and sees something that causes him to lose his sanity. He refuses to tell anyone (even Dyer) what he saw, though it is implied that it has something to do with what lies beyond the larger mountain range that even the Elder Things feared.
Professor Dyer concludes that the Elder Things and their civilization were destroyed by the Shoggoths they created and that this entity has sustained itself on the enormous penguins since eons past. He begs the planners of the next proposed Antarctic expedition to stay away from things that should not be loosed on this Earth.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
-H.P. Lovecraft
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It's important and all that, but it's juvenilia - the term "best" implies literary and philosophical merit at an adult level.
Dr Seuss books are great, likewise Spiderman comics and Jack London stories, but not in this category.
"Treasure of the Sierra Madre" may not be a must read, but if we're going to be including stuff like "Dune" in the running - - -
Don't. Try "The Sand Pebbles" instead.SAM said:
btw: interesting that Vonnegut's great contribution in total does not suggest a "best novel" vote (from me either), that Ursula LeGuin's is similarly difficult to place, and that "Infinite Jest" remains unloved.
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Not to mention that Atlas Shrugged is a really about the Soviet Union; the US only figures in as a mystified setting for Rand's polemics. You could argue that that sort of reactionism is itself informative about Cold War America, but that's awfully indirect as a credit to the author/work. And anyway, it's obvious that the assertion of insight here was just so much Libertarian posturing in the first place.
More importantly, Atlas Shrugged is extremely poorly written, to the point where it does a disservice to Dr. Seuss, Spiderman and Jack London to equate them. It's a hack romance novel with 800 pages of propaganda shoehorned into it. Sort of like Ayn Rand's love life, from what I gather...
I had been on the fence about suggesting that one, but thought it would make me look too pretensious, coming on the heels of a Pynchon recommendation... But now that I'm going down that road, I reckon I'll double down with Underworld and everything Nabokov wrote after 1940 (the previous works being Russian novels, and so ineligible here).
Good catch. My apologies.quadro said:
I was thinking of the Tarzan novels, to substitute, but recalled that someone I respect once observed that the action sequences in those books were well done - and that action is hard to describe well.
Drawing a blank here. Robert Ludlum? Zane Grey?
Sadly, it was the best thing Rand had ever written.
I vote for Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom and As I Lay Dying.
Maybe Michael Crichton? He's also got the shallow theoretical underpinnings and overt political agenda (and, of course, prose so god-awful that any literate adult quickly begins to feel they're being condescended to).
Dan Brown might be another interesting parallel, although I haven't read any of his books (proudly), and so I can't say for sure.
The difficulty is that Rand pretends to so much more than most authors in the hack category. So perhaps Hubbard is the best choice?
Is it? I recall thinking that Fountainhead was better, before I gave up halfway through it. And I have (intelligent, liberal) friends who swear that Anthem is a good read.
Although there is a worrying correlation between those recommendations and the recommender commencing postgraduate education in architecture or design...
Otherwise known as Dracula Needs a Librarian.
You're right. Fountainhead was marginally better and has the saving grace of being a few hundred pages shorter. Anthem? Good? Wow. I recall that one having read as though it were a novelization of some mainstream Hollywood movie.
Ouch Jack London is that bad? I must be too philistine to comment here....
No. Quadrophonics was saying that it was unfair to London, Dr. Seuss, and Stan Lee (Spiderman) to place Ayn Rand in their category of juvenilia. Jack London is awesome, but certainly geared more towards the younger reader.
If nothing else it struck me as more personal and less political, without as much kooky Objectivism stuff. But like I said I didn't finish it, and what I recall was mostly romance novel tripe and sullen posturing that the kids nowadays would refer to as "emo."
Speaking of which: Anne Rice vs. Ayn Rand. The one is an American who writes about vampires, the other a vampire who writes about Americans...
That would still be an improvement on the Rand I've read which, as mentioned above, is in the throw-away paperback category, far below what even the basest Hollywood producer would invest mainstream movie money in.
Apparently both Arch Enemy and Rush have done Anthem-themed albums...
However it turns out there is actually already a Fountainhead film, and Atlas Shrugged is currently in the works. So I stand corrected...