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The "Great American Novel"
This is the concept of a novel that is distinguished in both craft and theme
as being the most accurate representative of the zeitgeist* in the United
States at the time of its writing. It is presumed to be written by an American
author who is knowledgeable about the state, culture, and perspective of
the common American citizen. In historical terms, it is sometimes equated
as being the American response to the national epic.

* Zeitgeist "the spirit of the times" or "the spirit of the age."

Some Examples:

1851: Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (full title: Moby-Dick; or The Whale)
1884: Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
1925: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
1936: William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!
1938: John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy
1939: John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath
1951: J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye
1952: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
1953: Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March
1955: Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita
1960: Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird
1973: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow
1975: William Gaddis's J R
1985: Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West
1996: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest
1997: Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon
Adam Gopnik** considers Catcher in the Rye one of the "three perfect books"
in American literature, along with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby,
and believes that "no book has ever captured a city better than Catcher in the Rye
captured New York in the fifties."
Gopnik, Adam. The New Yorker, February 8, 2010, p. 21

**Adam Gopnik, (born August 24, 1956) is an American writer, essayist and commentator.

He is best known as a staff writer for The New Yorker—to which he has contributed non-fiction,
fiction, memoir and criticism and as the author of the essay collection Paris to the Moon,
an account of five years that Gopnik, his wife Martha, and son Luke, spent in the French capital.

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