The editors of The Modern Library were privileged to have the assistance of a distinguished Board made up of celebrated authors, historians, critics, and publishing luminaries. In 1998 and 1999, members of the Modern Library Board participated in the “100 Best” project, voting on the 100 Best Novels and 100 Best Non-fiction works, respectively.

1.     ULYSSES by James Joyce

Written as an homage to Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, Ulysses follows its hero, Leopold Bloom, through the streets of Dublin. Overflowing with puns, references to classical literature, and stream-of-consciousness writing, this is a complex, multilayered novel about one day in the life of an ordinary man. Initially banned in the United States but overturned by a legal challenge by Random House’s Bennett Cerf, Ulysses was called “a memorable catastrophe” (Virginia Woolf), “a book to which we are all indebted” (T. S. Eliot), and “the most faithful X-ray ever taken of the ordinary human consciousness” (Edmund Wilson). Joyce himself said, “There is not one single serious line in [Ulysses].

2.     THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Set in the Jazz Age, The Great Gatsby tells the story of the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby, his decadent parties, and his love for the alluring Daisy Buchanan. Dismissed as “no more than a glorified anecdote, and not too probable at that” (The Chicago Tribune), The Great Gatsby is now considered a contender for “the Great American Novel.” Fitzgerald wanted to title the novel “Trimalchio in West Egg,” but both his wife and his editor preferred “The Great Gatsby.” Fitzgerald gave in, though he still thought that “the title is only fair, rather bad than good.”

3.     A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN by James Joyce

Published in 1916, James Joyce’s semiautobiographical tale of his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, is a coming-of-age story like no other. A bold, innovative experiment with both language and structure, the work has exerted a lasting influence on the contemporary novel; Alfred Kazin commented that “Joyce dissolved mechanism in literature as effectively as Einstein destroyed it in physics.” Reviewing the book in The New Republic, H. G. Wells wrote, “Like some of the best novels in the world it is the story of an education; it is by far the most living and convincing picture that exists of an Irish Catholic upbringing.”

4.     LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita tells the story of middle-aged Humbert Humbert’s love for twelve-year-old Dolores Haze. The concept is troubling, but the novel defies any kind of label, though it has been heralded as a hilarious satire, a bitter tragedy, and even an allegory for U.S.-European relations. In Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi summarized the book as “hopeful, beautiful even, a defense not just of beauty but of life . . . Nabokov, through his portrayal of Humbert, has exposed all solipsists who take over other people’s lives.”

5.     BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley

Though Brave New World is less famous than George Orwell’s 1984, it arguably presents a world that more closely resembles our own: a world of easy sex, readily available and mood-altering pharmaceuticals, information overload, and mass production.  Juxtaposing Orwell’s and Huxley’s dystopias, the critic Neil Postman commented: “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. . . . Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”

6.     THE SOUND AND THE FURY by William Faulkner

Narrated by the Compson siblings—Benjy, a source of shame for his family due to his diminished mental capacity; brilliant and obsessive Quentin; and Jason, the cynic—as well as Dilsey, the powerful matriarch of their black servants, The Sound and the Fury is a tragedy of haunted lives. As each of these characters reflect on the fourth sibling, beautiful and free-spirited Caddy, Faulkner paints an indelible portrait of a family in disarray. While The Sound and the Fury was dismissed by its author as a “splendid failure,” it is now considered a masterpiece and played a crucial role in Faulkner being awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature.

7.     CATCH-22 by Joseph Heller

This satirical novel follows U.S. Captain John Yossarian and his squadron of World War II fighters as they navigate the horrors and paradoxes of war. Based on American author Joseph Heller’s own wartime experiences, the novel explores the many facets of war and employs a unique narrative structure. Catch-22 is widely seen as one of the most significant American novels of the twentieth century. The New York Times called it “a dazzling performance that will outrage nearly as many readers as it delights.”

8.     DARKNESS AT NOON by Arthur Koestler

Set in the midst of Stalin’s 1936–1938 purges—when Stalin executed as many as 1.75 million peasants, government officials, and Communist party members—Darkness at Noon is the story of a man named Rubashov, who is arrested in the middle of the night by the state’s secret police. The Party he has long served tortures him and demands he confess to crimes they know he has not committed. Darkness at Noon sold over 400,000 copies when it was published and its portrait of Communism was a major factor in the Communist Party’s defeat in France.

9.     SONS AND LOVERS by D.H. Lawrence

This intensely autobiographical novel recounts the story of Paul Morel, a young artist growing to manhood in a British working-class family rife with conflict. The author’s vivid evocation of life in a Nottingham mining village in the years before the First World War and his depiction of the all-consuming nature of possessive love and sexual attraction make this one of Lawrence’s most powerful novels. The poet Philip Larkin said, “If Lawrence had been killed off after writing [Sons and Lovers], he’d still be England’s greatest novelist.”

10.  THE GRAPES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck

Winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, this 1939 novel follows the Joad family as they leave the Oklahoma Dust Bowl and travel to California in search of work. A moving story about migration and abject poverty, The Grapes of Wrath is a candidate for the Great American Novel. Steinbeck himself claimed that he wanted the book “to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for [the Great Depression and its effects].”

11.  UNDER THE VOLCANO by Malcolm Lowry

November 2, 1938: It is the Day of the Dead, and Geoffrey Firmin, an alcoholic bureaucrat, is stumbling around the small Mexican town of Quauhnahuac in a last-ditch attempt to win his wife back. Set over the course of the day, Under the Volcano follows Firmin as he drinks wine, beer, mezcal, and tequila in a world that is as menacing and meaningless as it is exhilarating. Many publishers rejected this book but Lowry defended it as “a kind of symphony, or in another way as a kind of opera—or even a horse opera. It is hot music, a poem, a song, a tragedy, a comedy, a farce.”

