Writing for PBS, Victoria Fleischer on September 11 posted an article titled, “Have you read the 200 ‘best American novels’?”

She reported that a single individual “embarked on an experiment” and “committed to reading only American novels and decided to compile a list of the 100 best that were published between 1770 and 1985.”

The architect of this plan was, well, an architect from Massachusetts named David Handlin.

Not surprisingly, Updike’s Rabbit, Run made the list. But it does raise an eyebrow that it’s the ONLY Updike book included. The Pulitzer Prize winner Rabbit Is Rich didn’t make his list, nor did Updike’s own favorite book, the National Book Award-winning The Centaur.

Handlin’s picks have caused a stir, with Sandra Gilbert, a distinguished professor of English emerita at the University of California, questioning the criteria for “novel” and “American.” She wrote her own list in response, and one of the things she did was to remove Updike—though she was quoted in the PBS article as saying “I’m not at all inclined to demand deletions, but prefer instead to suggest additions that would make this mini-narrative of our literature (for a narrative it is) more representative of the culture we’ve inherited.”