emilyyoung says:
The Great Gatsby!

femmebot says:
I thought of Great Gatsby too but I think, for me, it's Catcher in the Rye since I identify with it more.

danahuff says:
The Great Gatsby is an excellent choice, but I also nominate The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick (which I read on DailyLit).

albert says:
I like that the definition includes "at the time of its writing," so that you can have more than one. Great Gatsby is definitely on my list, but so are Don DeLillo's Underworld and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

cresswga says:
My instant thought was the Grapes of Wrath as there has never been a better novel about strength in adversary but that was written 10 years after it was set so I am not sure if that counts.

Otherwise I would offer up On The Road by Jack Kerouac. The only problems are that it was largely autobiographical (which seems like a bit of a cheat) and it did not represent the spirit of the whole United States but only a small partof it.

Huckleberry Finn really is a great suggestion by danahuff but as I picked that as my answer to the last question I did not want to look like I was repeating myself :)

reshumate says:
How about To Kill a Mockingbird? It's the rare book that is still a bestseller 40 years after it was first published.

zimmermj says:
I'm going to go with The Scarlet Letter. It certainly represents the view of the times, and is absolutely a classic.

EHartshorn says:
I don't believe in "The" Great American Novel. It's too exclusionary and, even by the Wikipedia definition, implies that everyone living at one period of time has the same experience of life, which just isn't true.

tristiseye says:
I agree with To Kill a Mockingbird. Atticus Finch is one of the greatest father figures ever to be written. If not To Kill a Mockingbird, how about Catch 22? Its humor as well as its themes, particularly that of patriotism and heroism, are still highly debated now.

MaggieH says:
These are all great picks! I was expecting Huck Finn and The Great Gatsby for sure, but some of the others--especially Catch 22--are more surprising (in the pleasant sense).

Interesting point EHartshorn makes. Can "the" great American novel exist? Is there even such a thing as an American zeitgeist, a collective spirit of an age? And if so, can it be captured in a novel? Or is the American experience simply too varied for the concept of the great American novel to work? Is it a uniquely American question--that is, can there be a "great" English novel, but not American?

Interesting things to ponder. More ideas?

cresswga says:
As a Brit I would certainly be interested in everyone's thoughts on a classic British novel using a similar criteria. As an outsider living in the states I feel I have a more defined idea of the spirit of America than I do of the spirit of Britain.

Indeed I believe that by EHartshorn's definition it would be even harder for there to even be a classic British novel. We have always had such a culture and class divide that I do not believe one story could be all encompassing.