Well-Stocked Bookcase
(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)

Source: The Well-Stocked Bookcase: Sixty Enduring Novels by Americans Published Between 1926 and 1986. Book-of-the-Month Club, 1986? © 1986 BOMC?

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