12.  THE WAY OF ALL FLESH by Samuel Butler

Written between 1873 and 1884 but not published until 1903, Butler’s novel about the fortunes of the Pontifex family is a thinly veiled account of his own upbringing and a scathingly funny depiction of the hypocrisy underlying nineteenth-century domestic life. George Bernard Shaw hailed the novel as “one of the summits of human achievement” and William Maxwell claimed that it was the one Victorian novel he would save if his house caught on fire.

13.  1984 by George Orwell

The most famous dystopian novel of all time, 1984 is the story of Winston Smith as he struggles to survive in the sinister world of Big Brother. This novel has so defined the twentieth century that many terms from it—Big Brother, doublethink, thought police—have seeped into popular culture. When it was first published in 1949, the novelist V. S. Pritchett commented: “I do not think I have ever read a novel more frightening and depressing; and yet, such are the originality, the suspense, the speed of writing and withering indignation that it is impossible to put the book down.”

14.  I, Claudius by Robert Graves

A classic of historical fiction, this book is the fictionalized autobiography of the Roman Emperor Claudius, born partially deaf and afflicted with a limp, and his rise to power. Along the way, you see the inner workings of the First Family of Rome and the vicious, murderous in-fighting and poisonings that Claudius—considered too stupid, lame, and ugly to fear—observes. The book ends with Claudius’s ascension to emperor; Graves continues the saga in Claudius the God (also worth reading, though not on this list).

15.  TO THE LIGHTHOUSE by Virginia Woolf

The Ramsays spend summers in their holiday home off the coast of Scotland, welcoming a motley assortment of guests into their warm family fold. But the First World War looms, and when it has passed, everything will be changed. Writer Arnold Bennett criticized the novel’s slight narrative: “A group of people plan to sail in a small boat to a lighthouse. In the end, some of them reach the lighthouse in a small boat. That is the externality of the plot.” But if the plot is superficially small, Woolf’s prose is infinitely expansive, capturing gorgeous, ephemeral moments of family joy and heartbreak.

16.  AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY by Theodore Dreiser

Published in 1925, An American Tragedy is the story of the naive Clyde Griffiths and his desperate search for success. Dreiser based the story on a 1906 murder trial, and the resulting novel paints a damning portrait of early twentieth-century society. Over nine hundred pages long, this isn’t a quick read, but if you enjoy long studies of sexual obsession and ambition gone horribly wrong, this is the book for you.

17.  THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER by Carson McCullers

Published in 1940, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter follows a handful of outsiders in a small Georgia town: a young girl, a doctor, a deaf-mute, the owner of a diner, and an antagonistic wanderer. The novel was an overnight sensation and made Carson McCullers extremely famous. When it was first reviewed in The New York Times, Rose Feld wrote: “No matter what the age of its author, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter would be a remarkable book. . . . When one reads that Carson McCullers is a girl of 22 it becomes more than that. . . . [McCullers] writes with a sweep and certainty that are overwhelming.”

18.  SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE by Kurt Vonnegut

An American classic, Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden that Vonnegut, then a POW, himself survived, Slaughterhouse-Five includes time travel, a voyage to an alien planet, a love affair with a movie star, and an assassination in its vast scope. Despite these fantastical elements, Billy Pilgrim’s odyssey reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives. Michael Crichton, author of The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park, praised Slaughterhouse-Five as “beautifully done, fluid, smooth, and powerful.”

19.  INVISIBLE MAN by Ralph Ellison

Invisible Man is one man’s story of how the world around him has decided that he is invisible, and therefore disposable. Moving from the unnamed hero’s high school days, to the campus of a Southern college and then to New York’s Harlem, the hero is sometimes befriended but more often deceived and betrayed by the duplicity of others. Winner of the 1953 National Book Award, and described by Saul Bellow as “a book of the very first order, a superb book,” Invisible Man is a bold classic whose take on race in America remains as searing today as when it was first published.

20.  NATIVE SON by Richard Wright

The story of Bigger Thomas, a poor, twentysomething African-American man living in Chicago, Native Son unflinchingly portrays the damage poverty and racism can inflict. Bigger Thomas is a difficult, even unsympathetic character, but his experiences force the reader to confront the real cost of societal injustice. Loosely based on a series of “brick bat” murders in 1939, Native Son was an immediate bestseller, selling 250,000 copies within three weeks of its publication.

21.  HENDERSON THE RAIN KING by Saul Bellow

Eugene Henderson is an American millionaire living off his inherited wealth. Dissatisfied with his life, he leaves his comfortable world behind and travels to Africa. In a fictional village, his prayers for rain are answered, transforming him into a messiah figure. Saul Bellow also wrote The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, and Humboldt’s Gift, but Henderson the Rain King was his personal favorite.

22.  APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA by John O’Hara

In December 1930, just before Christmas, the Gibbsville, PA, social circuit is filled with parties and dances, rivers of liquor, and music playing late into the night. At the center of the social elite stand Julian and Caroline English, the envy of friends and strangers alike. But in one rash moment born inside a highball glass, Julian breaks with polite society and begins a rapid descent—the book takes place over thirty-six hours—toward self-destruction.  A twentieth-century classic, Appointment in Samarra is the first and most widely read book by the writer Fran Leibowitz called “the real F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

23.  U.S.A.(trilogy) by John Dos Passos

A collection of three novels—The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money—this work by Dos Passos combines the stories of different characters with current events, small biographies of famous men, and stream-of-consciousness moments to create a portrait of the United States itself. A massive 1,300-page saga, U. S.A. was hailed by The Washington Post as “the most ambitious attempt by any American writer of fiction to contain this vast, heterogeneous and elusive nation.”

