20^TH CENTURY AMERICAN FICTION

Sehome High School Library

Date: 9/22/2005

F Anderson

Anderson, Sherwood, 1876-1941. Winesburg, Ohio. [New ed.]. New

York, : Viking Press, 1960 [1919]. A unified collection of

short stories about a young reporter George Willare, who is

in revolt about the barren narrowness of small town life in

the American Midwest.

F Baldwin

Baldwin, James, 1924-. If Beale Street could talk. New York, :

Dial Press, 1974. An elemental love story of great power:

about Tish, 19 and pregnant, and Fonny, 22 and innocently

jailed.

F Baldwin

Baldwin, James, 1924-. Go tell it on the mountain. New York :

Modern Library, 1995. A fourteen-year old boy discovers the

terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a

store-front Pentecostal church in Harlem on a Saturday in

March of 1935.

F Ball

Ball, John Dudley, 1911-. Johnny get your gun; : a novel,. [1st

ed.]. Boston, : Little, Brown, [1969]. Story of Johnny, a

9-year old boy with a gun, obsessed with the desire to

revenge the "murder" of his transistor radio, a crime

perpetrated by a schoolmate. Virgil Tibbs is the detective

in this story.

F Beatty

Beatty, John Louis, 1922-1975. Who comes to King's Mountain?

New York : Morrow, 1975. Living in the South Carolina hills

in 1780, a young Scottish boy, whose own family is divided

between Loyalist and rebel, must decide for himself which

side he will follow.

F Bellow

Bellow, Saul. Dangling man. New York, : The Vanguard press,

[1944]. Joseph gives up his job expecting to be inducted

into the army, but due to technicalities, he is left

dangling for almost a year.

F Bellow

Bellow, Saul. Herzog. New York, : Viking Press, [1964]. Moses

Herzog sees himself as a survivor of private disasters, but

also those of the age, and asks himself piercing questions.

F Bellow

Bellow, Saul. Seize the day, : with three short stories and a

one-act play. New York, : Viking Press, 1956. Tommy

Wilhelm, a city man, constantly feels the sky is coming down

on him. He seeks his greatest need; the reason of things.

F Bellow

Bellow, Saul. The Victim. New York : Vanguard Press, 1947. Asa

Leventhal held a position at a New York trade journal and

had become successful and secure, until his Gentile friend

accuses him of ruining him and his career.

F Bellow

Bellow, Saul. The dean's December : a novel. 1st Harper & Row

ed. New York : Harper & Row, c1982. Albert Corde, a

newspaperman turned academic, leaves the country to visit

his dying mother-in-law, and while he is gone from Chicago,

his magazine articles and involvement in a student murder

scandal place him in the middle of a raging controversy.

F Bellow

Bellow, Saul. The adventures of Augie March, : a novel. New

York, : Mod. Lib., 1949. Describes the life of Augie March,

a poor Chicago boy growing up during the Depression, and his

search for a career.

F Bellow

Bellow, Saul. Humboldt's gift. New York : Viking Press, 1975.

Two characters force Charlie to re-examine his life. One is

Humboldt, a poet he knew in the 1930's, the other is a

small-time gangster.

F Bellow

Bellow, Saul. Mr. Sammler's planet. New York, : Viking Press,

[1970]. A survivor of the death camps in World War II, Mr.

Sammler is attentive to everything and appalled by nothing,

in his study of New York life and the future of life.

F Bjorn

Bjorn, Thyra Ferre. Papa's wife. New York : Bantam, 1966,

c1955. A beautiful young Swedish girl captures the heart of

a reluctant bachelor minister by becoming his housemaid.

F Buck

Buck, Pearl S. (Pearl Sydenstricker), 1892-1973. Mandala. New

York, : John Day Co., [1970]. Prince Jagat has lost most of

his wealth and royal titles, and sets out with an American

girl to find out if his son is actually dead. A delicate

romance ensues.

F Buck

Buck, Pearl S. (Pearl Sydenstricker), 1892-1973. The three

daughters of Madame Liang; : a novel,. New York, : John Day

Co., [1969]. Madam Liang is the owner of the most exclusive

and fashionable restaurant in Shanghai. Her daughters, all

educated in America, show the conflict between old China and

the new.

F Buck

Buck, Pearl S. (Pearl Sydenstricker), 1892-1973. The Big wave.

New York, : J. Day Co., [1973, c1948]. His family and

village swept away by a tidal wave, Jiya learns to live with

the ever-present dangers from the sea and volcano.

