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.

The anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers (1836), Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984) are all famous picaresque novels. While it does contain characters who travel around, Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895) does not contain any other elements of the picaresque novel.

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

This is one of the most famous stories by the American expatriate author Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” was published in 1933.

Gertrude Stein wrote Tender Buttons (1914), William Faulkner wrote The Sound and the Fury (1929), Thomas McGuane wrote The Sporting Club (1969), and T.C. Boyle wrote World's End (1987).

The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940),“A Clean Well-Lighted Place” (1933) and The Garden of Eden (1986) are all by Ernest Hemingway. The Making of Americans is a 1925 work by Gertrude Stein.

“A Clean Well-Lighted Place” was published in 1933. Hemingway died in 1961. His first publication (in book form) came in 1923.