The concept of the GAN seems to have been born in the late 1860s. In an 1868 The Nation
essay, Civil War veteran John William DeForest—himself an aspiring
GAN-ist—described the GAN as “the picture of the ordinary emotions and
manners of American existence,” a work that painted “the American soul.”
And what, precisely, did that soul entail? There was but one
real—though unquestionably daunting—requirement: it had to be supremely
national in breadth and scope. The Scarlet Letter—now
a perennial presence on modern GAN lists—could never be GAN material,
wrote DeForest. It was “full of acute spiritual analysis,” but was so
focused on the ineffable that it had “only a vague consciousness of this
life.” Its characters, DeForest complained, “are as probably natives of
the furthest mountains of Cathay or of the moon as of the United States
of America.” What an affront.
And so began a tradition that’s persisted as long as the search for
the Great American Novel: The insistence that certain great American
novelists fail to write in a strictly national vein, and so, cannot
produce the GAN no matter how otherwise great their writing may be.
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