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© 2025 Scott Yarbrough and Kirk Curnutt
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Few literary terms are more hotly debated, discounted, or derided than the "Great American Novel." But while critics routinely dismiss the phrase as at best hype and as at worst exclusionary, the belief that a national literature commensurate with both the scope and the contradictions of being American persists. In this podcast Scott Yarbrough and Kirk Curnutt examine totemic works such as Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and Toni Morrison's Beloved that have been labeled GANs, exploring their themes, forms, and reception histories, asking why, when, and how they entered the literary canon. Readers beware: there be spoilers here, and other hijinks ensue...
36 Episodes
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Send us a text It’s 1976. A woman named Reno in leather motorcycle gear descends upon the Bonneville Salt Flats on a state of the art Moto Valera motorcycle. Is speed her goal? Is it the land art created by her tracks across the flats? Is her rolling crash meant to serve as a metaphor for the next two year of her life? In this episode your intrepid hosts return to an era and setting that at least one of them never particularly wanted to visit: the art scene of New York in th...
Send us a text In this, our 34th episode of the Great American Novel podcast, the hosts tackle Colson Whitehead’s intriguing, interesting, and in some surprising ways challenging award-winning 2016 novel, The Underground Railroad. This novel works with the premise that the antebellum freedom trail to the north for escaped slaves was not a series of safe houses and hiding spaces with the occasional guide, but instead an actual underground railway. How can something be in some plays compl...
Send us a text In Episode 32 of the Great American Novel podcast, we slip through time with Billy Pilgrim as we shuffle between the character’s experiences as a prisoner of war and first hand witness to the Dresden firebombing in World War II and then trip the light fantastic to the far flung planet Tralfamadore. Or…do we? Yes, this episode has your intrepid explorers hiding in Kurt Vonnegut’s masterful 1969 post-modern novel SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE. We ponder the author’s central que...
Send us a text Few novels have had the cultural impact of Jack Kerouac's speed-fueled mad dash across the continent in search of kicks as On the Road. One doubts the 1960s ever would have happened had Kerouac's Beat Generation coterie not inspired a mass embrace (and mockery) of bohemian jazz culture rebelling against the conformity of Eisenhower-era conservatism and Atomic Age anxieties. This episodes explores the background of Kerouac's famous experiment in spontaneous prose, noting its aff...
Send us a text A couple of weeks ago—after this episode was recorded, but before it was edited and posted—the famous author Stephen King posted online his top ten novels of all time—and among them was Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools. This 1962 book was the first novel by Porter, a great American writer who had mostly worked in the short story genre and as a journalist and editor. The novel tells of a German passenger liner traveling from Mexico to different ports of Europe i...
Send us a text The Red Badge of Courage (1895) is a singularly unique war novel: whereas most depictions of the horrors of combat and the trauma of the battlefield are naturalistic, attempting to inflict upon the reader the violence the prose describes and terrifying us with the prospect that humans do not rise to heroic occasions, Stephen Crane's novel is impressionistic, blurring detail at the edges and giving scattershot glimpses of confusion, guilt, regret, and even envy and resentment. T...
Send us a text The Great American Novel Podcast episode 28 considers JD Salinger’s landmark 1951 classic, The Catcher in the Rye. Your hosts discuss Salinger’s famous reclusiveness, the book’s continuing appeal, and its influence on both the genre of so-called “young adult literature” and post-breakdown lit. We examine the novel in its role of the creation of the American teenager as a marketing sector and artistic project. We don’t dodge the thorny issues of Salinger’s life...
Send us a text The 26th episode of the Great American Novel Podcast delves into Carson McCullers’ 1940 debut novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Published when the author was only 23, the novel tells the tale of a variety of misfits who don’t seem to belong in their small milltown in depression-era, 1930s Georgia. Tackling race, disability, sexuality, classism, socialism, the novel catapulted McCullers to fame. It’s been an Oprah book and it’s been adapted to film. The Moder...
Send us a text Great American Novel Podcast 24 considers Joan Didion’s 1970 novel Play It as It Lays, which shut the door on the 60s and sped down the freeway into the 70s, eyes on the rearview mirror all the while. In a wide-ranging discussion which touches not only upon Didion and her screenwriter husband but also John Wayne, Ernest Hemingway, the Manson cult, the Mamas and the Papas and Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, we drive down the interstate with Didion and her Corvette as we con...
