ReadingRate · Best Books · 2026

The best books from the United States

Ranked by literary regard, the best American books are led by Moby-Dick, Beloved, The Sound and the Fury, The Great Gatsby, and Huckleberry Finn. This list ranks the top American works in ReadingRate's catalogue, with difficulty scores and reading-time estimates for each.

A computed ranking from literary-regard scores, and the deepest national list in the catalogue — over a thousand American works carry regard data. The top 25 spans the full difficulty range, from Gatsby's eight accessible hours to the modernist peaks of Faulkner and Pynchon.

1–10

  1. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851, difficulty 7.1/10)
  2. The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot (1922, difficulty 9.2/10)
  3. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929, difficulty 8.0/10)
  4. Beloved by Toni Morrison (1988, difficulty 5.8/10)
  5. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884, difficulty 5.2/10)
  6. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925, difficulty 5.2/10)
  7. The Sacred Wood by T. S. Eliot (1920, difficulty 6.7/10)
  8. Life Studies by Robert Lowell (1959, difficulty 3.9/10)
  9. Self-Reliance and Other Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1841, difficulty 4.4/10)
  10. Collected Poems by Robert Frost (1930, difficulty 6.2/10)

11–20

  1. A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams (1947, difficulty 6.7/10)
  2. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller (1949, difficulty 6.7/10)
  3. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926, difficulty 5.6/10)
  4. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (1855, difficulty 5.3/10)
  5. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery (1975, difficulty 6.1/10)
  6. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930, difficulty 6.7/10)
  7. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969, difficulty 6.3/10)
  8. Long Day's Journey into Night by Eugene O'Neill (1956, difficulty 5.3/10)
  9. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1974, difficulty 8.4/10)
  10. The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor (1972, difficulty 5.8/10)

21–30

  1. On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957, difficulty 5.4/10)
  2. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850, difficulty 7.2/10)
  3. A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor (1955, difficulty 4.2/10)
  4. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (1937, difficulty 3.4/10)
  5. Lilith's Brood by Octavia E. Butler (1989, difficulty 5.8/10)
  6. Harmonium by Wallace Stevens (1923, difficulty 8.3/10)
  7. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams (1944, difficulty 5.8/10)
  8. Essays: First and Second Series by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1844, difficulty 5.6/10)
  9. The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin (1963, difficulty 5.4/10)
  10. House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday (1969, difficulty 6.1/10)

31–40

  1. Walden by Henry David Thoreau (1854, difficulty 5.8/10)
  2. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1954, difficulty 5.8/10)
  3. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams (1955, difficulty 6.7/10)
  4. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (1881, difficulty 7.0/10)
  5. The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster (1987, difficulty 8.7/10)
  6. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1953, difficulty 7.5/10)
  7. In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway (1925, difficulty 5.8/10)
  8. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (1898, difficulty 7.7/10)
  9. Collected Stories by William Faulkner (1951, difficulty 5.9/10)
  10. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1953, difficulty 4.2/10)

41–50

  1. Montage of a Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes (1951, difficulty 3.8/10)
  2. The Hollow Men by T. S. Eliot (1925, difficulty 5.6/10)
  3. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939, difficulty 5.5/10)
  4. Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot (1943, difficulty 7.5/10)
  5. Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg (1956, difficulty 6.9/10)
  6. Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville (1853, difficulty 5.0/10)
  7. If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin (1974, difficulty 5.6/10)
  8. The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman (2003, difficulty 6.0/10)
  9. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (1929, difficulty 4.9/10)
  10. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951, difficulty 5.8/10)

51–60

  1. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977, difficulty 6.8/10)
  2. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner (1936, difficulty 7.9/10)
  3. Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin (1955, difficulty 4.6/10)
  4. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (1970, difficulty 5.9/10)
  5. Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner (1942, difficulty 6.0/10)
  6. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937, difficulty 6.3/10)
  7. V. by Thomas Pynchon (1963, difficulty 8.0/10)
  8. The Zoo Story by Edward Albee (1959, difficulty 6.3/10)
  9. North of Boston by Robert Frost (1914, difficulty 6.3/10)
  10. Paterson by William Carlos Williams (1963, difficulty 7.9/10)

61–70

  1. The Crucible by Arthur Miller (1953, difficulty 5.9/10)
  2. Spring and All by William Carlos Williams (1923, difficulty 8.0/10)
  3. James by Percival Everett (2025, difficulty 5.1/10)
  4. Light in August by William Faulkner (1932, difficulty 6.5/10)
  5. Underworld by Don DeLillo (1997, difficulty 6.4/10)
  6. The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1983, difficulty 4.9/10)
  7. Geography III by Elizabeth Bishop (1976, difficulty 7.8/10)
  8. The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill (1946, difficulty 6.3/10)
  9. The Ambassadors by Henry James (1903, difficulty 6.7/10)
  10. The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes (1926, difficulty 4.6/10)

71–80

  1. Fences by August Wilson (1985, difficulty 6.4/10)
  2. The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell (1912, difficulty 4.9/10)
  3. Angels in America: Perestroika by Tony Kushner (1992, difficulty 7.3/10)
  4. Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot (1935, difficulty 5.7/10)
  5. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (1985, difficulty 7.0/10)
  6. Benito Cereno by Herman Melville (1855, difficulty 5.2/10)
  7. White Noise by Don DeLillo (1985, difficulty 6.5/10)
  8. In the Heart of the Heart of the Country by William Gass (1968, difficulty 8.7/10)
  9. Paradise by Toni Morrison (1999, difficulty 6.5/10)
  10. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey (1962, difficulty 5.6/10)

81–90

  1. Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (1969, difficulty 5.7/10)
  2. Kindred by Octavia E. Butler (1979, difficulty 6.3/10)
  3. The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell (1949, difficulty 4.8/10)
  4. Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang (2019, difficulty 5.9/10)
  5. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin (1953, difficulty 7.6/10)
  6. Herzog by Saul Bellow (1965, difficulty 5.6/10)
  7. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon (1966, difficulty 6.8/10)
  8. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin (1969, difficulty 5.7/10)
  9. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1996, difficulty 8.1/10)
  10. The Piano Lesson by August Wilson (1987, difficulty 6.2/10)

91–100

  1. Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion (1968, difficulty 4.7/10)
  2. The Auroras of Autumn by Wallace Stevens (1950, difficulty 5.9/10)
  3. Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor (1952, difficulty 4.4/10)
  4. Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme (1981, difficulty 6.6/10)
  5. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961, difficulty 6.2/10)
  6. The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K Le Guin (1973, difficulty 6.7/10)
  7. The Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer (1968, difficulty 4.4/10)
  8. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852, difficulty 4.3/10)
  9. The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin (2015, difficulty 8.0/10)
  10. Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow (1976, difficulty 6.0/10)

Questions people actually ask

What is the great American novel?
By literary-regard data the strongest claims belong to Moby-Dick, Beloved, and Huckleberry Finn, with The Great Gatsby the most-taught contender. The honest answer is that the title is an argument, and this list shows the data behind each candidate.
What are the best American books?
Moby-Dick, Beloved, The Sound and the Fury, The Great Gatsby, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn lead the ranking. ReadingRate ranks the top entries by literary regard.
Is Moby-Dick worth reading?
It holds near-maximal literary regard and a genuinely high difficulty score — the cetology chapters are the information-density spike the data predicts. Readers who know that going in tend to fare far better than those expecting a sea chase.