A HEMINGWAY-ERA RELIC
Why You Shouldn’t Try To Write ‘The Great American Novel’
You won’t impress editors and agents with an outdated idea that doesn’t reflect modern publishing realities
Every so often, I’ll be interviewing a writer when he — and it almost always is a he — will say he’s working on “the Great American Novel.” I hope he can’t see me cringe.
Use that cliché today and you instantly date yourself with editors and agents you might like to impress, even if you intend your words ironically. You’ll come across as stuck in the days when Ernest Hemingway was stalking lions and hyenas in Kenya or Norman Mailer was carrying a rifle in the Philippines in World War II.
The idea of the Great American Novel took hold in the age of the quill pen. In 1868 the novelist John William DeForest suggested in an essay that the United States needed a new kind of literature to reflect “the American soul,” or its essential character. He called it “the Great American Novel.”
You can see why writers liked the idea. A nation shattered by the Civil War needed to soothe its wounded spirit. It must have appealed to the vanity of writers to think they could help.