F Buck

Buck, Pearl S. (Pearl Sydenstricker), 1892-1973. Imperial woman;

: a novel. New York, : J. Day Co., [c1956]. Tzu-hsi

receives an imperial summons to appear before the Empress of

China who has always been opposed to the western powers and

in favor of China's seclusion.

F Buck

Buck, Pearl S. (Pearl Sydenstricker), 1892-1973. The time is

noon; : a novel,. New York, : John Day Co., [1967, c1966].

Joan Richards returns to Middlehope after college to nurse

her mother, and discovers things about her family she

doesn't like.

F Cather

Cather, Willa, 1873-1947. O pioneers! Boston, New York, :

Houghton Mifflin company, 1913. When her father dies,

Alexandra takes over the care of her family and the

management of the farm, showing her energy and courage.

F Cather

Cather, Willa, 1873-1947. Obscure destinies. New York, :

Vintage Books, 1974,[1932]. Three stories of the West:

Neighbour Rosicky.--Old Mrs. Harris.--Two friends. Neighbor

Rosicky is a Bohemian immigrant whose hunger for the earth

drove him from New York to a Nebraska prairie farm. Old Mrs.

Harris is a fine old woman who tried to keep up the

traditions of her comfortable life in Tennessee when she was

transplanted to a Colorado town. Two Friends, two well-to-do

businessmen in a small Kansas town break up their long

friendship in a disagreement over politics.

F Cather

Cather, Willa, 1873-1947. Death comes for the archbishop ...

New York, : A. A. Knopf, 1927. The novel describes the

missionary efforts of the French bishop Jean latour and his

vicar, Father Joseph Vaillant, to establish a diocese in the

territory of New Mexico. The novel is based on the lives of

French clerics, Bish Jean Baptiste Lamy (1814-1888) and

Father Joseph Machebeuf. They prevail over all adversities

to build a cathedral in the wilderness.

F Cather

Cather, Willa, 1873-1947. Shadows on the rock. New York, : A.

A. Knopf, 1931. Cecile Auclair and her father Euclide watch

as thier old world traditions and values in Quebec are being

replaced by new ideas and men with less influence from

Europe. Takes place during the last days of the French

Canadian leader Frontenac (1697-1698).

F Cormier

Cormier, Robert. The chocolate war; : a novel. [New York] :

Pantheon Books, [1974]. A high school freshman discovers

the devastating consequences of refusing to join in the

school's annual fund raising drive and arousing the wrath of

the school bullies.

F Cormier

Cormier, Robert. After the first death. New York : Pantheon

Books, c1979. Events of the hijacking of a bus of children

by terrorists seeking the return of their homeland are

described from the perspectives of a hostage, a terrorist,

an Army general involved in the rescue operation, and his

son, chosen as the go-between.

F Cormier

Cormier, Robert. Beyond the chocolate war : a novel. 1st ed.

New York : Knopf : Distributed by Random House, c1985. Dark

deeds continue at Trinity High School, climaxing in a public

demonstration of one student's homemade guillotine. Sequel

to "The Chocolate War.".

F Cormier

Cormier, Robert. The bumblebee flies anyway. 1st ed. New York

: Pantheon Books, c1983. Sixteen-year-old Barney has only

fleeting memories about his past but, as a voluntary patient

at the institute for experimental medicine, he knows he is

different from the terminally ill patients surrounding him.

His involvement with the bitter, slowly dying, Mazzo brings

Barney hope, pain, and a moment of heroic glory.

F Cormier

Cormier, Robert. I am the cheese : a novel. [New York] :

Pantheon Books, c1977. A young boy desperately tries to

unlock his past yet knows he must hide those memories if he

is to remain alive.

F Craven

Craven, Margaret. Walk gently this good Earth. New York :

Putnam, c1977. Follows the lives of the four Westcott

children and their adopted brother from the 1930's to the

present, as they maintain their close family ties and

old-fashioned values while living on their vast Montana

ranch.

F Davis

Davis, Terry. Vision quest : a novel. New York : Viking Press,

1979. An eighteen-year-old wrestler, Louden Swain pursues

many interests, including a love affair, hiking in the

Cascades and reading American novels, as he strives to

achieve his quest for "vision.".

F DeLillo

DeLillo, Don. Libra. New York, N.Y., U.S.A. : Viking, 1988. A

fictional speculation of the events leading up to the

assassination of John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald.

