North American literature is Faulkner + A Confederacy of Dunces + the first half of Catch 22.
Everything else is "fine" and that's all. I've always felt sympathy for Fitzgerald, but his novels are quite irrelevant. Twain is G rated.
Hemingway is trash.
In poetry Whitman and Ginsberg are great.
And that's the end of North American literature.
Any definition of North American literature that includes Ginsberg and not Stevens or Williams, or somehow privileges Faulkner over O'Connor, or pretends that North America north of the forty-ninth or south of the Rio Grande doesn't exist, is no definition of 'North American literature' at all.