24.  WINESBURG, OHIO by Sherwood Anderson

Sherwood Anderson's timeless cycle of loosely connected tales—in which a young reporter named George Willard probes the hopes, dreams, and fears of a small Midwestern town at the turn of the century—embraced a new frankness and realism that helped usher American literature into the modern age. “Here [is] a new order of short story,” said H. L. Mencken when Winesburg, Ohio was published in 1919. “It is so vivid, so full of insight, so shiningly life-like and glowing, that the book is lifted into a category all its own.”

25.  A PASSAGE TO INDIA by E.M. Forster

In E. M. Forster’s epic yet intimate 1924 novel, his last to be written and published in a long lifetime, a day trip to explore the enigmatic Marabar Caves explodes into accusations of sexual assault. Forster’s beautifully rendered characters illuminate the tensions of British-occupied India and make A Passage to India a work not only of historical impact but of deep humanity. Of Forster’s masterworks, including A Room with a View, Howards End, and the long-suppressed Maurice, A Passage to India may well be the richest and most ambitious. The Guardian recently described it as “a strangely timeless achievement . . . eerily prescient on the subject of empire.”

26.  THE WINGS OF THE DOVE by Henry James

Published in 1902 and set amid the splendor of fashionable London drawing rooms and gilded Venetian palazzos, The Wings of the Dove concerns a pair of lovers who conspire to obtain the fortune of Milly, a doomed American heiress. But the naïve young woman becomes both their victim and their redeemer in James's meticulously designed drama of treachery and self-betrayal.  Writing in 1959, James Thurber described the book as “a kind of femme fatale of literature . . . a masterpiece.”

27.  THE AMBASSADORS by Henry James

Henry James’s 1903 novel, written at the peak of “The Master’s” powers, follows the trip of Lewis Lambert Strether to Europe in pursuit of Chad, his widowed fiancée’s supposedly wayward son. Charged with bringing back the young man to the family business, Lewis soon encounters unexpected complications and a world of subtlety previously unknown to him. A finely drawn portrait of a man’s awakening to life, The Ambassadors is a timeless masterpiece of James’s late period and the book that James himself considered his best.

28.  TENDER IS THE NIGHT by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Scott Fitzgerald’s final completed novel, Tender Is the Night, follows the charming American couple Dick and Nicole Diver—loosely based on real-life 1920s socialites Gerald and Sara Murphy—as they cavort around the French Riviera. One summer, Dick and Nicole befriend a young American actress named Rosemary Hoyt, but their idyllic life is threatened when the truth behind Dick and Nicole's marriage is revealed. Fitzgerald claimed that this was his favorite of all his works, writing in a friend’s copy, “If you liked The Great Gatsby, for God's sake read this. Gatsby was a tour de force but this is a confession of faith.”

29.  THE STUDS LONIGAN TRILOGY by James T. Farrell

Written during the Great Depression, these three novels (Young Lonigan; The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan; Judgment Day) follow their eponymous hero as he roams through raw, energetic, 1930s-era Chicago, complete with the American Nazi Party headquarters, the White Sox, and the stockyards. The first volume, Young Lonigan, was considered so incendiary when it was first published that it was issued in a wrapper identifying it as a “clinical document” to be read only by social workers and psychologists.

30.  THE GOOD SOLDIER by Ford Madox Ford

The Ashburnhams and the Dowells are wealthy, charming, and refined. They have been close friends for years. Their lives are apparently perfect. But in this short novel set just before World War I, nothing is what it seems. Told by an unreliable narrator, with a nonlinear plot, this portrait of Edwardian society is, says Jane Smiley, “a masterpiece, almost a perfect novel” that depicts “the world of Jane Austen a hundred years on, depopulated, lonely, and dark.”

31.  ANIMAL FARM by George Orwell

This short novel, set on an English farm, is an allegory about the Soviet Union and its transition from an idealistic workers’ revolution to a brutal dictatorship. The young pigs Snowball and Napoleon lead a revolution, ousting the farmer in favor of animal self-rule. Their new regime is based on one core principle: “All animals are equal.” Complete with a wise donkey, rebellious hens, and suspiciously urbane pigs, this book is considered one of the best satires of all time.

32.  THE GOLDEN BOWL by Henry James

The Golden Bowl is the story of the rich American Adam Verver, and his daughter, Maggie. The two fall in love—Adam with Maggie’s friend Charlotte, and Maggie with Prince Amerigo, an impoverished Italian prince—unaware that Charlotte and Prince Amerigo are former lovers. The story is one of passion, betrayal, and manipulation, told in James’s signature elaborate style. Gore Vidal wrote that The Golden Bowl “is a story radiant with the art of a master fulfilled; and dark with the profound knowledge of how force [in this case, money] is motor to all our lives.”

33.  SISTER CARRIE by Theodore Dreiser

Sister Carrie transformed the conventional “fallen woman” story into a bold and truly innovative piece of fiction when it appeared in 1900. Naïve young Caroline Meeber, a small-town girl seduced by the lure of the modern city, becomes the mistress of a traveling salesman and then of a saloon manager, who elopes with her to New York. Both its subject matter and Dreiser’s unsparing, nonjudgmental approach made Sister Carrie a controversial book in its time, and the work retains the power to shock readers today.

34.  A HANDFUL OF DUST by Evelyn Waugh

The title is a reference to a line from T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” (“I will show you fear in a handful of dust”) in this satire about a disaffected country squire who travels to the Brazilian jungle in order to find a meaningful life. In 2010 Time magazine named A Handful of Dust to its list of “All-Time 100 Best Novels” and wrote: “If this is Waugh at his bleakest, it’s also Waugh at his deepest, most poisonously funny.”