F DeLillo

DeLillo, Don. White noise. New York : Penguin Books, 1986. The

Gladney's family life is disrupted and threatened when an

industrial accident sends a lethal cloud over their

community. Jack Gladney struggles with the ensuing

complications which include murder.

F Dexter

Dexter, Pete, 1943-. Paris Trout. 1st ed. New York : Random

House, c1988. A white man named Paris Trout murders a

fourteen-year-old black girl in a small Georgia town just

after World War II. He feels he has done absolutely nothing

wrong. The effects of this brutal killing on the small

southern town, its civility, manners, and social fabric is

the story of this book.

F Dexter

Dexter, Pete, 1943-. Brotherly love. New York : Random House,

1991. Peter, son of a powerful Philadelphia union boss who

had connections with the mob, was orphaned at the age of 8

and fell into a different world of bad blood and shifting

loyalties, a world where violence was everywhere and

inescapable.

F Dillard

Dillard, Annie. The Living. New York, NY : HarperCollins

Publishers, c1992. Historical novel of Bellingham,

Washington during the late 1800's and early part of the 20th

century.

F Doctorow

Doctorow, E. L., 1931-. Loon lake. 1st trade ed. New York :

Random House, c1979. During the Great Depression of the

thirties, Warren follows a private train to Loon Lake, the

hidden wilderness estate of one of the country's richest

men. There he studies conflicting values and demands, and

plunges into a life that he little expected.

F Doctorow

Doctorow, E. L., 1931-. World's fair. 1st ed. New York :

Random House, c1985. When the New York World's Fair comes

in 1939, Ed crosses over into a future of his own, in a time

when life was simpler.

F Doig

Doig, Ivan. The sea runners. 1st ed. New York : Atheneum,

1982. In 1853 four indentured servants escape from Russian

Alaska and make their way by canoe down the Pacific

Northwest coast toward Oregon.

F Doig

Doig, Ivan. English creek. 1st ed. New York : Atheneum, 1984.

Jick McCaskill and his family live in northern Montana,

where his father is a forest ranger and range rider. His

older brother at 18 is set on marriage to a town girl and

livelihood as a cowboy, which throws the family into

conflict.

F Dorris

Dorris, Michael. The window. 1st ed. New York : Hyperion

Books, c1997. When ten-year-old Rayona's Native American

mother enters a treatment facility, her estranged father, a

Black man, finally introduces her to his side of the family,

who are not at all what she expected.

F Dos Passos

Dos Passos, John, 1896-1970. U.S.A. Boston, : Houghton Mifflin,

1963 [1938]. The 42nd parallel.--Nineteen nineteen.--The

big money. Three novels of pre WWI and the boom era of the

Twenties.

F Dubus

Dubus, Andre, 1936-. Selected stories. 1st ed. Boston : D.R.

Godine, 1988. 23 stories by Andre Dubus show people who

come to accept pain as a fair price for pleasure, and to

view right and wrong as a matter of degree. He suggests that

their self-inflicted punishments are often worse than what a

just court, or a just God, would decree.

F Edmonds

Edmonds, Walter Dumaux, 1903-. The night raider and other

stories. Boston : Little, Brown, c1980. Perfection of

Orchard View.--Raging canal.--Charlie Phister's famous bee

shot.--The night raider. Four short stories set in New York

State during the early years of this century: Raging Canal

shows the dark, savage side of what life was often like for

the boys who worked on the Erie Canal. In Perfection of

Orchard View, a gentleman farmer has a truly funny

disagreement with his hired hand. Charlie is an example of

the brashness of youth and Night Raider is the story of a

wild animal who ventures too close to civilization.

F Edwards

Edwards, Louis. Ten seconds. St. Paul : Graywolf Press, 1991.

Darrell McDaniel relives the main periods in his life in

10-seconds of a 100 meter race. Darrell, a young

African-American man, attempts to ground his identity in the

south.

F Ellison

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible man. 2nd Vintage International ed.

New York : Vintage International, 1995. Tells the story of

a black man who goes through progressive states from

youthful affirmation in a small southern town, to total

rejection after a Harlem race riot. Stiving to be himself,

he finds that he must not only contend with the whites but

with the powerful members of his own race.

F Erdrich

Erdrich, Louise. Tracks : a novel. 1st ed. New York : Henry

Holt, c1988. Told in the alternating voices of a wise

Chippewa Indian leader, and a young, embittered mixed-blood

woman, the novel chronicles the drama of daily lives

overshadowed by the clash of cultures and mythologies.

