Ten American Books

So many books, so little time! Here are ten I want to read, in an effort to consolidate my credentials as an Americanist... Five from the 19th century, five from the twentieth. Setting myself a deadline: the end of the academic year.

1. Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 1840
2. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 1850
3. Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 1851
4. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, 1881
5. Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1884
6. Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence, 1920
7. Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1940
8. Saul Bellow, Herzog, 1964
9. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, 1973
10. David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, 1997