35.  AS I LAY DYING by William Faulkner

In this harrowing stream-of-consciousness novel, Faulkner tells the story of the Bundren family’s odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother. Narrated in turn by each of the family members—including Addie herself from beyond the grave—As I Lay Dying is a complex chorus of familial love and angst. Faulkner said of the novel that he “set out deliberately to write a tour-de-force,” and this family saga, which he wrote in just six weeks, certainly fits the bill.

36.  ALL THE KING’S MEN by Robert Penn Warren

Winner of the 1947 Pulitzer Prize, All the King’s Men is the story of the populist politician Willie Stark, as narrated by the reporter Jack Burden. Burden watches as Willie Stark rises to power, changing as he does from a naïve idealist to a charismatic, powerful, and corrupt state governor. Most people assume that Willie Stark was based on real-life politician Huey Long, a controversial senator who was assassinated in 1935, but Warren always disavowed any resemblance between the two.

37.  THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY by Thornton Wilder

Winner of the 1928 Pulitzer Prize, The Bridge of San Luis Rey takes a single event—a bridge collapsing on July 20, 1714—and expands it into a meditation on life and faith. A monk named Brother Juniper witnesses the collapse and, curious about why God would allow such a tragedy, decides to compile a book about the five people who died in an attempt to understand God’s purpose.  A novella that carries the emotional weight of a much longer book, The Bridge of San Luis Rey was a bestseller when it was published and has never been out of print.

38.  HOWARDS END by E.M. Forster

Howards End, a story about who would inhabit a charming old country house (and who, in a larger sense, would inherit England), was the novel that earned E. M. Forster recognition as a major writer. Centered around the conflict between the wealthy, materialistic Wilcox family and the cultured, idealistic Schlegel sisters—and informed by Forster’s famous dictum “Only connect”—it is full of tenderness. Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty is an homage to Howard’s End, with aspects of the plot and various characters drawn straight from Forster’s original.

39.  GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN by James Baldwin

Go Tell It on the Mountain, published in 1953, is Baldwin’s first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles one day in the life of a fourteen-year-old boy. Baldwin’s rendering of his protagonist’s spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves. “Mountain,” Baldwin said, “is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else.”

40.  THE HEART OF THE MATTER by Graham Greene

Major Henry Scobie is an assistant police commissioner for a West African colony. Disillusioned but compassionate, he leads a quiet existence married to a woman he does not love. But when a new police inspector and a young widow arrive in town, the resulting love triangles and dilemmas will up-end his life. Generally considered Greene’s masterpiece, The Heart of the Matter was an immediate bestseller, selling 300,000 copies in the UK alone. In 1948, The New York Times raved: “From first page to last, this record of one man's breakdown on a heat-drugged fever-coast makes its point as a crystal-clear allegory—and as an engrossing novel.”

41.  LORD OF THE FLIES by William Golding

A group of British schoolboys are marooned on an island with no grown-ups. At first, they enjoy their freedom. But the realization that there are no rules, and the ensuing struggle for order and dominance, transforms this book into a brutal story about human nature. Written while Golding was teaching at a boys’ grammar school, The Lord of the Flies was famously dismissed by an editor as an “absurd and uninteresting fantasy . . . Rubbish & dull. Pointless.” However, a younger editor at the same publishing house disagreed, and the book was published in 1954. Since then it has sold over 10 million copies.

42.  DELIVERANCE by James Dickey

Famously made into a 1972 film with Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight, this story of a weekend canoe trip gone horribly, horribly wrong won critical acclaim when it was first published. The New York Times Book Review praised it as “a novel that will curl your toes . . . Dickey's canoe rides to the limits of dramatic tension,” The New Yorker called it “a brilliant and breathtaking adventure,” and The New Republic called it “a tour de force.” It is impossible to put down and terrifying to read.

43.  A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME (series) by Anthony Powell

Inspired by the sixteenth-century painting by Nicolas Poussin, this series of novels chronicles one man’s life. Published from 1951 to 1975, these novels were critical darlings, with Arthur Schlesinger Jr. proclaiming them “an unsurpassed picture, at once gay and melancholy, of social and artistic life in Britain between the wars.” An excellent book for fans of Evelyn Waugh or Edward St. Aubyn’s “Patrick Melrose” novels.

44.  POINT COUNTER POINT by Aldous Huxley

Point Counter Point follows a large cast of characters, many based on people Huxley actually knew, as they argue and sleep with one another. The title references musical counterpoint, a compositional technique that relies on melodic interaction to make independent voices or chords sound harmonic together—and, similarly, Huxley attempted to create a harmonic whole with independent characters, instead of a unifying plot. The storylines are linked but not always easy to follow; still, it is a humorous if dry satire of 1920s intellectual life.

45.  THE SUN ALSO RISES by Ernest Hemingway

Perhaps the ultimate novel of the “Lost Generation,” The Sun Also Rises is the story of WWI veteran Jake Barnes, the beautiful and seductive Lady Brett Ashley, and the raucous café society of 1920s Paris. Written in Hemingway’s signature terse style, and populated by characters based on people Hemingway knew, the book came out to mixed reviews. Some critics found the characters unlikable, and older critics especially disliked Hemingway’s spare prose. Nevertheless, the book was a bestseller, making Hemingway famous, and it inspired a generation of readers and writers.

46.  THE SECRET AGENT by Joseph Conrad

One of Joseph Conrad's most accessible novels, The Secret Agent is the chilling story of a terrorist plot. Based loosely on the failed Greenwich bombing of 1894, this short novel follows  Adolf Verloc, who appears to be a successful businessman, happily married and living in London, but is in fact an anarchist spy for an unnamed country. The New York Times called The Secret Agent “the most brilliant novelistic study of terrorism as viewed from the blood-spattered outside.”