F Faulkner

Faulkner, William, 1897-1962. Intruder in the dust. New York, :

Random House, [1948]. Lucas Beauchamp, a Negro who refuses

to accept a servileattitude, is accused, wrongfully, of

murdering a white man and is threatened by a lynch

mob.Sixteen-year-old Chick and his friends prove his

innocence and help capture the real murderer.

F Faulkner

Faulkner, William, 1897-1962. The sound and the fury. Modern,

1946 [1929]. A degenerate Southern family, the Compsons,

are described by Benjy, a 33-year-old idiot.

F Faulkner

Faulkner, William, 1897-1962. Big woods. New York, : Random

House, [1955]. The bear.--The old people.--A bear

hunt.--Race at morning. A collection of Faulkner's hunting

stories.

F Faulkner

Faulkner, William, 1897-1962. Light in August;. New York, :

Modern Library, [1950] [1932]. Joe Christmas, part black,

part white, has an affair with Joanna Burden, whom he kills,

and sets fire to her house. The enraged townspeople capture,

castrate and kill him.

F Faulkner

Faulkner, William, 1897-1962. The reivers, : a reminiscence.

New York, : Random House, [1962]. On a summer day in 1905,

Lucius Priest age 11 is persuaded by Boon Hogganbeck to

"borrow" his grandfather's car and make a trip to Memphis.

Ned McCaslin, Negro, stows away and the three are off on a

heroic odyssey which ends at Miss Reba's bordello,

effectively destroying Lucius' innocence.

F Faulkner

Faulkner, William, 1897-1962. The sound and the fury. New York,

: Random House, [1946] [1929]. Three brothers of the

Compson family each tell their thoughts about their decaying

aristocratic family of Mississippi. The idiot Benjy, the

Harvard student Quentin and the petty-minded Jason each

expose the family problems and weaknesses.

F Faulkner

Faulkner, William, 1897-1962. Go down, Moses. New York, :

Modern Library, 1955, [1942]. Was.--The Fire and the

hearth.--Pantaloon in black.--The old people.--The

bear.--Delta Autumn.--Go down, Moses. A collection of short

stories set in Faulkner's mythical Yoknapatawpha County. The

stories are unified by a common theme of the rituals of

hunting.

F Faulkner

Faulkner, William, 1897-1962. Absalom, Absalom! New York, :

Random house, 1964 [1936]. Thomas Sutpen, son of a poor

white planter, attempts to be accepted as a Southern

aristocrat and founder of a wealthy family. Returning from

battle in the Civil War, he finds his plantation and dreams

in ruins.

F Faulkner

Faulkner, William, 1897-1962. The hamlet. [3d ed.]. New York,

: Random House, [1964], [1940]. Flem Snopes begins as a

clerk in a store in Yoknapatawpha County early in the 20th

century. Through usury, connivance and thrift he becomes

part-owner of the store and husband of his employer's

daughter. He later works his way up to vice president in a

bank, driving the president from town.

F Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald, F. Scott (Francis Scott), 1896-1940. The great

Gatsby. 1st Scribner Paperback Fiction ed. New York :

Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995. The tragic story of the

wealthy Jay Gatsby and his attempt to win back the love of

Daisy Buchanan.

F Fleischman

Fleischman, Paul. Mind's eye. 1st ed. New York : Holt, 1999.

A novel in play form in which sixteen-year-old Courtney,

paralyzed in an accident, learns about the power of the mind

from an elderly blind woman who takes Courtney on an

imaginary journey to Italy using some handwritten notes in a

1910 Baedeker's guidebook.

F Guthrie

Guthrie, A. B. (Alfred Bertram), 1901-. No second wind. Boston

: Houghton Mifflin, 1980. In the midst of the tension and

threatened violence of the conflict between ranchers and

strip-miners, the sheriff of a small town in Montana tries

to solve a baffling murder.

F He

Hemingway, Ernest, 1899-1961. For whom the bell tolls. 1st

Scribner trade pbk. ed. New York : Scribner, 2003. The

story of an American, Robert Jordan, and his adventures

during the Civil War in Spain with the anti-fascist

guerrillas in the mountains.

F Heller

Heller, Joseph. Catch-22 : a novel. New York : Simon &

Schuster, 1999. A bombardier, based in Italy during World

War II, repeatedly tries to avoid flying bombing missions

while his colonel tries to get him killed by demanding that

he fly more and more missions.