Send us a text In Great American Novel Podcast Episode 20, your fearless (or is it feckless) hosts find themselves in the damp swamps and thick scrublands of north central Florida in the post-Reconstruction era as we struggle to survive with the settlers of the brush country in Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' Pulitzer Prize winning 1938 novel, The Yearling. We discuss how this Maryland native came to work with the editor of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe, and how she came to love the Flori...
Send us a text Season three kicks off with a fiftieth anniversary celebration of Thomas Pynchon's postmodernist whirl-a-gig Gravity's Rainbow. Originally published on February 28, 1973, this encyclopedic inquiry into the systematicity of existence, power, and technology was just this week described by Esquire as "one of the weirdest, richest, most frustrating, inscrutable, brilliant, gorgeous, exhilarating, inexplicable, disgusting, hilarious, remarkable, and goddamn frustrating again novels ...
Send us a text Only thirty years old this year, Ernest J. Gaines' A Lesson Before Dying (1993) is a powerful testament to social justice and to the search for individual dignity in an oppressive legal system. Set in the late 1940s in a small Louisiana community, the book tells the story of two men, one a convicted murderer on death's row (Jefferson) and the other his reluctant tutor (Grant) who is asked to teach the doomed man how to face death and injustice with a sense of self-worth. A...
Send us a text In Great American Novel Podcast Episode 18, our final Season 2 episode, we plunge ourselves into New Orleans of the fin de siècle in Kate Chopin's 1899 novel The Awakening. Edna Pontellier wrestles with a life she never chose, beset by a bore of a husband, a flimsy excuse for a lover, and a patriarchal society which has tried to restrain her choices to almost nothing. One of the great early feminist novels, we discuss its slow but steady climb from obscurity to ubiquity. The Gr...
Send us a text The Great American Novel podcast is an ongoing discussion about the novels we hold up as significant achievements in our American literary culture. Additionally, we sometimes suggest novels who should break into the sometimes problematical canon and at other times we’ll suggest books which can be dropped from such lofty consideration. Your hosts are Kirk Curnutt and Scott Yarbrough, professors with little time and less sense who nonetheless enjoy a good book banter....
Send us a text The 14th episode is a ride into the evening redness in the west as your hosts consider one of the more notorious books on our short list: Cormac McCarthy’s epic subversive western, BLOOD MERIDIAN, or, The Evening Redness in the West. This 1985 tome of McCarthy’s has engaged constant discussion and speculation due to the high poetry of its language and the stark horror of its violence. Saddle up and touch your heels to your horse to hear our wide-ranging discussion o...
Send us a text The Great American Novel podcast is an ongoing discussion about the novels we hold up as significant achievements in our American literary culture. Additionally, we sometimes suggest novels who should break into the sometimes problematical canon and at other times we’ll suggest books which can be dropped from such lofty consideration. Your hosts are Kirk Curnutt and Scott Yarbrough, professors with little time and less sense who nonetheless enjoy a good book banter....
Send us a text Our eleventh episode explores the most recent novel on our list of celebrated Great American Novels, Marilynne Robinson's 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning exploration of Christian humanism, GILEAD. Set in a fictional small Iowa town in 1956, this deceptively lowkey narrative about a dying minister, John Ames, and the sudden reappearance of the town's prodigal son, Jack Boughton, raises intriguing questions about the intersection of the soul and society. Robinson is our most prominen...
Send us a text The Great American Novel podcast is an ongoing discussion about the novels we hold up as significant achievements in our American literary culture. Additionally, we sometimes suggest novels who should break into the sometimes problematical canon and at other times we’ll suggest books which can be dropped from such lofty consideration. Your hosts are Kirk Curnutt and Scott Yarbrough, professors with little time and less sense who nonetheless enjoy a good book banter....
Send us a text In this installment we look at another of the most iconic of GANs, Mark Twain's 1885 "bad boy" novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Written over an eight-year period, what began as a sequel to the mischievous "bad boy" book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) steepened into a caustic interrogation of racism in the United States. Twain's depiction of the relationship between the naive sprite Huck and the runaway slave Jim at once appeals to the American desire for harmon...
Send us a text In our seventh episode we explore a Great American Novel that's so ubiquitous it's almost hard to believe there was a time when the media wasn't full of contrast, random references to The Great Gatsby. The story of a mysterious millionaire who turns up on Long Island, throwing lavish parties and spinning fables as transparently invented as they are enthralling, captures something essential about the promise of America. We explore why the term used for that something---the Ameri...
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