47.  NOSTROMO by Joseph Conrad

Originally published in 1904, Nostromo is considered Conrad's supreme achievement. Set in the imaginary South American republic of Costaguana, the novel reveals the effects of unbridled greed and imperialist interests on many different lives. Although each character's potential for good is ultimately corrupted, Nostromo underscores Conrad’s belief in fidelity, moral discipline, and the need for human communion. The author himself described the book as “an intense creative effort on what I suppose will remain my largest canvas.”

48.  THE RAINBOW by D.H. Lawrence

The Rainbow is the epic story of three generations of the Brangwens, a Midlands family. A visionary novel, it explores the complex sexual and psychological relationships between men and women in an increasingly industrialized world. Originally published in England in 1915, The Rainbow was the subject of an obscenity trial, as a result of which over a thousand copies were burned. Although it was available in the United States, it would be banned in England for many years.

49.  WOMEN IN LOVE by D.H. Lawrence

A sequel to The Rainbow, Women in Love is D. H. Lawrence’s magnificent exploration of human sexuality in the days surrounding World War I. The story of two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, Women in Love illuminates their characters and their relationships with the men that they love. The character of Ursula was based on Lawrence’s wife, Frieda, and Gudrun was loosely based on the writer Katherine Mansfield.

50.  TROPIC OF CANCER by Henry Miller

Often described as lewd, outrageous, and pornographic, Tropic of Cancer is the story of Henry Miller, a writer living in Paris. Blurring the line between fact and fiction, this novel was banned in the United States until an obscenity trial in 1961. The trial went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which overturned a lower court’s ruling in 1964, allowing the book to be published in the United States. Norman Mailer called Tropic of Cancer “one of the ten or twenty great novels of our century, a revolution in consciousness equal to The Sun Also Rises.”

51.  THE NAKED AND THE DEAD by Norman Mailer

Based on Mailer’s own experiences during World War II, The Naked and the Dead is the story of a U.S. platoon in the Philippines. Mailer’s decision to use a range of characters instead of a single hero was inspired by Leo Tolstoy; Mailer used to read parts of Anna Karenina every morning, before he worked on his own writing. Perhaps as a result, he felt that The Naked and the Dead was “the greatest war novel since War and Peace.”

52.  PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT by Philip Roth

A long monologue delivered by Alexander Portnoy to his psychologist, many U.S. libraries banned the book because of its unbelievably frank and incredibly detailed accounts of the female form, masturbation, and fellatio (among other things). The literary critic Irving Howe dismissed the book as “vulgar” and claimed that “the cruelest thing anyone can do with Portnoy’s Complaint is to read it twice.” But the novel was a literary sensation, selling millions of copies and making Philip Roth a household name overnight.

53.  PALE FIRE by Vladimir Nabokov

Pale Fire is a stylistic masterpiece in true Nabokovian fashion: a 999-line poem by reclusive genius John Shade with an adoring foreword and commentary by Shade’s self-styled Dr. Boswell, Charles Kinbote, adding up to a satiric novel of literature and intrigue. Nabokov loved wordplay, and this novel shows his skills at their finest. While Time initially dismissed Pale Fire as “an exercise in agility – or perhaps bewilderment,” this did not prevent the magazine from naming it one of their top 100 English-language novels, and it remains one of Nabokov’s most popular works to date.

54.  LIGHT IN AUGUST by William Faulkner

Light in August, a novel about hopeful perseverance in the face of mortality, features some of Faulkner’s most memorable characters: guileless, dauntless Lena Grove, in search of the father of her unborn child; Reverend Gail Hightower, who is plagued by visions of Confederate horsemen; and Joe Christmas, a desperate, enigmatic drifter consumed by his mixed ancestry. The book was originally called Dark House, but Faulkner changed it to Light in August, based on a comment that his wife made.

55.  ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac

A loosely fictionalized version of Kerouac’s road trips with Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty, in the novel), this novel’s tone captures the wild rhythm of life on the road. Jack Kerouac described On the Road as “a journey through post-Whitman America to FIND that America and to FIND the inherent goodness in American man. It was really a story about 2 Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God. And we found him.” When Kerouac delivered his 120-foot-long scroll of a manuscript to his publisher, Robert Giroux, he supposedly unfurled the scroll and “tossed it right across the office like a piece of celebration confetti.”

56.  THE MALTESE FALCON by Dashiell Hammett

When Sam Spade is hired by the sultry, gorgeous Miss Wonderly to track down her little sister, he does not realize that he’s been brought into the search for an incredibly valuable figurine of a falcon. But as events unfold (and the body count rises), it becomes clear that Spade can trust no one—least of all his beautiful client. The Maltese Falcon is the detective novel that introduced the archetype of the world-weary, cynical private detective to a wide audience, and the 1941 movie based on the novel (starring Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor) is considered the first major film noir. 

57.  PARADE’S END by Ford Madox Ford

Set before, during, and slightly after World War I, Parade’s End is the story of Christopher Tietjens, whose decency is consistently taken advantage of by his beautiful and devious wife Sylvia. When Tietjens meets Valentine Wannop, a suffragette with an independent spirit, the stage is set for a love triangle that touches on class, money, and a changing world.

58.  THE AGE OF INNOCENCE by Edith Wharton

Newland Archer saw little to envy in the marriages of his friends, yet he prided himself that in May Welland he had found the perfect woman—tender and impressionable, with equal purity of mind and manners. Enter Countess Olenska, a woman of quick wit sharpened by experience, determined to find freedom in divorce. Against his judgment, Newland is drawn to the socially ostracized Ellen Olenska. He knows that he can expect stability and comfort in a marriage with sweet-tempered May. But what new worlds could he discover with Ellen? Written with elegance and wry precision, this is a Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece and a tragic love story.

