Claim OwnershipGreat American Novel
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© 2026 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...
44 Episodes
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Send us Fan Mail Willian Faulkner’s 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury is widely regarded as a modernist masterpiece. It is the novel which secured his reputation forever. With that stated, it’s also a notoriously difficult book for readers new to Faulkner to dig into. But, just in the nick of time (only 97 years or so after the book’s publication), your intrepid hosts are here to help steer you through this complex and amazing novel. The Sound and the Fury tells of th...
Send us Fan Mail Published in two parts in 1868 and 1869 (with the second half originally titled Good Wives), Louisa May Alcott's Little Women for decades defined the goals and aspirations of the young-adult novel: written as the realism movement took hold after the Civil War, it eschewed the sappy sentimentalism of Harriet Beecher Stowe and the preachiness of Horatio Alger, creating a portrait of female adolescence that felt strikingly aspirational until the modern era. While the b...
Send us Fan Mail Episode 42 of the Great American Novel Podcast considers Toni Morrison’s 1977 novel and National Book Critics’ Circle award winner Song of Solomon. Song of Solomon tells of the coming age of Macon “Milkman” Dead between the Second World War and before the passage of the Civil Right Act. Other unique and complex characters such as Pilate, his aunt, Hagar, his lover (and cousin), and Guitar, his friend and nemesis help round out a complicated and intriguing story about how a yo...
Send us Fan Mail F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night (1934) has always sparked great debate about whether it is a noble botch or a modernist classic because its non-chronological form, confounding character motivation, and intrusive narrative voice all seem so compellingly imperfect. In 1951 the literary critic Malcolm Cowley even published a "corrected" edition in which he reordered the novel so it unfolded in sequence---to no avail in critical estimantion. In this story of the talente...
Send us Fan Mail Episode 40 of the Great American Novel Podcasts discusses one of the great American novels of the Twentieth Century, one that is perhaps more significant and relevant now than it has been in quite some time. In this episode your feckless hosts discuss All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 Pulitzer Prize winning novel. Warren tells the story of Willie Stark, a country boy turned crusading attorney turned backroom deal-making, power-wielding governor ...
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