For that nineteenth-century Anglo-American practitioner, Henry James, the novel was a loose and baggy monster. This genre, literally the new inheritor of the romance tradition and the cultural consequence of, among other things, the rise of a middle class, has such an extraordinary breadth of forms and formats that definition necessarily gives way to description. Customary designations of the novel may involve length, linguistic tradition, regional or national identification, established historical epoch or period, experimental correlation with developments in other disciplines or spheres, or close association with cultural movements—often those considered radical, in the mathematical sense of that word. Many of these categories of description have particular application to the American novel as one constituent element of a national literary tradition that Marius Bewley labeled “The Eccentric Design: Form in the Classic American Novel” (1959, italics added).

One of the earliest written prototypes of the American novel was a New Republic-era experiment by the nation’s pioneering professional novelist, Charles Brockden Brown. In Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798), Brown introduced themes which have resonated for two centuries: a reading of the then “untamed,” unfamiliar American landscape as Gothic wilderness; the preoccupation with madness, guilt and the nightmarish; a fascination with murder and suffering as acts of divine retribution; and an inexplicable alliance with the preternatural. From that 1798 narrative, one can easily trace a trajectory from Edgar Allen Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables (1851) to Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood (1952).

Much of American literature has been a Bildungsroman, or novel of education, both in the literal journeys of individual characters and the nation’s own symbolic coming of age. A very significant component of that journey from innocence to experience has been the encounter with multiple landscapes of ever-changing national borders. In his five novels known as the LeatherStocking Tales (1823–41), James Fenimore Cooper narrated the exploits of Natty Bumpo and the Native chief, Chingachgook, in the confines of the allegedly “civilized” world and the philosophical textbook of the frontier. Such concerns would return a generation later in the works of American transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau, while the journey to experience underpins Mark Twain’s picaresque Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), considered by many the pre-eminent American novel. For some, the frontier/wilderness was a mythic space in which one’s mettle was tested and one’s character honed by the struggle for survival. For Herman Melville, that frontier was an ocean expanse where Captain Ahab in Moby Dick (1851) battled for dominion against Job’s Leviathan. For Tomas Rivera, however, the natural world was the concrete terrain in which the migrant workers of…y no se lo trago la tierra/And the Earth Did Not Devour Him (1971) interwove their achronological and elusive impressions with the recurrent cycles of the farmworker’s growing seasons. For John Steinbeck, writing about the forced emigrations of Midwestern farmers in the Depression era (The Grapes of Wrath, 1939), nature was an equal partner in an archetypal story about survival against the odds.

In an entirely different landscape—the sophisticated world of the European salon— Henry James described the search for an American identity and a home. James, himself an American expatriate, painstakingly chronicled that same quest in such novels as The American (1877) and The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Incisive critiques of American manners also found elegantly nuanced expression in the novels of Edith Wharton, particularly in The Age of Innocence (1920).

Whether sketching out sumptuously appointed drawing rooms or virgin prairies, American writers often discovered a wilderness of interior exile. The oeuvres of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald contributed significant portraits to such a gallery Nella Larsen and James Weldon Johnson captured the loneliness of racial identity confusion in Passing (1929) and Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912). In The Surrounded (1936) and House Made of Dawn (1968), D’Arcy McNickle and N. Scott Momaday described painful attempts to reconcile twinned Native and American cultures which often seemed and functioned as antagonistic or foreign to each other. Gish Jen’s Typical American (1991) used humor to talk about the problematic cost of Asian American forms of apparently successful identity negotiation, while Bharati Mukherjee’s fiction asked uncompromising questions about becoming American. The complex choreography of sexual identity also offered a “queered” reading of the American consciousness in such works as Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood (1936) and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956).

Narratives by voluntary as well as involuntary immigrants simultaneously explored the border crossings from birth to physical as well as legal and social adulthood in a new order. Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers (1925) pursued the psychological clash between a father’s old vistas and a daughter’s new world ideals in a narrative about Yiddish cultural transplantation. A consistent and sardonic critique of the nation’s repressive infantilization of boys demanding recognition of their full adult status appeared in Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (1952).

Intermingling both the pain and the beauty of life in the American crucible, the sighted legatees of Ellison pierced the veil intended to disregard the humanity of the other in such lyrical prose poems as Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1984). Sometimes this demythologizing project involved a compelling, incisive and genderforegrounded interrogation of the constraints on women’s imaginative, fiscal, intellectual and psychosexual independence that surfaced in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900). Novelists such as Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, Gloria Naylor and Maxine Hong Kingston created new dynastic trinities of grandmothers, mothers and daughters in Sula (1974) and Song of Solomon (1977), The Joy Luck Club (1989), Mama Day (1988) and The Woman Warrior (1976).

American narrative experimentalists—Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, William S. Burroughs, William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, Donald Barthelme, Toni Cade Bambara, Kurt Vonnegut, Ismael Reed, Leslie Marmon Silko, Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison and others—often made use of the conflation of genres or the construction of fabulation to confront simultaneously the future, the inherited and the invented past. Hence, Louise Erdrich’s trilogy traces almost a century of recollections about family stories; for those whose histories have been erased, distorted or discounted, fiction-as-historiography has become a compelling genre all of its own.

Rememory and the haunting of buried secrets permeate such texts which make whitewater of streams-of-consciousness. Other writers like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Upton Sinclair used fiction as a site of testimony where one could make a public and prophetic record of that which demanded documentation.

From the preoccupation with the sighting of whales to the haunting power of wraiths and the remembered, American novels have served as a moveable feast.