A boy survives a bombing at the Met and steals a small Dutch painting. Tartt spent eleven years writing a Dickensian novel about grief, addiction, beauty, and the objects we cling to, and the result won the Pulitzer despite the literary establishment's best efforts to dismiss it. The book is too alive to stay in any critical box. Readers voted with their obsession.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.