Novels, Memoirs, and More for American Religion Courses

Randall Stephens

Do you teach a course on American Religion, or have you taken a course on the subject? If you answered yes to either, then maybe you read a novel alongside your chief textbook and that avalanche of primary source documents.  (See Everett Hamner's post from summer 2011.)

I think that when I assign a novel in my American Religion and Culture course it is like throwing the students a bone.  (No, I've never taught The Lovely Bones, but maybe that would work.)

In prep for teaching the class again, I went back through an email thread from the H-AmRel discussion list. I asked subscribers what novels and memoirs they liked to use in their courses.  I received a flood of responses.  Not knowing too much about all the valuable books out there, this was extremely helpful.  So, I list here many of the suggestions list members offered up, and I add some others of my own as well. 

In no order at all:

Harold Frederic, The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896)

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)

James Carroll, An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us (1996)

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004)

Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2007)

Nellie McClung, Purple Springs (1921)

Shirley Nelson, The Last Year of the War (1978)

Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me Ultima (1972)

John Steinbeck, To A God Unknown (1933)

Charles Monroe Sheldon, In His Steps (1897)

Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston (1975)

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1986)

Maryse Conde, Crossing the Mangrove (1995)

O. E. Rolvaag, Giants in the Earth (1927)

Louise Erdrich, Tracks (1988)

James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, The Account: Alvar Núñez Cabeza De Vaca's Relación (1542)

Erskine Caldwell, Deep South: Memory and Observation. The Story of a Minister's Son and his Religion (1980)

Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of Dorothy Day (1952)

Will Campbell, Forty Acres and a Goat (1986)

Harry Crews, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (1978)

Samuel S. Hill, Southern Churches in Crisis (1966)

Eli N. Evans,

The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South (1973)

John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux (1932)

Albert J. Raboteau, A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History (1995)

Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry (1927)

Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)

Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood (1952)

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar (1868)

Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (1977)

Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)

Annie Clark Tanner, A Mormon Mother (1941)

Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers (1925)

Lis Harris, Holy Days: The World of the Hasidic Family (1985)