aListofBooks

Ultimate Best Books

Genre: American (126 books)

The best classic books from the American genre.

In Our Time

In Our Time

Ernest Hemingway

4.33 (3)

The strange thing was, he said, how they screamed every night at midnight.

#323
RANK
1,754
POINTS
Babbitt

Babbitt

Sinclair Lewis

4.0 (1)

The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods.

#327
RANK
1,710
POINTS
Sula

Sula

Toni Morrison

5.0 (3)

In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from the roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood.

#330
RANK
1,705
POINTS
Sister Carrie

Sister Carrie

Theodore Dreiser

4.0 (3)

When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her total outfit consisted of a small trunk, a cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and a yellow leather snap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister's address in Van Buren Street, and four dollars in money.

#333
RANK
1,700
POINTS
Housekeeping

Housekeeping

Marilynne Robinson

3.75 (4)

My name is Ruth.

#334
RANK
1,698
POINTS
Jazz

Jazz

Toni Morrison

3.25 (4)

Sth, I know that woman.

#339
RANK
1,630
POINTS
Nostromo

Nostromo

Joseph Conrad

3.8 (5)

In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of Sulaco—the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its antiquity—had never been commercially anything more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local trade in ox-hides and indigo. The clumsy deep-sea galleons of the conquerors that, needing a brisk gale to move at all, would lie becalmed, where your modern ship built on clipper lines forges ahead by the mere flapping of her sails, had been barred out of Sulaco by the prevailing calms of its vast gulf. Some harbours of the earth are made difficult of access by the treachery of sunken rocks and the tempests of their shores. Sulaco had found an inviolable sanctuary from the temptations of a trading world in the solemn hush of the deep Golfo Placido as if within an enormous semi-circular and unroofed temple open to the ocean, with its walls of lofty mountains hung with the mourning draperies of cloud.

#340
RANK
1,624
POINTS
Ironweed

Ironweed

William J. Kennedy

4.0 (1)

Riding up the winding road of Saint Agnes Cemetery in the back of the rattling old truck, Francis Phelan became aware that the dead, even more than the living, settled down in neighborhoods.

#341
RANK
1,623
POINTS
The Beautiful and Damned

The Beautiful and Damned

F. Scott Fitzgerald

3.2 (5)

In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him.

#344
RANK
1,614
POINTS
A People's History of the United States

A People's History of the United States

Howard Zinn

5.0 (2)

Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat.

#345
RANK
1,607
POINTS