Best Books About Ambition and the American Dream
The best books about ambition and the American Dream — from The Great Gatsby and Revolutionary Road to Babbitt and The Corrections. Essential reading on ambition and failure.
American literature is, more than any other national literature, obsessed with ambition and the Dream — the belief that self-invention is possible, that effort and will can produce any outcome, and the specific American catastrophe that results when the Dream fails or, worse, when it is achieved and found wanting. The novels below are the essential texts on ambition, success, failure, and what we sacrifice on the way to what we think we want.
The American Dream and Its Failure
The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
The essential text on American ambition — Jay Gatsby’s self-invention, his attempt to buy back the past, and his destruction by the very class he has tried to enter. Fitzgerald’s argument (the American Dream is founded on a fraudulent promise; those who believe it most completely are destroyed by it) is made in prose of extraordinary compression and beauty. At 180 pages, the most concentrated major American novel.
Babbitt — Sinclair Lewis (1922)
The satirical companion to Gatsby — George Babbitt has achieved what Gatsby wants (wealth, respectability, a comfortable position in his community), and Lewis’s portrait of what that achievement actually feels like from the inside is the most sustained critique of the American commercial dream. The novel gave the English language a word (‘babbitt’) for the conformist who has traded inner life for social acceptance.
Revolutionary Road — Richard Yates (1961)
The most devastating account of the gap between self-image and reality — Frank and April Wheeler believe they are superior to the life they are living, and that belief, without the substance to support it, destroys them. Yates’s argument is about the specific American delusion of exceptionalism: the conviction that you are different from the people around you, and what happens when the life around you turns out to be the life you’re actually living.
Ambition and Its Costs
The Corrections — Jonathan Franzen (2001)
Franzen’s portrait of three adult children each navigating the gap between their ambitions and their reality — the banker who is secretly miserable, the academic who has failed, the chef who is succeeding but at a cost she can’t yet calculate. The most contemporary novel in this list and the one that most directly addresses the specific version of the American gap between aspiration and achievement that exists in the early twenty-first century.
Sabbath’s Theater — Philip Roth (1995)
The most extreme novel in this list — Mickey Sabbath, a sixty-four-year-old puppeteer whose life has been a sustained assault on convention (sexual, professional, moral), confronting the consequences of a life spent in pursuit of freedom without accommodation. Roth’s novel asks what happens when you reject the ambitions of respectability — family, career, social position — entirely, and pursue only the life of the body and the theatre. The most challenging in this list; read after the others.
Reading Order
Start accessible: The Great Gatsby → Babbitt → Revolutionary Road.
The full American critique: Babbitt → The Great Gatsby → Revolutionary Road → The Corrections.
Most demanding: The Great Gatsby → Revolutionary Road → Sabbath’s Theater.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best novel about ambition?
The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald is the most concentrated statement about American ambition and its limits — Jay Gatsby's attempt to recreate the past, to buy back the love of Daisy Buchanan through wealth, is the founding myth of American self-invention and its fraudulence. Revolutionary Road (1961) by Richard Yates is the most direct confrontation with the gap between who people believe themselves to be and who they actually are — Frank and April Wheeler's conviction of their own superiority to the suburban life they inhabit, and the catastrophe that follows. Both are essential for any reader interested in what ambition costs.
What is The Great Gatsby about?
The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald follows Jay Gatsby — who has reinvented himself from obscure poverty into fabulous wealth — and his attempt to recover his relationship with Daisy Buchanan, with whom he was in love before the war. Nick Carraway, Gatsby's neighbour and Daisy's cousin, observes the attempt and its failure. Fitzgerald's argument is about the American Dream: its seductiveness, its fraudulence, and the violence it conceals. The famous ending — 'So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past' — is the most precise statement of the Dream's impossibility in American literature.
What is The Corrections about?
The Corrections (2001) by Jonathan Franzen follows three adult children of Alfred and Enid Lambert — Alfred's Parkinson's disease is advancing, Enid wants one last Christmas together, and the children (Gary, a banker; Chip, a failed academic; Denise, a chef) are each navigating their own versions of the gap between what they intended to be and what they have become. Franzen's novel is about the specifically American version of this gap: the belief that ambition and effort should be sufficient to produce the life you imagined, and the specific failure that results when they are not.
What does Babbitt say about American ambition?
Babbitt (1922) by Sinclair Lewis is the most sustained satirical portrait of American commercial ambition — George F. Babbitt, a real estate agent in Zenith, has achieved the success his culture defines as success (a house, a car, a club membership, a respected position), and is entirely miserable. Lewis's argument is that the American Dream, when achieved, reveals itself as a trap: the successful person is imprisoned by the social conformity that success requires. Babbitt is the original American novel about the emptiness at the heart of achieving what you were supposed to want.
