February 18, 2010

If J. D. Salinger had written “The Catcher in the Rye” and nothing else, he would still be remembered as an enduringly important novelist. The same can be said of Joseph Heller and “Catch-22” or E. L. Doctorow and “Ragtime” (or, for that matter, “The Book of Daniel”). And Don DeLillo earned his literary laurels with “Libra,” a re-imagining of the assassination of John F. Kennedy that is, for me, the Great American Novel.