American literary history after World War II
The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath, 1963)
Beloved (Toni Morrison, 1987)
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Juno Díaz, 2007)
The Catcher in the Rye (J. D. Salinger, 1951)
The Crying of Lot 49 (Thomas Pynchon, 1965)
The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin, 1974)
Feed (M. T. Anderson, 2002)
The Fifth Season (N. K. Jemisin, 2015)
Future Home of the Living God (Louise Erdrich, 2017)
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925)
The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood, 1985–Canada)
Huckleberry Finn (Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain, 1884)
Hummingbird Salamander (Jeff VanderMeer, 2021)
Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison, 1952)
Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov, published in France in 1955, in the U.S. in 1958)
Nightmare Alley (William Lindsay Gresham, 1946)
The Overstory (Richard Powers, 2018)
Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents (Octavia E. Butler, 1993 and 1998)
Ragtime (E. L. Doctorow, 1975)
Shalimar the Clown (Salman Rushdie, 2005)
The Space Merchants (Frederik Pohl and C. M. Cornbluth, 1952)
The Underground Railroad (Colson Whitehead, 2016)
Vineland (Thomas Pynchon, 1990)
A Visit from the Goon Squad (Jennifer Egan, 2010)
White Noise (Don DeLillo, 1985)