What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?



"What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?" is an informal opinion poll conducted in 2006 by the New York Times Book Review (NYTBR) to determine "the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years." Eligible works were those written by an American author and published during the quarter-century period from 1980 through 2005. The poll was conducted by NYTBR editor Sam Tanenhaus, who sent letters to literary figures requesting their participation and received 124 responses. The results were published on May 21, 2006, in the Sunday edition of the New York Times. An essay by A. O. Scott, titled "In Search of the Best", reflected on the results and the premise of the "Great American Novel".

Toni Morrison's 1987 novel Beloved received the most votes, a result that had been anticipated by Tanenhaus, Scott, and several poll participants. The runners-up were the novels Underworld (1997) by Don DeLillo; a tie for third place between Blood Meridian (1985) by Cormac McCarthy and Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy (1995) by John Updike; and American Pastoral (1997) by Philip Roth. The full list featured another 17 works that garnered at least two votes; some books with only one vote were later identified in other sources. Works by Roth received more total votes than those by any other author.

The poll spurred vigorous debate and a wide range of commentary on the status of an American literary canon. Critics of the poll found its results to be unrepresentative of the breadth of contemporary American literature, noting apparent biases against—for example—women's writing, regionalist literature, or genre fiction. Taking inspiration from the exercise, The Observer conducted its own poll for the best novel published during the same timespan by a writer from Britain, Ireland, or the Commonwealth, with J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999) emerging as the winner.

Results
In early 2006, Tanenhaus sent a letter "to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages" requesting participating in the poll. Participants were invited to submit their single choice for the best work of American fiction from 1980 to 2005; submissions with more than one selection or ranked lists were not accepted. The NYTBR offered poll respondents "confidentiality, though not anonymity", in that it would publish the names of those who participated in the poll while maintaining the secrecy of ballots.

The poll results were announced on May 18, 2006, ahead of the BookExpo America trade fair in Washington, D.C., before appearing in print on May 21. That week's edition of the NYTBR was exclusively devoted to fiction works, and the magazine's cover illustration features the cover art of 22 books from the poll results. The published results included the winner, four runners-up, and 17 works of literature that received at least two votes. Beloved by Toni Morrison received the most votes. The list as published did not reveal who voted for any given work, nor did it provide the number of votes received by a given work. However, Scott's accompanying essay provided the tallies of votes received by the top five works, as well as noting that works by Philip Roth had received more total votes than those by any other author, with 21 votes overall spread across seven novels (six of which received multiple votes).

After the poll results were published, the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) contacted poll respondents and were able to identify some works receiving a single vote. The list below includes the results published in the NYTBR plus any works known to have received only a single vote.

Vote breakdown of top five works and others

Authorship of works with multiple votes

Authorship by gender of works with multiple votes

Participants
The names of 124 poll respondents were printed in the NYTBR. Although the NYTBR did not reveal any voter's selection, several respondents chose to publicly disclose the title of the work for which they cast their vote after the list was published. If known, a participant's poll response is provided below in a footnote.


 * Kurt Andersen
 * Roger Angell
 * A. Manette Ansay
 * James Atlas
 * Russell Banks
 * John Banville
 * Julian Barnes
 * Andrea Barrett
 * Rick Bass
 * Ann Beattie
 * Madison Smartt Bell
 * Aimee Bender
 * Paul Berman
 * Sven Birkerts
 * Harold Bloom
 * Bill Buford
 * Ethan Canin
 * Philip Caputo
 * Michael Chabon
 * Susan Choi
 * Mark Costello
 * Michael Cunningham
 * Edwidge Danticat
 * Don DeLillo
 * Pete Dexter
 * Junot Diaz
 * Morris Dickstein
 * Andre Dubus III
 * Tony Earley
 * Richard Eder
 * Jennifer Egan
 * Dave Eggers
 * Lucy Ellmann
 * Nathan Englander
 * Louise Erdrich
 * Anne Fadiman
 * Henry Finder
 * Jonathan Safran Foer
 * Paula Fox
 * Nell Freudenberger
 * Carlos Fuentes
 * David Gates
 * Henry Louis Gates Jr.
 * Julia Glass
 * Nadine Gordimer
 * Mary Gordon
 * Robert Gottlieb
 * Philip Gourevitch
 * Elizabeth Graver
 * Andrew Sean Greer
 * Allan Gurganus
 * Jim Harrison
 * Kathryn Harrison
 * Alice Hoffman
 * A. M. Homes
 * Maureen Howard
 * John Irving
 * Ha Jin
 * Thom Jones
 * Heidi Julavits
 * Ward Just
 * Mary Karr
 * William Kennedy
 * Frank Kermode
 * Stephen King
 * Maxine Hong Kingston
 * Walter Kirn
 * Benjamin Kunkel
 * David Leavitt
 * Chang-Rae Lee
 * Brad Leithauser
 * Frank Lentricchia
 * John Leonard
 * Jonathan Lethem
 * Alan Lightman
 * David Lodge
 * Ralph Lombreglia
 * Phillip Lopate
 * Janet Malcolm
 * Thomas Mallon
 * Ben Marcus
 * Peter Matthiessen
 * Ian McEwan
 * David Means
 * Daphne Merkin
 * Stephen Metcalf
 * Rick Moody
 * Lorrie Moore
 * Geoffrey O'Brien
 * Chris Offutt
 * Stewart O'Nan
 * David Orr
 * Cynthia Ozick
 * Ann Patchett
 * Tom Perrotta
 * Richard Gid Powers
 * William Pritchard
 * Francine Prose
 * Terrence Rafferty
 * Marilynne Robinson
 * Roxana Robinson
 * Norman Rush
 * Richard Russo
 * George Saunders
 * Liesl Schillinger
 * Joanna Scott
 * Jim Shepard
 * Karen Shepard
 * David Shields
 * Gary Shteyngart
 * Lee Siegel
 * Curtis Sittenfeld
 * Jane Smiley
 * Wole Soyinka
 * Scott Spencer
 * William Styron
 * Studs Terkel
 * Deborah Treisman
 * Anne Tyler
 * Mario Vargas Llosa
 * William T. Vollmann
 * Edmund White
 * Tom Wolfe
 * Tobias Wolff

