Searching for the Great American Novel The first question is: What is doing a spanish guy talking about the Great American Novel? Especially because I don't speak english properly and I didn't visit America for the first time until I was 25 years old. Yes, you're right. But you've to understand that the North American culture is probably the most expanded one around the world. And I've read a lot of books in my life trying to discover what is the authentic Great American Novel. What does it mean Great American Novel? That's the first problem: for most experts there isn't something like a definition. Anyway, we're going to try one: an ambitious plot that captures the true soul of the country and their citizens, a large tapestry that shows all the features of being american, maybe part of the history of the country, of his contradictions. This is weird because most of literary critics think you can find the first example in "Moby Dick" by Melville, a novel that it doesn´t happen in America. Why then they choose it? Maybe because you can find in it something about the real nature of the human being. It's almost an essay about the goals in life and how they can drive us to madness. The white whale -the authentic star of this story- is a pefect metaphor about us, about America, about the world. If we forward until the first decades of the 20th century we can find a new relevant author: John Dos Passos. I'm thinking of his trilogy about America and also in "Manhattan Transfer" (the first novel where the city of New York appeared like the main character of the book). His literature works like a Kaleidescope in which we can observe a slice of a lot of lifes boiling in their dreams, hopes and desires. In the forties, new names were appeared. Some examples: John Cheever or Yates. The first one preferred the short story, but if we read all these stories on a row we could see and ambitious teatrise about the human condition. A bit years later, Raymond Carver also used the tales to dissect our frustrations. Finally in the last 40 years, we can find a lot of postmodern authors. There're a popular names like Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon or Jeffrey Eugenides. The last one published "Middlesex" in 2002, a book what you're going to find about we're talking. It's a familiar story that starts in the Ancient Greece and arrives until the present, showing during the way what means to grow up and forming a familiy. Let me know what's your favorite American book.