F Hemingway

Hemingway, Ernest, 1899-1961. To have and have not. New York, :

Scribner, 1937.

F Hersey

Hersey, John, 1914-. Under the eye of the storm. Knopf, 1967.

Tom Medlar and his three passengers aboard the Harmony (his

wife and a couple named Harnden) are swept out to sea in the

path of a hurricane.

F Hersey

Hersey, John, 1914-. A single pebble. [1st ed.]. New York, :

Knopf, 1956. While in China on business in the 1920's, a

young American engineer becomes involved in the lives of

people who live on a junk on the Yangtze River.

F Ignatius

Ignatius, David, 1950-. The sun king : a novel. 1st ed. New

York : Random House, c1999. Sandy Galvin, a billionaire

with a rare talent for taking risks and making people happy,

buys the most powerful newspaper in Washington D.C. and

wields it like a sword. But in his path, is his old Harvard

flame, Candace Ridgway, a beautiful and icy journalist known

to her colleagues as the Mistresss of Fact. A love story.

F Irving

Irving, John, 1942-. The Hotel New Hampshire. 1st ed. New York

: Dutton, c1981. The novel takes place in two different

countries, in the U.S. (Maine) and in Vienna during the

1950's. The main character John Berry, middle child in a

family of 8 that includes a bear and a dog named Sorrow,

tells about his family, which he describes as a hotel

family. They own a series of hotels, the last of which is in

New Hampshire where his father's dreams guide the unique

family.

F Irving

Irving, John, 1942-. A widow for one year : a novel. 1st ed.

New York : Random House, 1998. A multilayered love story of

astonishing emotional force.

F Jones

Jones, Douglas C. Elkhorn Tavern. 1st ed. New York : Holt,

Rinehart and Winston, c1980. While Martin Hasford is away

fighting in the Confederate army, his wife Ora and two

children Roman and Calpurnia, fight off civilian and

military marauders near the tavern called The Elkhorn in

western Arkansas.

F Kantor

Kantor, MacKinlay 1904-. Voice of Bugle Ann. Coward-McCann,

1935. Bugle Ann, a fox-hound whose hunting days and nights

were spent in the Missouri hills, was so well loved by her

master Springfield Davis, that he shot the man who was

suspected of killing her.

F Kerouac

Kerouac, Jack, 1922-1969. On the road. 40th Annivesary ed. New

York : Viking, 1997, 1957. Chronicles Kerouac's years

traveling the North American continent, from East Coast to

West Coast to Mexico with his friend Neal Cassady. The two

roam the country in a quest for self-knowledge and

experience.

F Knowles

Knowles, John, 1926-. Peace breaks out. 1st ed. New York :

Holt, Rinehart and Winston, c1981. An ex-infantryman and

P.O.W. comes to Devon School in New Hampshire, a boys prep

school, to teach American history and coach athletics,

thinking it would be a respite from war. Instead, among his

students he finds the violence and evil of war repeating

itself.

F Lamott

Lamott, Anne. Crooked little heart. 1st ed. New York :

Pantheon Books, c1997. Thirteen-year-old tennis champion

Rosie Ferguson, her mother Elizabeth, and her stepfather

James, all struggle with their own heartbreaks along the

road to becoming a united family.

F Lester

Lester, Julius. Two love stories. New York, : Dial Press,

[1972]. Basketball game.--Catskill morning. In Basketball

Game, the author explores the tentative relationship between

a black boy and a white girl in a Southern city, a

relationship ultimately destroyed by the barriers of color.

In Catskill Morning, he writes of sexual awakening in an

idyllic love affair which ends shatteringly.

F Lewis

Lewis, Sinclair, 1885-1951. Babbitt. New York : Harcourt, Brace

& World, c1950 [1922]. Babbitt is a middle-class realtor

who tries to alter his dull life with a little excitement

only to find that his fear of ostracism is greater than his

desire for escape.

F Lewis

Lewis, Sinclair, 1885-1951. Arrowsmith. New York, : Harcourt,

Brace & World, [1952? c1925]. A young doctor, Martin

Arrowsmith, begins medical practice in a small town, moving

on to a city health department, and eventually becomes the

doctor at an "institute" sponsored by a rich man and his

wife. In his quest for pure science, Arrowsmith encounters

meanness, corruption and misunderstanding, and he finds

himself oftern frustrated with the practice. The novel is

frequently satiric and caused much controversy when it was

first