'Beloved' Tops Peers' List of Top Novels
Writer Toni Morrison, photographed in 2005. Pascal Guyot/AFP/Getty Images hide caption
Writer Toni Morrison, photographed in 2005.
Pascal Guyot/AFP/Getty ImagesToni Morrison's 1987 work Beloved is the best American novel of the past quarter-century. That's according to a vote of writers and critics who were invited to weigh in with their choices by The New York Times Book Review.
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The 124 literary lights who responded to the Times invitation gave multiple mentions to five Philip Roth novels -- especially American Pastoral. Cormac McCarthy has four books on the list: Blood Meridian plus his Border Trilogy. John Updike also has four: each of the novels in his Rabbit Angstrom series, which began with 1960's Rabbit, Run, but stretches into the 1990s.
Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus discusses the list... and the process... with Debbie Elliott.
Underworld
Rabbit Angstrom
Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich, & Rabbit at Rest
American Pastoral
The 'New York Times' List
The New York Times asks authors to weigh in on the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years.
WINNER
Beloved
Toni Morrison
RUNNERS-UP:
Underworld
Don DeLillo
Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy
Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels
John Updike
Rabbit at Rest
Rabbit Is Rich
Rabbit Redux
Rabbit, Run
American Pastoral
Philip Roth
ALSO RECEIVING MULTIPLE VOTES
A Confederacy of Dunces
John Kennedy Toole
Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson
Winter's Tale
Mark Helprin
White Noise
Don DeLillo
The Counterlife
Philip Roth
Libra
Don DeLillo
Where I'm Calling From
Raymond Carver
The Things They Carried
Tim O'Brien
Mating
Norman Rush
Jesus' Son
Denis Johnson
Operation Shylock
Philip Roth
Independence Day
Richard Ford
Sabbath's Theater
Philip Roth
Border Trilogy
Cormac McCarthy
'Cities of the Plain'
'The Crossing'
'All the Pretty Horses'
The Human Stain
Philip Roth
The Known World
Edward P. Jones
The Plot Against America
Philip Roth