Great American Novels and Writers

Here are four famous American novelists who created great books and literature for the ages. Each of them has written a "great American novel." Each writer offers new perspectives on how we live, and the purpose and meaning of life. One by one, they changed the way we read and write fiction. But great writers are also entertainers who introduce us to interesting new worlds. These four great American writers are celebrated worldwide.

1. William Faulkner
2. Herman Melville
3. Ernest Hemingway
4. Toni Morrison

William Faulkner

William Faulkner is one of the greatest novelists of all time. He was born in Mississippi in 1897. After schooling, he traveled, wrote and worked a series of small jobs. He found a publisher for his first novel, Soldiers' Pay, with the help of writer Sherwood Anderson. Estelle Oldham rejected his proposal of marriage in 1918, but she married Faulkner in 1929 after her divorce.

As a setting for many of his novels, William Faulkner created an imaginary southern place called Yoknapatawpha County. He is known for As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, The Unvanquished, The Wild Palms, The Hamlet, and Go Down, Moses. By the mid 1940s all of his novels were out of print, but a new collection of his writing, published in 1946 as The Portable Faulkner, finally established his reputation. Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949. He is identified with the Southern School of American writers, who found inspiration in dark, brooding, sometimes epic, and usually eccentric southern lives. His writing combines symbolism and stream of consciousness with deadpan humor and down-home characters.

Herman Melville

Herman Melville created a masterpiece of American literature, Moby-Dick. Although his writing was ignored during his lifetime, he created what has since been called "the great American novel." Born in 1819 in New York City, he left school at the age of 15 to work a string of jobs as a clerk, banker, a teacher and a surveyor. When he signed up as a cabin boy on a sailing vessel and then on a whaler, he discovered his love of the sea. After four years at sea, Melville returned home to begin writing.

He wrote 10 major novels, Typee, Omoo, Mardi, Redburn, White-Jacket, Pierre, Israel Potter, The Confidence Man, and Billy Budd, most of them based on his sea adventures. Melville's masterpiece Moby-Dick is a sea story, told by the narrator Ismael, about Captain Ahab, so obsessed with revenge on the white whale Moby-Dick that he destroys the crew of the Pequod. The book is both a sea adventure and a symbolic allegory of life as a quest for meaning. None of Melville's other work compares to this epic. While he was writing his masterpiece, Melville was probably influenced by his neighbor, famous novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne.

But Melville's novels had no success during his lifetime. During his later life, Melville worked for 19 years as a customs inspector in New York. His literary reputation was made only after a re-evaluation of his novels around 1920.

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was born in 1899 near Chicago. His father was a doctor who taught him to hunt and fish. After high school, he was wounded while serving in World War I as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in Italy. He wrote about the effects of war, bullfighting and big game hunting, and particularly how one faced up to danger and the threat of death. His novels are often about death and the meaningless destruction of life, with heroes who are wounded and solitary.

His major works are the novels The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea, and a volume of short stories, In Our Time. Later he wrote another novel To Have and Have Not, along with the short stories Winner Take Nothing and some nonfiction. His writing style, spare, understated, direct, and with a distinct voice, influenced writers and shaped American literature.

Hemingway lived life to the fullest, taking part in the Spanish Civil War, World War II and other wars as a combatant and sometimes a reporter. He was famous as a hard-drinking, hard-fighting celebrity author, fond of bullfights and prize-fighting. In 1961, he used a gun to take his own life, as his father had also done.

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison writes about time, history, and life internalized. She received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1993. Her themes and style emerge from the stories and insight of her African American heritage. She writes with poetic eloquence of black experiences, suffering and tragedy, racial identity and folklore. Her plots also include the supernatural, ghosts and dreams.

Morrison was born as Chloe Anthony Wofford, in the steel town of Lorain, Ohio, to parents who came from coal miners, sharecroppers and a shipyard welder. Morrison received a Bachelor's degree from Howard University and a Master's degree from Cornell. After her divorce, she raised her two children as a single mother. She taught at Howard University and was a book editor at Random House for seventeen years.

Her early novels include The Bluest Eye and Sula. Her next book, Song of Solomon, brought her awards and recognition. Beloved is probably her most important novel to date, the story of a slave mother who kills her daughter to save her from a life of slavery. Jazz, Tar Baby, Paradise, and Love are recent novels about black identity and the African-American experience. Toni Morrison continues to write.

I hope life brings you much success.
I wish you a very happy day.

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