I'm not sure what Showalter's book says, but she's too smart a critic to ignore the fact that women were the most popular novelists of the mid-19th-century, with excellent writers such as Stowe, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, and Susan Warner producing copious volumes of fiction, with or without servants to take over the housework. Also, a woman, Willa Cather, did write the great American novel--three or four of them, actually. How can one not seriously consider Death Comes For the Archbishop as a contender? There are many great books of criticism out there on women writers in 19th-century America. Showalter is just trying to re-invent the wheel, it seems.

but she hasn't yet.

I endured the Dead White Males backlash in college...This is so frigging tiresome.

[i]"America is the first nation united by ideas rather than a shared cultural and racial history..."[/i]

This is a good article, but I really have to protest the above quote. Ideas which unite a nation - that's what "cultural history" [i]is[/i], for goodness' sake.

Especially the great "My Antonia."

already has. Amy Tan has done a great job too. And let us not forget Daniell Steel.

On the men's side I like Steinbeck and Stephen King. King's early novels are quintessential America in all our vulgarity, consumerism, paranoia and violence. With a little sex thrown in.

Zora Neale Hurston - one of the best American writers ever, in my opinion.

The novel in America is dead. It doesn't matter if it's written by a male or female. It's all narration now. It is of the mind, no longer of the body. It is concept. It is logical manipulation. It is about a race who now live in their heads. Language and plot like a sit-com or reporting gossip. It isn't alive. In South America it is alive. Read Marquese. The patriarchy has infested both sexes, the "intellectuals" who don't know their ass from their toes. The poor airheads attracted to the form don't know any better. I know: date a Latino if you don't believe me. Find out what it's like to have a good fuck. Get your phd or graduate degree and call me any name you want. But if you call what you write moving you're drinking the kool aid. The truth takes place in the body, not the mind. Laugh at me today, but remember what I have said tomorrow when you feel alone and empty.

Marilynne Robinson

...I was under the impression that the great, Pulitzer Prize winning American novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, considered by many to be The Great American Novel, was in fact written by a woman named Harper Lee. Someone should have told her good buddy Truman Capote, that Harper was actually a guy. They might have made a cute couple.

I approach this knowing that I am, after all, an elderly

southern woman, but my writing has been rather technical history and my contacts almost always with men.

That said, it occurrs to me that women are referees, not players. Men can, and do, say and write anything. Women as I

have known them have too many irons in the fire to focus as

intesively as a novel requires.

You're exploiting women when you label an article on men's responses to women's abortions "Damaged Goods," when in fact the men discussed never refer to women in those terms (either as "objects" or "damaged").

And you're exploiting women when you title a piece "Why Can't a Woman Write the Great American Novel?" when you know good and well that many women's novels have been celebrated as great American Novels. Uncle Tom's Cabin and Death Comes For the Archbishop have already been mentioned. There's also The Age of Innocence (and one could suggest The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country, as well) and, oh yeah, Beloved. Ever here of that one? (Or Sula?) Written by someone named Toni Morrison, you may have encountered the name once or twice. Not that she's come to be the living representitive of American literature in our era, or anything.

Honestly, it's sickening how much Salon is getting off these day on the victimization of women. How desperate are you for hits? Obviously desperate enough to keep hitting women verbally. Stop it.

I don't think there's much of a debate here. Since men marginalize women in every possible venue, where's the surprise?

Let us take for our example the usual canon of required high school reading: Hemingway (an overrated blowhard, IMHO), Sinclair Lewis (BABBITT is a painful, even silly, read), Twain (always entertaining, but no more so than a dozen female authors I could name--like, say, Janet Austen or Frances Burney, and yes, I know they're Brits.) Steinbeck is noteworthy and well worth the investment of time--as is D.H. Lawrence. But where's Doris Lessing? Edith Wharton? Flannery O'Connor? Katherine Mansfield? Joyce Carol Oates, although suspiciously prolific, has turned out some amazing short stories (i.e. "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been".)

Let's see. Was I ever asked to read any of these authors in high school? Nope.

Men have long perceived women to be a threat on this playing field. We are naturally gifted linguists, many of us. We are quite capable of organizing a linear plot. And God knows we've got something to say. But we're WOMEN, you see, with our picayune feminine concerns like, oh, I don't know, love and relationship and forgiveness for being universally despised and oppressed.

Hundreds of American women have written hundreds of Great American Novels. It is a failure of perception on the part of the mostly male literati that has relegated these talented authors to second and third tiers. But I am confident that history will be less in error.

There are lots of proficient writers, but very few proficient writers who write with heart.

may have inadvertently come across a reality that I have noticed about men and women and how they approach the arts.

my criticism for a long time about most any female artists is that they generally are either narcissistic navel gazers, unvarnished complainers, or neurotic fetishists braying on about typical female obsessions such as men, men, and men.

the few women that transcend the media they work in tend to write more like guys in that they tackle the bigger, outside world.

then ben sen says that one ought to be fucked by a latino guy to get a sense of the body rather than to be stuck in the mind, I think it does reflect this female internal dialog that women tend to have where they get lost in the corridors of their minds and it takes a visceral physical activity to dislodge them from eventually becoming neurotic cat ladies.

the creativity has to be made to happen.

men, on the other hand, being ambitious about wanting to be horndog seventy somethings with beautiful and willing 20 year old women in their arms, tend to look outward and write expansively. the men do also begin their creative journeys in the mind, but the road from the mind out to the body and to beyond the body is a well traveled road in men. for if men were NOT this way, then nothing inspiring would ever be written by them. they would all sound like early Woody Allen, which is novel at first, but quickly becomes grating (and, incidentally, might also be a reason he was always popular with women more than men).