Best American novel of the last one hundred years

[tolbiny]

To Kill a Mocking Bird. I wouldn't rate it as the best, but it deserves a mention especially if you are looking for suggestions.

[multious]

huxley definitely ranks high. Brave New World is pretty much my least favourite of his books

[RJT]

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To Kill a Mocking Bird. I wouldn't rate it as the best...

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I would.

[wdcbooks]

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You don't think the ayn rand suggestions already did this?

Fwiw, i really did want to clarify for those that might not be familiar with the brothers k.

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I would probably be more familiar with them if they were a mid-eighties WWF tag team.

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Remind me to tell you about getting dead drunk with the Bushwackers, or maybe the Bushwack brothers and Jesse Ventura, I never followed the WWF so I don't remember the name.

As to the OP. "Wise Blood" Flannery O'Connor. If she had written five other novels they would be ranked 1-5.

[Nicholasp27]

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

ship it

[THEOSU]

"Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."

[HtotheNootch]

Confederacy of Dunces

[gumpzilla]

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Confederacy of Dunces

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I just read this a couple of days ago. Man, I don't get the hype.

I'm having a hard time deciding on what I'd pick, so I'll just comment on some books mentioned in this thread. Lolita and Catch-22 are both pretty good choices. There were large parts of Infinite Jest I liked, but I don't think it really hung together as a complete package in the way I would have liked. Ditto for Gravity's Rainbow. And as others before me have pointed out, Ayn Rand novels are pretty laughable. The Faulkner I've read has seemed very Significant but I didn't love any of it. I've read a little of Steinbeck, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, but nothing jumps out at me too much.

A couple of books that I like quite a bit but probably lack the snob factor to be truly great: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Neuromancer, Cryptonomicon.

[gumpzilla]

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A couple of newer ones I would suggest you take a look at - Don DeLillo's "White Noise," which offers a pretty trenchant look at modern society (the details of which unfortunately sound a little dated). Also, read something by Philip Roth... I'm not sure if "American Pastoral" is his best, but I liked it.

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Roth writes nicely but I'm not sure I'd recommend American Pastoral; of the three books I've read by him it's the one I liked least. The Plot Against America is an excellent book.

I've read White Noise and one other book by DeLillo and I don't really get him.

[IronDragon1]

-With all due respect, unless you like hackneyed plots or are the most die hard of die hard objectivists, Ayn Rand is a horrendous fiction author.

-Pynchon is good, as is F.Scott Fitzgerald and William Burroughs. I also recommend Don Delillo and Phillip Roth.
Also, do try some of the great foreign authors of the 20th century like Salman Rushdie, Haruki Murakami and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.