Tyler van Opstal- Some brief notes on Book of the Month Club’s Well Stocked Bookcase

    The search for a Great American Novel has been in play for several centuries, with a country seen as culturally young and unfinished desperate to hold up masterpieces to rival those written centuries ago on the European continent- specifically masterpieces that embodied and influenced America as a nation much as authors like de Balzac did for France. Many contenders have been put forth over time, with some popular options being Melville’s Moby Dick, Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom. The author of a Great American Novel candidate are typically white men (the only common candidate I can think of by an author of color is Ellison’s Invisible Man), and most writings by authors of color or women that might otherwise have candidacy suffered from decades or even centuries of literary criticism that dismissed these novels as ‘Black novels’ or ‘women novels’ which they would not consider for the Great American Novel because they did not encompass what critics saw as a full American experience (by which they meant the white American experience). The improvement of criteria to search for what might be the Great American Novel continues now and would require much more than a brief informal set of notes to discuss properly. Instead, this serves as preface for some notes on one reference book which discusses American novels of quality. 

    Book of the Month Club, founded in 1926 and still ongoing, is a mail subscription service that provides editor-selected books to readers. For their sixtieth anniversary in 1986, the club produced a slim book entitled The Well-Stocked Bookcase, which contains a list of sixty American novels published between 1926-1986 selected by the editorial board as the novels most influential and reflective to the American national identity and psyche. While the limited time range prevents it from being a true search list for the Great American Novel, the goal is much the same and it is a handy reference on the topic. Notable is the Bookcase’s entry on the previously mentioned Invisible Man. The entry, by renowned literary scholar Clifton Fadiman (who as a side note used the nickname ‘Kip’), correctly states that the novel “though rooted in black experience, it can be judged on its merits as a novel among other novels [as opposed to a Black novel] (p. 34).” Fadiman does however present an overly optimistic view when he says that segregation of literature is no longer an issue and that “Today... the non-black audience has learned to judge a work of art by a black writer as it would any other (34)” which is not the case in America even now and certainly wasn’t in 1986.  

    Indeed, Fadiman would not have needed to look any further to disprove his proclamation of equality than A Well-Stocked Bookcase itself. Ellison is one of only two Black authors of the fifty-eight listed in the book (Faulkner and Hemingway are each represented twice), with the other being Toni Morrison for Song of Solomon. Of the other sixty-six writers represented, forty-five are white men and eleven are white women. While the novels that Book of the Month Club selected are certainly all fine pieces of literature (except for Nabokov's Lolita which I refuse to praise even indirectly) the extremely lopsided representation from a period that also included Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Delaney’s Babel 17, Walker’s The Color Purple, Baldwin’s Go Tell it On the Mountain and other incredible works of American literature written by Black authors shows that the search for the Great American Novel has long been treated as the search for the Great (White) American Novel. 

Books quoted- 

Book of the Month Club Editorial Board. The Well-Stocked Bookcase. Book of the Month Club.