Melville's critics, inevitably, panned him for what he had characterised self-deprecatingly and in his frustration as his fictional "botches," although his works were rarely that.

For a nation that cannot boast of a Cervantes or Rabindranath, there will always be a need to find an All-American, a unifier who assures them of their place in the hallowed halls of literature. Cormac McCarthy, more than any other writer of his generation, was equipped to shoulder that title.

Nadeem Zaman’s The Inheritors retells and recontextualizes one of the most famous stories there ever was—F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925).

Harper Lee, who wrote one of America's most enduring literary classics, To Kill a Mockingbird, and surprised readers 55 years later with the publication of a second book about the same characters, dies at the age of 89 on Friday.