I'm going to throw nonfiction into the mix.
First, a book about which I am, well, obsessed.
The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams
It was number one in the Modern Library's listing of the best nonfiction of the 20th century.
"'I cannot remember when I was not fascinated by Henry Adams,' said Gore Vidal. 'He was remarkably prescient about the coming horrors.'
"His political ideals shaped by two presidential ancestors--great-grandfather John Adams and grandfather John Quincy Adams--Henry Adams was one of the most powerful and original minds to confront the American scene from the Civil War to the First World War."
Printed privately in 1907 and published to wide acclaim shortly after the author's death in 1918, The Education of Henry Adams is a brilliant, idiosyncratic blend of autobiography and history that charts the great transformation in American life during the so-called Gilded Age."
The book is Adams' cynical view on the events of the late 19th century, focusing on why he is a "failure," that is, why he, grandson and great-grandson of presidents, was not a political power.
"He was not, by any measure but his own, a failure. And the proof of the pudding is The Education of Henry Adams itself, which remains among the oddest and most enlightening books in American literature. It contains thousands of memorable one-liners about politics, morality, culture, and transatlantic relations: "The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine forest." There are astonishing glimpses of the high and mighty: "He saw a long, awkward figure; a plain, ploughed face; a mind, absent in part, and in part evidently worried by white kid gloves; features that expressed neither self-satisfaction nor any other familiar Americanism..." (That would be Abraham Lincoln; the "melancholy function" his Inaugural Ball.) But most of all, Adams's book is a brilliant account of how his own sensibility came to be. A literary landmark from the moment it first appeared, the Autobiography confers upon its author precisely that prize he felt had always eluded him: success."
And it includes this:
"Indeed, one day when Adams was pleading with a Cabinet officer for patience and tact in dealing with Representatives, the Secretary impatiently broke out:—'You can’t use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and hit him on the snout!' Adams knew far too little, compared with the Secretary, to contradict him, though he thought the phrase somewhat harsh even as applied to the average Congressman of 1869;—he saw little or nothing of later ones;—but he knew a shorter way of silencing criticism. He had but to ask:—'If a Congressman is a hog, what is a Senator?' "