Well-Stocked Bookcase's "Book-of-the-Month-Club"
How/Why this list was created:
"Last year, during the celebration of the Book-of-the-Month Club’s 60th anniversary, and in anticipation of the Year of the Reader being sponsored in 1987 by The Library of Congress, we six members of the Club’s Editorial Board [Clifton Fadiman, John K. Hutchens, David Willis McCullough, Gloria Norris, Mordecai Richler, and Wilfred Sheed] decided to sort through our own mental bookcases and select 60 novels, published between 1926 and 1986, whose impact still endures — novels that have changed how we Americans talk, think, write, feel and see ourselves. We gathered for an informal dinner and compared lists."
— From the introduction by Gloria Norris
Additional Rules:
- No non-American authors were to be included
- No members of the Editorial Board were to be included
- No author would be represented by more than one novel
with the exception of Faulkner and Hemingway)
There are 64 Books listed because there are 2 sets of trilogies…The Awakening Land Trilogy (Conrad Richter) and The U. S. A. Trilogy (John Dos Passos)
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