59.  ZULEIKA DOBSON by Max Beerbohm

Written in 1911, just before World War I, the various absurdities of plot and all of the characters are best seen as a satire of Downton Abbey–era society, class, and wealth. A beautiful young woman goes to Oxford and meets the handsome, rich, and snobbish Duke of Dorset. He proposes, and Zuleika, believing that she can only love someone who doesn’t love her, refuses him. More men fall in love with Zuleika, and chaos is unleashed in suitably ridiculous, Oscar Wilde­–ish fashion. The Guardian called Zuleika Dobson “the finest, and darkest kind of satire: as intoxicating as champagne, as addictive as morphine.”

60.  THE MOVIEGOER by Walker Percy

Binx Bolling is a young Korean War veteran, adrift in his own life. He goes to movies and has a series of meaningless flings with his secretaries. But in this laconic novel, this premise expands to become a meditation on emotion and self-examination. Walker Percy won the National Book Award for The Moviegoer, beating the following nominees, among others: Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger, and Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates.

61.  DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP by Willa Cather

Based on the life of Jean-Baptiste Lamy, the first archbishop of the (newly created) diocese of New Mexico, Death Comes for the Archbishop portrays the clash between Old World, New World, and Native American culture. Cather’s love for American land shines through the beautiful prose as the reader moves from scene to scene, following hero Jean Marie Latour as he wrestles with corruption and the requirements of his mission.

62.  FROM HERE TO ETERNITY by James Jones

Diamond Head, Hawaii, 1941: Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt is a champion welterweight and a fine bugler. But when he refuses to join the company's boxing team, he gets “the treatment” that may break him or kill him. First Sgt. Milton Anthony Warden knows how to soldier better than almost anyone, yet he’s risking his career to have an affair with the commanding officer's wife.  In this magnificent but brutal classic of a soldier’s life, James Jones portrays the courage, violence, and passions of men and women in the most important American novel to come out of World War II, a masterpiece that captures as no other the honor and savagery of men.

63.  THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLE by John Cheever

Winner of the 1958 National Book Award, The Wapshot Chronicle is the story of Moses and Coverly Wapshot, two brothers growing up in the fictional New England town of St. Botolphs, Massachusetts. Both brothers wrestle with the lessons and expectations of their father, and both struggle to create their own identity away from St. Botolphs. A story of eccentric, warm characters in an archetypal Massachusetts fishing community, The Wapshot Chronicle established John Cheever as a novelist (he had previously focused on short stories) and a humorist.

64.  THE CATCHER IN THE RYE by J.D. Salinger

The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is Holden Caulfield, a sixteen-year-old who leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. As we spend time in his head, we see him experience the pain and pleasure of adolescence, and the particular ache of finding one’s place in the world. Holden Caulfield made his first appearance in the short story “Slight Rebellion off Madison,” which was published in The New Yorker in 1946. Among the book’s many fans is Bill Gates, who proclaimed it his favorite read.

65.  A CLOCKWORK ORANGE by Anthony Burgess

In A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess depicts a dystopian future where gangs of teenage criminals rule the streets; among them a fifteen-year-old “droog” named Alex. Narrated in a brutal invented slang that brilliantly renders his and his friends’ social pathology, Alex’s story is a frightening fable about good and evil, and the meaning of human freedom. Burgess has offered several explanations for the meaning of the novel’s mysterious title—from East London Cockney slang to a pun on the Malay word “orang,” meaning “man,” to an oxymoronic juxtaposition of the mechanical and the organic.

66.  OF HUMAN BONDAGE by W. Somerset Maugham

Originally published in 1915, this story of infatuation begins with Philip Carey, a sensitive boy raised by a religious aunt and uncle. Philip yearns for adventure, and at eighteen leaves home to pursue a career as an artist in Paris. When he returns to London to study medicine, he meets the androgynous but alluring Mildred and begins a love affair that will change the course of his life. “Here is a novel of the utmost importance,” wrote Theodore Dreiser on the book's publication. “One feels as though one were sitting before a splendid Shiraz of priceless texture and intricate weave, admiring, feeling, responding sensually to its colors and tones.”

67.  HEART OF DARKNESS by Joseph Conrad

Originally published in 1902, and written several years after Conrad’s grueling sojourn in the Belgian Congo, the novel tells the story of Marlow, a seaman who undertakes his own journey into the African jungle to find the tormented white trader Kurtz. Rich in irony and spellbinding prose, Heart of Darkness is a complex meditation on colonialism, evil, and the thin line between civilization and barbarity. The basis for Francis Ford Coppola’s movie Apocalypse Now, Heart of Darkness remains one of the most searing and relevant books of the twentieth century.

68.  MAIN STREET by Sinclair Lewis

When Carol Milford marries Will Kennicott, she moves to his small hometown of Gopher Prairie but is quickly dismayed by the backwardness of her new surroundings. She endeavors to reform the town and the people around her in this satire about the rapid modernization of early twentieth-century America. Lewis Mumford observed: “Young people had grown up in this environment, suffocated, stultified, helpless, but unable to find any reason for their spiritual discomfort. Mr. Lewis released them.”

69.  THE HOUSE OF MIRTH by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton never wrote a more compelling or tragic heroine than the beautiful Lily Bart, whose attempts to navigate turn-of-the-twentieth-century society founder on her lack of the only commodity that matters: money. As Lily is brought low by circumstance, Wharton brings to life the alluring, dangerous, and stifling world of Old New York.  Published in 1905, The House of Mirth is the first of Edith Wharton’s major novels—Ethan Frome, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence and it remains a memorably vibrant, and still wrenchingly heartbreaking, masterpiece.

70.  THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET by Lawrence Durrell

Set in Alexandria, Egypt, these interlinked novels explore the city over the 1930s and 1940s.  Justine was published in 1957, Balthazar and Mountolive in 1958, and Clea in 1960. The novels follow the same characters, but from different perspectives and different times—a tactic that Durell claimed was inspired by Einstein’s theory of relativity (which gives you some idea of his ambitions for this tetralogy).

