America is too big for the Great American Novel

our Twitter (X) feedView our Youtube channelView our Instagram feedView our Substack feedView our Spotify feed A map is a text in its own right, and like a Pynchon novel, this one can be read in a multitude of ways. History and SocietyStorytellingClassic LiteratureLiterary CriticismNovels Map fans and book lovers: Now that’s a Venn diagram with a big overlap. When you’re reading a map, in your head you’re imagining a narrative to go along with it,” Ben Gibson says.

Big Think’s design director, Ben is also the co-founder of Pop Chart, where he gets to produce in poster format all the things that would otherwise keep bouncing around in his head. Like this incredible map about books. Pinning more than 400 novels across the U.S. landscape, this _Literary Map of the United States_ is a work of substance, a _magnum opus_ — not just because it cost Ben many months and several sleepless nights to conceive, but because it is a text in its own right, one that, like a Pynchon novel, can be read in a multitude of ways.

In a previous article, I examined the “imaginative geography” encoded in the map: how literature tied to a specific location (real or fictitious) can capture our imaginations and, in doing so, transform those places. Like how Stephen King’s hair-raising tales have seeped into real-life Maine or how Cannery Row has come to forever echo John Steinbeck’s 1945 novel. This time, I’ve asked Ben to accompany me on a different kind of expedition in search of the Great American Novel.

I did so knowing full well it would prove a wild goose chase — _the_ Great American Novel does not exist. It’s a mirage we’ve been chasing since 1868, when the novelist and Civil War veteran John William De Forest coined the phrase in an eponymous essay. De Forest argued that the U.S. was in need of a literary work that would “paint the American soul” on a tableau large enough to encompass the entire nation.

Humbly refusing to offer one of his own works for consideration, he concluded that the Great American Novel had yet to be written. In the decades since, the quest for the GAN — a time-saving abbreviation popularized by Henry James — served as a proxy for a much larger question: _What is America, and who gets to define it_? Plenty of attempts have been made to identify, or even write, the GAN.

In the latter category, the two Sinclairs come to mind: _The Jungle_ (1906) by Upton Sinclair and _Babbitt_ (1922) by Sinclair Lewis. But the search devolved into something of a literary in-joke. In 1973, Philip Roth satirized the quest with a book simply called _The Great American Novel_ — ironically one of his minor works.