Librarians Choose a Century of Good Books
Magazine: Library Journal; November 15, 1998When we asked you, Dear LJ readers, to send us choices for a "century of goodbooks," you weighed in by the hundreds with lists ranging from a single nomination to collections of 100. There were lists solely of women s titles, several that cited only poetry, and lists by one of or an entire library staff of compilers. We were thrilled by the response.
Overwhelmingly, you chose fiction, so for this first report we're listing only your fiction choices. Given the number of books nominated, we decided not to cut the list to 100 but to report all the titles that got the most votes.
Listed below are the 150 20th-century fiction titles that you regard as the most influential, either in the larger world or in their impact on you personally. Obviously, you read mostly American and British writers and, alas, primarily men. Given that three-fourths of the profession are women, the dominance of males was a surprise.
Your comments on your choices make it clear that they are heartfelt. 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."
The book that was far and away your first choice is Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. Remarkably, while there is overlap with the Modem Library list, your top titles reflect more of the books that people actually read rather than those they feel they should have read. Reflecting that "popular" taste, most of the top 40 titles have also made it to the big screen.
1. To 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, ames 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)