71.  A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA by Richard Hughes

Set in the nineteenth century, this novel revolves around six children who are seized by pirates on a voyage from Jamaica to England. What begins as an adventure becomes a darker story about the childrens’ naïve lack of morality. In a 1969 interview with The New Yorker, Hughes claimed he was inspired by an old lady’s description of being captured by surprisingly considerate pirates as a child. Hughes commented, “This was a new idea—that pirates were sentimental about children. I began to wonder what would happen if a group of pirates were suddenly landed with a group of children. In the ensuing conflict, which side would go under?”

72.  A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS by V.S. Naipaul

Mohun Biswas is born with an extra finger and inadvertently causes his own father’s death. Affable but unlucky, Mr. Biswas grows up, gets a job, and inadvertently proposes to a woman (whose family accepts on her behalf). What he really wants, though, is a home of his own. The novel’s premise is simple, but the language is rich, textured, and humorous. Naipaul, who would win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, confessed: “Of all my books A House for Mr. Biswas is the one closest to me. It is the most personal, created out of what I saw and felt as a child. It also contains, I believe, some of my funniest writing.”

73.  THE DAY OF THE LOCUST by Nathanael West

A panoramic account of the desperate ambitions, and equally desperate miseries, of an array of Los Angeles denizens at the height of the Hollywood studio era, this 1939 novel is as unsparing as it is compulsively readable. With a cast of characters including an avaricious, only marginally talented starlet, an innocuous-seeming retiree under whose dull surface violence lurks, and the painter whose vision of a “Burning of Los Angeles” canvas imagines the apocalypse of the American Dream, The Day of the Locust is a grisly masterpiece—a “nightmare of lust and violence, of distortions and cruel comedy,” as The New York Times described it.

74.  A FAREWELL TO ARMS by Ernest Hemingway

Frederic Henry is an American paramedic in the Italian Army during World War I. He meets Catherine Barkley, a nurse, and they fall in love. Loosely based on Hemingway’s relationship with Red Cross nurse Agnes von Kurowsky, A Farewell to Arms was censored for its expletives and frank descriptions of Frederic and Catherine’s romance. Fun fact: When Ernest Hemingway sent a draft of A Farewell to Arms to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Fitzgerald wrote back with ten pages of suggestions and possible edits. Hemingway’s response? “Kiss my ass.”

75.  SCOOP by Evelyn Waugh

A send-up of tabloid journalism in the 1930s, Waugh drew inspiration for Scoop from his time working as a special correspondent for the Daily Mail. In the novel, the two biggest newspapers, The Daily Beast and The Daily Brute, report on the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. As the newspapers (and their megalomaniacal owners) vie for supremacy, they create news as needed and report the war as they see fit. Even The Atlantic admitted, “There is perhaps no more uproarious burlesque of the workings of the press.” This is a wickedly funny novel that feels all too relevant in the age of Internet journalism.

76.  THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE by Muriel Spark

“Give me a girl at an impressionable age,” the title character boasts, “and she is mine for life.” The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie tells the story of a glamorous, unconventional schoolteacher and her favorite students, who worship but ultimately betray her.  Upon its 1961 publication, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which is frank in its exploration of sexuality, was deemed “not read-aloudable” by the audiobook industry, a code for “too X-rated.”

77.  FINNEGANS WAKE by James Joyce

When James Joyce finished writing Ulysses—his long, complicated masterpiece about one day in the life of Dublin—he decided to write Finnegans Wake: a long, complicated novel about one night in the life of Dublin. A nonlinear dream narrative, the first sentence of Finnegans Wake reads: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.” The book defies summary, though many critics and scholars have tried. Still, Joyce maintained that Finnegans Wake made sense—he told his biographer that he could “justify every line of this book.”

78.  KIM by Rudyard Kipling

Kim is the tale of an Irish orphan raised as an Indian vagabond on the rough streets of colonial Lahore: a world of high adventure, mystic quests, and secret games of espionage played out between the Russians and the British in the mountain passages of Asia. Kim is torn between his allegiance to the ascetic lama, who becomes his beloved mentor, and the temptations of those who want to recruit him as a spy in the “great game” of imperial conflict. In a series of thrilling escapades, he crisscrosses India on missions both spiritual and military before the two forces in his life converge in a dramatic climax in the high Himalayas.

79.  A ROOM WITH A VIEW by E.M. Forster

Published in 1908 to both critical and popular acclaim, A Room with a View is a whimsical comedy of manners that owes more to Jane Austen than perhaps any other of Forster’s works. The central character is a muddled young girl named Lucy Honeychurch, who runs away from the man who stirs her emotions, remaining engaged to a rich snob. Forster considered it his “nicest” novel, and today it remains probably his most well liked. Its moral is utterly simple: Throw away your etiquette book and listen to your heart.

80.  BRIDESHEAD REVISITED by Evelyn Waugh

In post–World War I England, a young middle-class man is infatuated with an aristocratic family and their glittering but decaying way of life, particularly the family’s flamboyant younger son and beautiful older daughter.  There are many autobiographical facts in Waugh’s life that are tantalizingly close to elements of Brideshead, but the novel opens with this author’s note: “I am not I; thou art not he or she; they are not they.”

81.  THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH by Saul Bellow

“I am an American, Chicago born, and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted.” So begins The Adventures of Augie March, a modern picaresque (a genre of literature that follows a loveable rogue through a series of misadventures) that won the 1954 National Book Award is considered a contender for the Great American Novel Apparently the novel was very easy to write—Saul claimed that “the book just came to me. All I had to do was be there with buckets to catch it.”

