The Nobel laureate Toni Morrison has topped a New York Times poll conducted among "prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages" to find the best American fiction of the last 25 years.

In a development so inevitable that AO Scott, writing in the New York Times, would have found any other outcome "startling", Morrison's Pulitzer prize-winning novel, Beloved, triumphed again. The novel, first published in 1987, is set in the troubled years following the American civil war and tells the story of a former slave, haunted by the ghost of her dead child.

Scott points to the "remarkable speed" with which it has inserted itself into the canon, stressing Morrison's "intention in writing it precisely to expand the range of classic American literature", to "complete and to some extent correct" it.

But the list itself reveals just how resistant to change the canon will prove. Morrison is one of only two black authors and two women appearing among the nominations. Edward P Jones's The Known World and Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping - the only book on the list not to have been reviewed by the New York Times at the time of its publication - both received "multiple votes", but not enough for them to be placed among the runners-up.

The rest of the list is made up of the senior statesmen of American fiction, with runners-up spots taken by Don DeLillo's Underworld, John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom novels, Cormac MacCarthy's Blood Meridian and Philip Roth's American Pastoral. It's a list - how can I put this - just a heartbeat away from being full of dead white males.

The Times makes no claims for completeness or scientific accuracy - a poll sample of only 125 people, where Beloved received just 15 votes - but there's something going on here. Is it because of the question? Maybe everyone gets a little heavy when they're asked for "the single best work of American fiction". Is it the judges? Maybe a different panel of "literary sages" would have come to a different kind of list. Or are they just plain wrong?