After we previously blogged about the dubious search for the “Great American Novel,” The Guardian decided to annoy countless readers everywhere by drafting a list of 32 authors who will “compete” to be named the “Great American Novelist” in an online tournament. To qualify, an author had to have produced at least four novels, been American, and written in the last 100 years.
Why four books? Why within the past 100 years? The arbitrariness of it all..such a stupid endeavor.
Anyway, for those interested, here are the 32 finalists:
William Faulkner
Saul Bellow
Philip Roth
John Updike
John Steinbeck
Sinclair Lewis
Toni Morrison
Ernest Hemingway
Edith Wharton
Cormac McCarthy
Willa Cather
Don DeLillo
EL Doctorow
Thomas Pynchon
Vladimir Nabokov
Annie Proulx
James Baldwin
William S. Burroughs
Raymond Chandler
John Dos Passos
John Fante
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Richard Ford
Wallace Stegner
William Gaddis
Joseph Heller
Ursula K. Le Guin
Carson McCullers
Joyce Carol Oates
William Styron
Paul Auster
Kurt Vonnegut
