| Library Journal readers (Librarians)
were asked to send choices for a "century of goodbooks."
Listed below are the 150 20th-century
fiction titles regarded as the most influential, either in the larger world
or in their impact on you personally.
One librarian said that her criteria
were 1) the books had to be "memorable," 2) they had to be books she "read
over and over," and 3) they had to have "taken me to places and points
of view I never would have discovered on my own."
Most of the top 40 titles were
also made into movies.
To learn
more about these books, copy the name of the author and the title you want,
paste it into the window below, and submit to Amazon.com by pushing
go.
1. Kill a Mockingbird,
Harper Lee (1960)
2. The Catcher in the
Rye,J.D. Salinger (1945)
3. Lord of the Rings,
J.R.R.
Tolkien (1956)
4. Gone with the Wind,
Margaret Mitchell (1936)
5. Beloved, Toni
Morrison (1987)
6. The Color Purple,
Alice
Walker (1982)
7. Nineteen Eighty Four,
George Orwell (1949)
8. Animal Farm, George
Orwell (1954)
9. Lord of the Flies,
William Golding (1954)
10. Catch 22, Joseph
Heller (1961)
11. The Good Earth, Pearl
Buck (1931)
12. Charlotte's Web,
E.B. White (1952
13. The Great Gatsby,
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
14. Slaughterhouse-Five,
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (1969)
15. One Hundred Years of Solitude,
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1970)
16. Lonesome Dove, Larry
McMurtry (1986)
17. Lolita, Vladimir
Nabokov (1955)
18. Fahrenheit 451,
Ray Bradbury (1952)
19. Rebecca, Daphne
Du Maurier (1938)
20. The Grapes of Wrath,
John Steinbeck (1939)
21. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,
Betty Smith (1947)
22. The Hobbit,
J.R.R. Tolkien (1937)
23. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's
Nest, Ken Kesey (1962)
24. The Prime of Miss Jean
Brodie, Muriel Spark (1962)
25. My Antonia, Willa
Cather (1918)
26. The Old Man and the Sea,
Ernest Hemingway (1952)
27. Lady Chatterley's Lover,
D.H. Lawrence (1928)
28. Invisible Man,
Ralph Ellison (1952)
29. Exodus, Leon Uris
(1957)
30. Sophie's Choice,
William Styron (1979)
31. Native Son, Richard
Wright (1940)
32. Little House on the Prairie,
Laura Ingalls Wilder (1935)
33. A Farewell to Arms,
Ernest Hemingway (1929)
34. Winnie the Pooh, A.A.
Milne (1926)
35. The Jungle, Upton
Sinclair (1906)
36. The Handmaid's Tale,
Margaret Atwood (1986)
37. The Age of Innocence,
Edith Wharton (1920)
38. Rabbit Run,
John Updike (1960)
39. On the Road,
Jack Kerouac (1957)
40. Stranger in a Strange
Land, Robert A. Heinlein (1961)
41. Brave New World,
Aldous Huxley (1932)
42. Angle of Repose, Wallace
Stegner (1971)
43. All Quiet on the Western
Front, Erich Maria Remarque (1929)
44. Ulysses, James
Joyce (1922)
45. The Sun Also Rises,
Ernest Hemingway (1926)
46. The Stranger,
Albert Camus (1942)
47. The Sound and the Fury,
William Faulkner (1929)
48. Possession, A.S. Byatt
(1990)
49. Stone Diaries,
Carol Shields (1994)
50. Song of Solomon,
Toni Morrison (1977)
51. The Joy Luck Club,
Amy Tan (1989)
52. Roots, Alex
Haley (1976)
53. A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man, James Joyce (1916)
54. Look Homeward Angel,
Thomas Wolfe (1929)
55. Pale Horse, Pale Rider,
Katherine Anne Porter (1939)
56. Ethan Frome,
Edith Wharton (1911)
57. The Lover, Marguerite
Duras (1972)
58. A Clockwork Orange,
Anthony Burgess (1962)
59. Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood
Anderson (1919)
60. To the Lighthouse,
Virginia Woolf (1927)
61. The World According to
Garp, John Irving (1978)
62. The Wonderful Wizard of
Oz, . Frank Baum (1900)
63. The Lion, the Witch and
the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis (1950)
64. The Hound of the Baskervilles,
A. Conan Doyle (1902)
65. The Fountainhead,
Ayn Rand (1943)
66. The Burger's Daughter,
Nadine Gordimer (1979)
67. The Call of the Wild,
Jack London (1903)
68. One Day in the Life of
Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1963)