The following people were among those who had been invited to participate in the poll, but ultimately declined to respond:
 * Laura Miller
 * Meghan O'Rourke

Response
The eventual victory of Beloved did not come as a shock to Times staffers who were involved with the project. "It's a very controversial book and a controversial choice," Tanenhaus said in an interview with Book TV, "although not altogether surprising. And in fact, we heard from a few voters who predicted Beloved would win—even as they cast votes for other books." In his essay accompanying the poll, titled "In Search of the Best", A. O. Scott wrote, "[t]he results—in some respects quite surprising, in others not at all—provide a rich, if partial and unscientific, picture of the state of American literature, a kind of composite self-portrait as interesting perhaps for its blind spots and distortions as for its details." Of the poll winner, Beloved, Scott said:

"Any other outcome would have been startling, since Morrison's novel has inserted itself into the American canon more completely than any of its potential rivals. With remarkable speed, Beloved has, less than 20 years after its publication, become a staple of the college literary curriculum, which is to say a classic. This triumph is commensurate with its ambition, since it was Morrison's intention in writing it precisely to expand the range of classic American literature, to enter, as a living black woman, the company of dead white males like Faulkner, Melville, Hawthorne and Twain."

A year after the poll's publication, Lawrence Buell remarked that it had "occasioned an amazing amount of comment" on the topic of the Great American Novel. Sara Nelson, then editor-in-chief of Publishers Weekly, wrote of the poll: "There's no doubt about it: I envy Tanenhaus this publicity—and perhaps advertising-generating vehicle, even if he does say that the winning publishers have not been alerted in advance, à la Oprah, and therefore are unlikely to buy extra ads in the issue. Cash investment or no, to be named the New York Times Book Review's best fiction of the last 25 years has to be a brand-builder for both the winner and its bestower." The poll has been cited as a prominent example of the influence of the media on the construction of literary canons, alongside other institutional influences such as academia, governmental agencies, nonprofit organizations, libraries, and publishing companies.

On May 22, 2006, the public radio show Open Source, hosted by Christopher Lydon, invited literary critics James Wood, Mark Greif, Ruth Franklin, and Dennis Loy Johnson to discuss and analyze the poll results. The 2010 conference of the American Literature Association (ALA) hosted a panel discussion on the poll results, with one panelist representing the literary society of each of the top five authors in the poll as follows: Marni Gauthier (of the DeLillo Society), Steven Frye (of the McCarthy Society), Yvonne Atkinson (of the Morrison Society), David Brauner (of the Roth Society), and Marshall Boswell (of the Updike Society).

Taking inspiration from the NYTBR poll, British newspaper The Observer conducted its own poll of 150 "literary luminaries" seeking their choice of the "best British, Irish or Commonwealth novel" published between 1980 and 2005. Disgrace, the 1999 novel by South African–Australian author J. M. Coetzee, received the most votes in The Observer's poll. Comparing Disgrace and Beloved in an article for the Journal of Narrative Theory, Molly Abel Travis wrote: "What these two novels have in common, besides being profound and beautifully written narratives by Nobel laureates, is that they confront historical traumas and foreground the contested relationship between empathy and ethics through narrative distancing."

