Greatest American novelist?

Overall: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Southern: Robert Penn Warren/William Faulkner

Contemporary: Cormac McCarthy/Phillip Roth

Poets: Walt Whitman/Robert Frost/Billy Collins

I'll say Steinbeck edges out Twain. I'd like to pick someone like Kerouac, but so much of his writing seems contextual that I am not sure it will still be as great in a hundred years, let alone two hundred. A lot of other great works offer that same insubstantial nature. It might be the novel that screams out America in a specific year. But when the years role by, you have to question is Catch-22 timeless? Is One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest a novel for the ages? Am I reading a Huckleberyy Finn, or merely another Look Homeward Angel? Much of Steinbeck's writing seems to be ageless. A lot seems to be intrinsically based in the country, just as more than a bit of Tolkien screams England, even when he writes of Middle-earth.

The question is loaded with meaning, but I'd have to say that I could never pick Roth, because he writes from such a non-american perspective, that of a member of an outsider group. An odd juxtaposition of both insider and outsider, and delightful to read. Now I'm not saying that being jewish isn't being American, but so often in Roth's work he is saying this. If you get the difference. It is American to be an immigrant. It is American to be an outsider. Combine the two and can you be the great American novelist, when you center your writing in being an alien to the American experience? It is as if Lost in Translation was picked as the great Japanese movie over Seven Samurai or a hundred others.

Hmm, if you'd asked Who is the Greatest American short story writer? I'd have yped Hemingway and left it at that.

I admit to having read Saul Bellow. I think it is too early yet to say Roth or Updike. I think Twain is fine and Nathaniel Hawthorne is an arguable choice. Hemingway, Faulkner fall short in my opinion. Fitzgerald or Steinbeck are better choices in my opinion. But the one writer that stands out in his glorious work Moby Dick is Herman Melville.

Melville, Twain, Vonnegut are three of my favorites, but the Americans I most enjoy aren't really novelists, such as Flannery O'Connor and Walt Whitman.

It'd be a toss-up between Toni Morrison, Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, and Frank Herbert, all depending on what you liked to read. That's just my opinion, however.

Edgar Allen Poe,hands down

There is too many I like.

Just too many.

Well, actually, a select few, but I feel like I'm betraying them when I put them in order.

It's not Stephenie Meyer, kids.