Wallace Stegner has been known as “the dean of Western writers” and had close ties with the University of Utah during his life. Angle of Repose (1971) is one of his many works set in the American West.

Sophie’s Choice (1979) is William Styron’s sixth novel and is the winner of the 1980 National Book Award. It concerns a tragic decision that the eponymous heroine had to make during the Holocaust.

James Michener wrote The Drifters (1971), William Kennedy wrote The Ink Truck (1969), John Kennedy Toole wrote A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), and John Fowles wrote The Ebony Tower (1974).

The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967)  and Sophie’s Choice (1979) are both novels by William Styron. The rest are all titles by American author James Michener.

Chesapeake was published in 1978, Tales of the South Pacific was published in 1947, The Drifters was published in 1971, and Caravans was published in 1963.

William Styron's Sophie’s Choice (1979) is set in Brooklyn, although past action was set in Auschwitz and several scenes occur outside New York City.

John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) follows the struggles of an "Okie" family, the Joads, who are displaced from their Oklahoma farm by the Dust Bowl and forced to move to California.

This is the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Confederacy of Dunces, written by John Kennedy Toole (1937-1969) and published posthumously in 1980.

Phillip Roth wrote The Ghost Writer (1979), James Michener wrote Return to Paradise (1950), Mary Robison wrote Oh! (1981), and Amy Hempel wrote At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom (1990). The alternative options provided here are all American fiction writers who were active in the last half of the 20th century.

A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) by John Kennedy Toole takes place in New Orleans in the mid-20^th century.

Although John Kennedy Toole only lived to be 31, The Neon Bible, a novel he wrote when he was only 16 years old, was released in 1989. The rest of these titles are works by William Faulkner.

A Rose for Emily was published in 1930, A Fable was published in 1954, The Reivers was published in 1962, and Pylon was published in 1935.

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole was published in 1980. 

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980) is a picaresque novel, one in which a central character (usually a witty but lower-class male) has a variety of adventures and misadventures in society.

Atticus Finch is from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Holden Caulfield is from J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Yossarian is from Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), and Rhett Butler is from Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).

John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces was published in 1980.