America is too large for one story, this is why the myth of The Great American Novel is not unlike the concept of a fountain of youth. But America can be defined, at least for the armchair traveler, through the distinct notions of its different regions. In this guide, we're looking at the open country of the West, the strange social world of the South, and the restless machinery of New York.
01 · Texas, USA · Montana, USALonesome Dove
Larry McMurtry
McMurtry takes the great American myth of the frontier and emphasizes the distance, danger and loneliness of a wild country coming into itself. Two aging Texas Rangers leave the little border settlement of Lonesome Dove and drive a great herd of cattle north toward Montana, crossing a country that still seems almost impossibly large.
The landscape is forever changing around them. Towns appear and disappear, rivers hamper the journey, weather can kill, and the promise of the untouched country they seek always seems to lie a little farther ahead. But Lonesome Dove is less interested in heroic conquest than in the people drawn into the journey. Cowboys, settlers, outlaws and drifters are carried west by ambition, boredom, memory or the simple idea that the grass might indeed be greener on the other side.
Few novels convey so well the physical scale that shaped the American imagination. The West here is both a real landscape and an idea people keep chasing.
Take a question with youHow much of the American idea of freedom depends on having somewhere else to go?
02 · Savannah · Georgia, USAMidnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
John Berendt
A true story that reads like a novel. The city of Savannah does not reveal itself all at once. Berendt arrives as an outsider and bit by bit enters a world of shaded squares, old houses, private clubs, gossip, eccentricity and carefully observed social rules. What begins as fascination with a beautiful Southern city eventually becomes a murder mystery and the trials that follow it.
Though the events are factual, Savannah is so full of improbable characters that it often reads like fiction. Old money lives beside theatrical outsiders. Respectability coexists with scandal. History is present everywhere; it survives in houses, manners, loyalties and the unspoken knowledge of who belongs where.
Berendt's great achievement is not simply documenting a famous case. He makes the reader understand why Savannah could produce this particular cast of people, and why they could hardly belong anywhere else.
Take a question with youHow much can you learn about a place from the rules its people never have to explain?
03 · New York CityThe Bonfire of the Vanities
Tom Wolfe
By the 1980s, the great American frontier has moved to Wall Street. It's just where the money ended up.
Sherman McCoy is a bond trader living at the summit of New York's financial world when a wrong turn into the Bronx begins to unravel his life. From there Wolfe opens almost every door he can find. Trading floors, luxury apartments, courtrooms, newsrooms, political offices and the streets of the Bronx all become parts of the same enormous system.
This is New York thrown into high contrast. Money meets resentment, ambition becomes public spectacle, and every institution seems to have its own appetite. Wolfe moves between social worlds that occupy the same city while barely understanding one another.
The novel belongs unmistakably to the excesses of the 1980s, but its New York remains recognizable: competitive, theatrical, status-conscious and endlessly capable of turning another person's disaster into opportunity.
Take a question with youIn a city built on ambition, can success define itself?
