Important List #11 - Ten Great Characters in American Literary Novels

This is a very personal list. I have not read much Updike or any Faulkner, and I'm not going to pretend I have. They, as well as F. Scott Fitzgerald, can wait until some future time when I read a lot more - perhaps when I have mobility issues.

1. Captain Leander Wapshot - The Wapshot Chronicles by John Cheever
2. Quoyle - The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
3. Atticus Finch - To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
4. Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon (they kind of blend in together) - Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon
5. Ignatius J. Reilly - Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
6. Meyer Landsman - Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon
7. Holden Caulfield - Catcher In the Rye by J. D. Salinger
8. Sheldon Anapol - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
9. Chip Lambert - The Corrections by Jonathan Frantzen
10. Ruth Ellis - Stern Men by Elizabeth Gilbert

I was inspired by reading The Wapshot Chronicles, and really feeling quite emotional towards the end when Leander dies. He wrote beautiful and candid letters to his sons advising them on how to be men. And I only came across it because I was combing the CH section for Chabon books I hadn't read.

The odd one out in the list is Chip from The Corrections - I don't like him so much as the situations he gets into and especially the mad climax of the book.