I believe that Saul Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March was even more important than On the Road (1957), by Jack Kerouac.

Bellow influenced writers as diverse as Philip Roth and Jeffrey Eugenides.

I am surprised that three very important books missed the list:
1) The Grapes of Wraith
2) The Jungle
3) 1984

All three spoke about issues relating to our society and the problesm being faced, and made America aware of big important social issues

The title should be: “How Testosterone shaped the nation,” excluding–perhaps–the book by the woman Jewish immigrant…
and some kind of subtitle like: how hegemonic texts continue to threaten public education

Ayn Rand! Love her or hate her, to ignore her influence on the political economy of the US shows how skewed and limited this list is.

Don’t forget perhaps one of the very first books to influence Westward expansion — William Bartram’s TRAVELS… chs

I don’t know which books changed America; but, there’s no doubt about which book America is changing into: 1984.

What a coincidence..very surprised to hear the topic subject. Mary Antin’s Promised Land came up in discussion at yesterday’s family Thanksgiving gathering. A copy of The Promised Land has sat in our living room bookcase since 1925..but as a point of contention. My great aunt is the girl mentioned in The Dover Street chapter whom Mary Antin sat beside at Girl’s Latin school. My great aunt I guess was none too happy with the decription of their relationship. The way she told it, she kind of took Mary A. under her wing and provided a place of warmth and light to do their homework and have a bite to eat…in her father’s “cheap lunch room” these words are underlined in edition of the book I have in front of me now with a pencilled connotation in the margin which is faded and illegible.

Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, and later Lancelot describe, precisely, the modern malaise and sense of isolation in a crowded world. He redefined extentialism. Richard Ford’s Independence Day is along those same lines, and is a crowning achievement.

I would also recommend an alternative list of powerful books that the writers’ contemporaries either ignored or did not know existed. Both Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and Emily Dickinson’s fascicles contained ideas that could have changed America–if only people read it (Moby-Dick) or knew they existed (Dickinson’s poetry).

Moby Dick would have been another I would have expected.

[...] From NPR’s On Point with Tom Ashbrook broadcast: Dec. 22, 2008 Books That Changed America [...]

Rachel Carson’s “SILENT SPRING” changed the landscape of environmental protection in America, and was the watershed book for legislation such as the Clean Water Act. Her monumental work shaped the American consciousness, and opened our eyes and minds to our environmental rights against companies that pollute our – and our children’s – lives.

How is it that the Bible, especially the King James version, didn’t make the list? Despite the fact that we’re secular society, the Bible is such a part of the fabric of the thinking of our population, it informs the conversations, the decisions, the direction of the country even for atheists.

I don’t buy the guest’s statement that novels haven’t had the same impact as his other books.

Although they are more of a chronical of change than “game changers”, I would add “The World is Flat” and “The Lexus and the Olive Tree” by Thomas Friedman. I would cosider them as two volumes of one “work”. These books are a “digestible” expose of globalism.

Because of their accessibility, I believe that they have both increased awareness of this social/politcal shift, as well as broadened the range of possibilities for positive social, political and economic advancement.

What a brilliant program! I applaud the work of Jay Parini and look forward to the ensuing debate about the texts central to American culture. I would like to add Walt Whitman’s “The Leaves of Grass” to the debate. It’s essential position to the development of an American vernacular is, I believe, indisputable.

How could Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged not be on the list? It still sells half million copies a year and polls show it to be the book that most changed people’s lives, other than the Bible. I think the author let his lefty views affect his work here.

Mary Rowlandson’s Journal–one of the most influential captivity narratives, The Journal influenced America’s assumptions about both indigenous Americans and women. Written during King Phillip’s War, a political disaster that shaped our American identity more significantly than The Revolution, The Journal especially gave us insight into how women thought of themselves then, how we were to behave at home and in extremis outside the family; it is also a reminder of how quick we have been to continuously report truth as we believe others want to hear it. Rowlandson was a celebrity at the time and predated a good share of the sociology of women in the 20th century.

The Promise of American Life, by Herbert Croly.

Two books that really did influence a huge number of people of my generation:

Silent Spring
The Whole Earth Catalog
Unsafe at Any Speed

woops. that should say “three” books, not two.

I didn’t get a chance to hear the whole program, but was very dismayed to hear the guest, Jay Parini, mispronounce several times W. E. B. DuBois’s last name. The author of _Souls of Black Folk_ did not pronounce his last name as if it were authentically French (rhyming with “tra-la”). Anyone who has has done serious work on the man knows that he pronounced it rhyming with “noise.” I have often had to set many students straight about the very “literal English” pronunciation he gave to his name, but I am mystified as to how Jay Parini could have written a significant part of a book about the man and his most famous work without learning how to pronounce his name.

It is hard for me to pinpoint 13 particular books that shaped America because the choice is so extensive – and many more are yet to come.

Just listened-in. Very interesting interview, and especially helpful to a young guy like myself who has only just skimmed the surface of “books to be read”.
Well done.

Mailer’s “The Armies of the Night”

Would Jay Perini explain HOW these books changed America, not why, but how? Did the common man read them and were they read at the time they were written?

In the early years of this country, few people were iterate and well off enough to own books AND to have the time to read them. For the most part, the books on this list reflect the evolving history of a growing country, telling stories both fictional and real of events happening at a particular time in that history.

But game-changers? Maybe, maybe not.

While listening to the Parini interview – very interesting, and I enjoyed it very much – I sensed that Mr. Parini had manufactured a list of very powerful texts that is simply an extension of the Obama platform. There are a number of authored “game changers” that should have had a place on the list – Bible, Atlas Shrugged… But I guess you run the risk whenever you create “the list”!

What about Silent Spring by Rachel Carson?

To Kill A Mocking Bird

On the dark side, Madison Grant’s “The Passing of the Great Race”, an “immensely popular” book that Hitler described as “his Bible” and that sold 1.6 million copies in the U.S. alone between its publication in 1916 and the author’s death in 1937.

Find out more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madison_Grant

The interview was great and informative.

This list refers to books that changed America. The Bible,while an important piece of world literature, didn’t do much to CHANGE America, since it preceded the establishment of any our colonies in the first place. Sure, it may have brought about change in many individuals over the years, but it didn’t present any new ideas for America as a whole. This isn’t a list of book that were merely important statements, rather those that actual brought about sweeping paradigm shifts to our country’s literary culture, and subsequently our social makeup.