Criticism and analysis
Laura Miller declined to participate in the poll, citing her dislike for the trend of hierarchically ranking "classic books". In a piece for Salon.com, Miller wrote:

"I've always disliked the 'greatness sweepstakes' view of literature. Every conversation I've ever witnessed about which works or writers are 'truly great' has smacked of philistinism ... Ultimately, novels are so diverse that once they attain a certain level of quality, they really can't be meaningfully ranked against one another. Pride and Prejudice and Crime and Punishment are both excellent, but very different, books, and the idea that we can decide which is better—or 'greater'—is fundamentally absurd. ... I realize that people—or some people—will always feel profoundly uncomfortable with the idea that some fields of excellence can't be as minutely broken down as the NCAA rankings. But get used to it."

Most critiques of the poll addressed its perceived failures to represent the full diversity of American fiction, based on criteria such as authorial identity, literary genre, or geographic origin. Lev Grossman of Time magazine called the poll results "aggressively boring" and said "it's a very staid, predictable, old, white (except for Morrison and Jones), and male (except for Morrison and Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping) bunch. No surprise extra-canonical incursions. (No William Gibson? No Watchmen?)" Poet and critic Ron Silliman criticized the list for its narrow selection of authors, and particularly its gender inequality, with only two works written by women receiving more than one vote. Silliman asked, "Do we really think that more than one fourth of all the important novels over the past quarter century were written by one man? If so, do we honestly think they were written by Philip Roth? I'd poke my eyes out before I'd live on that planet." Silliman suggested that Tanenhaus and the poll respondents "should both get out more, venturing further north than Connecticut, further west than Riverside Drive, further south than Gramercy Park. It wouldn't hurt to meet women." Susan Straight lodged a similar complaint in the Los Angeles Times, in which she criticized the poll's evident bias toward authors from the East Coast, particularly New York, to the detriment of writers from the Western United States and the geographically diverse traditions of American literary regionalism.

The victory of Beloved attracted criticism from British journalist Harry Mount in an article for The Daily Telegraph quoting two pundits, who judged the novel to be undeserving of such acclaim on the merits and accused the respondents of politicizing the poll. Melik Kaylan, then a journalist for The Wall Street Journal, said he was "flabbergasted" at the number-one ranking of Beloved and said it "shows a political process at work, both in terms of who writers feel they ought to vote for because of political correctness, but also who they wouldn't want voted above them." Conservative commentator Roger Kimball called Morrison "the perfect New York Times poster girl ... Someone whose opinions and skin colour immunise her from criticism and whose cliché-riddled, melodramatic prose impart a hungry urgency to the tired Left-liberal yearnings of the paper's cultural commissars. Pathetic, but wholly typical." Following Morrison's death in 2019, Tessa Roynon of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation referenced Mount's article as a "depressingly predictable" instance of backlash to Morrison's fiction.

Other assessments of the poll from a political lens were less negative. Benjamin Nugent observed that the overwhelming majority of authors represented in the poll were broadly aligned with political liberalism: Mark Helprin stood as the only outspoken conservative to make the list (alongside Cormac McCarthy, whose political attitudes were more closely guarded and ambiguous). However, Nugent's observation was not a criticism per se, given that the ideological composition of the poll reflected the conspicuous scarcity of openly conservative authors within the American literary fiction community overall. Bryan M. Santin used the poll to compare the critical fortunes of Beloved and another 1987 novel, Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities; the former had generally been celebrated by liberals, while the latter was more often championed by conservatives. For Santin, the Times poll—which did not register a single vote for Bonfire—served as evidence "that Beloved had become a canonical text and Bonfire had not," thwarting conservative predictions that the prestige of Wolfe's book would endure in the long term.

Reactions from authors named in the poll results
John Updike encountered the poll results shortly after their announcement at BookExpo America, where he was promoting his latest novel, Terrorist. His reaction to the list was observed in real time by Patti Thorn of Rocky Mountain News, who reported he "breathed a sigh of relief" when he saw his name on the list at third place. "Sometime later," he told Thorn, "you wonder why these other books came first." He continued, "I feel awkward about any award. [These polls turn] literature into a kind of track meet, where you can judge first, second and third ... I wonder if the discontent it breeds doesn't offset the joy of the winners."

Michael Cunningham—a participant in the poll himself, whose own novel The Hours also received a single vote from a fellow author—praised the poll's top five novels for capturing a sense of the zeitgeist when taken as an aggregate whole. Cunningham then emphasized the difference between the criteria to name a greatest book of its time versus the personal criteria to name a favorite book. For example, he said he regarded Nicholson Baker's 1988 novel The Mezzanine as not just a personal favorite, but a book he would recommend to an English-literate extraterrestrial lifeform to "convey a sense of American life right now"; nevertheless, he deemed The Mezzanine too unusual, too experimental, and too radical in its modernist style to qualify, in his view, as a definitive "best" book representing its era.