Every Version of American Gods

The gods who never went home

Neil Gaiman published American Gods in 2001, and it won the Hugo, Nebula, and Bram Stoker awards in the same year. The premise is simple and inexhaustible: every immigrant who crossed an ocean brought their gods with them, and those gods are still here, forgotten and diminished, scraping out livings as con men, funeral directors, and cab drivers while newer gods of media and technology rise to replace them. Shadow Moon, released from prison the day his wife dies, is hired as muscle by the trickster Mr. Wednesday, who is running a grift across the country to recruit old gods for a coming war.

The novel drew on Gaiman's own experience as an English writer living in the American Midwest and on years of research into world mythology. It traveled across media in several directions at once. A longer Author's Preferred Text edition restored roughly 12,000 words cut from the original, and the 2011 Tenth Anniversary Edition incorporated further revisions. Gaiman returned to the same world with Anansi Boys in 2005 and revisited the character Shadow in novellas and short stories collected in Fragile Things (2006) and Trigger Warning (2015). P. Craig Russell adapted the novel into a comics series for Dark Horse beginning in 2017, the same year the Starz television adaptation premiered. The show ran three seasons, adapting the novel's main plot with substantial additions before ending in 2021.