69. The Mists of Avalon,
Marlon Zimmer Bradley (1983)
70. I, Claudius,
Robert Graves (1934)
71. From Here to Eternity,
James Jones (1951)
72. East of Eden, John
Steinbeck (1952)
73. Cry, the Beloved Country,
Alan Paton (1948)
74. Advise and Consent,
Allen Drury (1959)
75. A Passage to India
E.M. Forster (1924)
76. 20021: A Space 0dyssey,
Arthur C. Clarke (1968)
77. The Good Soldier,
Ford Maddox Ford (1927)
78. Their Eyes Were Watching
God, Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
79. The Wind in the Willows,
Kenneth Grahm (1908)
80. Portnoy's Complaint,
Philip Roth (1969)
81. The Plague,
Albert Camus (1947)
82. The Little Prince,
Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1943)
83. The Bluest Eye, Toni
Morrison (1969)
84. The Bean Trees, Barbara
Kingsolver (1988)
85. Tarzan of the Apes,
Edgar Rice Burroughs (1914)
86. Sister Carrie,
Theodore Dreiser (1900)
87. A Good Man is Hard To
Find, Flannery O'Connor (1955)
88. Remembrance of Things
Past, Marcel Proust (1960)
89. Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow
(1975)
90. Ordinary People, Judith
Guest (1976)
91. Of Human Bondage,
W Somerset Maugham (1915)
92. Heart of Darkness,
Joseph Conrad (1902)
93. Babbit, Sinclair Lewis
(1922)
94. All the King's Men,
Robert Penn Warren (1946)
95. Women in Love,
D.H. Lawrence (1920)
96. Waiting for Godot,
Samuel Beckett (1953)
97. USA, John Dos
Passos (1919, 1936, 1938)
98. The Unbearable Lightness
of Being, Milan Kundera (1984)
99. A Death in the Family,
James Agee (1957)
100. The Once & Future
King, T.H. White 1953
101. The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell
Hammett (1930)
102. The Golden Bowl,
Henry James (1904)
103.The Golden Notebook,
Doris Lessing (1962)
104. The Forsyte Saga,
John Galsworthy (1922)
105. The Big Sleep,
Raymond Chandler (1939)
106. The Bell Jar,
Sylvia Plath (1963)
107. The Ambassadors,
Henry James (1903)
108. The House of the Spirits,
Isabel Allende (1985)
109. Of Mice and Men,
John Steinbeck (1937)
110. The Naked and the Dead,
Norman
Mailer (1948)
111. Magic Mountain,
Thomas Mann (1924)
112. Johnny Got His Gun,
Dalton Trumbo (1959)
113. Ironweed, William
Kennedy (1983)
114. A Farewell to Arms,
Ernest Hemingway (1929)
115. Dune,
Frank Herbert (1965)
116. Doctor Zhivago,
Boris Pasternak(1958)
117. Death Comes for the Archbishop,
Willa Cather (1927)
118. Cat's Cradle,
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (1963)
119. Brideshead Revisited,
Evelyn Waugh (1945)
120. Breathing Lessons,
Anne Tyler (1988)
121. Are You There God, It's
Me, Margaret, Judy Blume (1970)
122. The Accidental Tourist,
Anne Tyler (1985)
123. A Thousand Acres,
Jane Smiley (1991)
124. A Room with a View,
E.M. Forster (1908)
125. Wise Blood, Flannery
O'Connor (1952)
126. The Tin Drum,
Gunter Grass (1959)
127. Wide Sargasso Sea,
Jean Rhys (1966)
128. White Noise, Don
De Lillo (1985)
129. Where the Wild Things
Are, Maurice Sendak (1963)
130. Wapshot Chronicle,
John Cheever (1979)
131. Under the Volcano, Malcolm
Lowry (1947)
132. Tropic of Cancer,
Henry Miller (1934)
133. Things Fall Apart,
Chinua Achebe (1959)
134. The Yearling,
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1948)
135. The Winds of War,
Herman Wouk (1971)
136. The Moviegoer,
Walker Percy (1961)
137. The Razor's Edge,
Somerset Maugham (1944)
138. The Rebel,
Albert Camus (1954)
139. The Pearl,
John Steinbeck (1947)
140. The Outsider,
Colin Wilson (1956)
141. Call It Sleep,
Henry Roth (1934)
142. The Heart Is a Lonely
Hunter, Carson McCullers (1940)
143. The Godfather,
Mario Puzo (1969)
144. A Curtain of Green,
Eudora Welty (1941)
145. The End of the Affair,
Graham Greene (1951)
146. The Color of Water,
James McBride (1996)
147. The Caine Mutiny,
Herman Wouk (1951)
148. The Bridge of San
Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder (1927)
149. The Agony and the Ecstasy,
Irving Stone (1961)
150. Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy,
James T. Farrell (1935) Henry James (1904) |