The Great American Novel: six contenders for the title

'The Great American Novel' is a phrase critics have been arguing about since 1868, and no book has ever settled it. But a handful keep coming up, each capturing a different piece of the country's contradictions.

Ernest Hemingway declared that all modern American literature comes from one book, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a raft trip down the Mississippi that quietly indicts a whole nation's conscience. F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby distills the American Dream into a green light and a doomed party. Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird made a childhood and a trial into the country's moral education.

Then come the books that reckon with what America was built on. Toni Morrison's Beloved is the ghost story of slavery it took a Nobel laureate to write. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is about a man his country refuses to see. And looming over them all is Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, the mad, magnificent whale hunt that many critics still consider the summit.

There's no winner, and that's the point. America is too large and too divided for one book to hold. But reading these six together comes as close as anything to the whole argument.