Gotfryd, Bernard, photographer · Public domain

Turned the tension between Jewish assimilation and self-invention into some of the most argued-over American fiction of the twentieth century, from the taboo-breaking comic monologue of Portnoy's Complaint to the alternate history of The Plot Against America, in which Charles Lindbergh wins the 1940 presidential election. His recurring narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, let him blur memoir and fiction across a dozen books. He won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral and a second National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater, and in 2005 became only the second living author included in the Library of America.