82.  ANGLE OF REPOSE by Wallace Stegner

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize when it was published in 1971, Wallace Stegner’s American classic centers on Lyman Ward, a historian who relates a fictionalized biography of his pioneer grandparents. Through a combination of research, memory, and exaggeration, Ward voices ideas concerning the relationship between history and the present, art and life, parents and children, husbands and wives. Set in many parts of the West, Angle of Repose is a story of discovery—personal, historical, and geographical—that endures as Wallace Stegner's master

1.  THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS by Henry Adams

Written by the historian, novelist, world traveler, caustic observer, and informal presidential advisor, The Education of Henry Adams was privately printed in 1907 and posthumously published in 1918 to great acclaim. It was a popular bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize. If you read nothing else, check out pages 17 to the top of page 19 (in the Modern Library edition) for a study in concision, empathy, and cutting criticism in his narrative portrait of his grandmother, “The Madam,” wife of John Quincy Adams and daughter-in-law of the “stern” and “efficient” Abigail Adams.

2. THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE by William James

The Varieties of Religious Experience was an immediate bestseller upon its publication in June 1902. James discusses conversion, repentance, mysticism, and fears of punishment in the hereafter—as well as the religious experiences of such diverse thinkers as Voltaire, Whitman, Emerson, Luther, Tolstoy, and others. The result is a book that encourages readers to ask new questions rather than feel that the old ones have been answered.

3. UP FROM SLAVERY by Booker T. Washington

Published to great acclaim in 1901, this memoir helped make Washington the most prominent black spokesman of his time. Washington vividly recounts his birth into slavery, his yearning for education, and his vision of an educational center for black students. A shrewd politician and a tireless promoter of the importance of education, Washington was devoted to advancing the cause of racial equality. On reading this classic autobiography, Langston Hughes noted, “[Washington’s] story of himself, as half-seen by himself, is one of America’s most revealing books.”

4.  A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN by Virginia Woolf

Based on a series of lectures Woolf delivered at Cambridge in 1928, A Room of One’s Own argues that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of great books that could have been written by women—if they had been given the time, means, education, and space that have always been granted to men. A brilliant, early feminist text, Woolf argues for a woman’s right to create, rather than be relegated to the role of domestic angel or idealized beauty.

5.  SILENT SPRING by Rachel Carson

First published in The New Yorker in 1962, Silent Spring documented the many environmental problems caused by pesticides, from alarming mutations to cancer in human beings. As a result of Carson’s compelling argument, as well as public outcry, the U.S. government banned the use of DDT (a synthetic pesticide), and the EPA was formed. Sir David Attenborough (narrator of Planet Earth and other documentaries) believes that Silent Spring and The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin are the two books that have most changed the scientific world.

6. SELECTED ESSAYS, 1917-1932 by T. S. Eliot

Witty, learned, and filled with quips like “It is a question of some nicety to decide how much must be read of any particular poet,” this collection of literary criticism from T. S. Eliot, the author of “The Wasteland” and  other poems, provides insight into Eliot’s literary theory with essays on Seneca, Shakespeare, Dante, William Blake, and Charles Dickens. This is an insightful—if slightly academic—take on Western literary tradition by one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century.

7.  THE DOUBLE HELIX by James D. Watson

The autobiographical account of the discovery of the structure of DNA, The Double Helix is unusual because of its memoir-like and colorful approach. Harvard University Press declined to publish it for that very reason, while other readers criticized Watson for dismissing Rosalind Franklin (whose data Watson used).  Nonetheless, The New York Times said that “anyone seeking to understand modern biology and genomics could do much worse than start with the discovery of the structure of DNA, on which almost everything else is based.”

8. SPEAK, MEMORY by Vladimir Nabokov

Written by the author of Lolita and Pale Fire, this memoir traces Nabokov’s life from his childhood up until his emigration to the United States. Nabokov describes his aristocratic background, his lifelong love of butterflies, his education in Cambridge, a young love affair, and meeting his wife, Vera, in his signature rhapsodic style. John Updike, author of The Witches of Eastwick and the Rabbit series, wrote that “Nabokov has never written English better than in these reminiscences. . . Nabokov makes of his past a brilliant icon—bejewelled, perspectiveless, untouchable.”

9. THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE by H. L. Mencken

Published in 1919, this book defends American English as a language in its own right, instead of a perversion of British English. Mencken also celebrated the fact that American English was, despite the massive sprawl of the United States, a single dialect: “There may be slight differences in pronunciation and intonation—a Southern softness, a Yankee drawl, a Western burr—but in the words they use and the way they use them all Americans, even the least tutored, follow the same line. . . . A Boston street-car conductor could go to work in Chicago or San Francisco without running the slightest risk of misunderstanding his new fares.”

10.  THE GENERAL THEORY OF EMPLOYMENT, INTEREST, AND MONEY by John Maynard Keynes

Keynes departed from classical economics by suggesting that a free market required government structure to operate efficiently. In doing so, The General Theory made economics and economists socially relevant and introduced the idea that economics and politics were intertwined. Keynes argued against the “long run” view of economics, quipping that “this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task, if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us, that when the storm is long past, the ocean is flat again.” In 1971, President Nixon stated: “We are all Keynesians now.”

11.  THE LIVES OF A CELL by Lewis Thomas

What does the mitochondria do?  How are men similar to giant clams? How does language affect science? Weaving together music, biology, and medicine, this collection of essays tackles these questions in an introduction to science that is also a pleasure to read. When it was first published in 1974, Joyce Carol Oates praised Thomas for his “effortless, beautifully toned style” and described Thomas’s  essays themselves as “undogmatic, graceful, gently persuasive . . . insist[ing] upon the interrelatedness of all life.” The book would go on to receive two National Book Awards.

12.  THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY by Frederick Jackson Turner

In this hugely influential essay, Turner introduced the idea that the frontier—from the first Puritan settlers to the pioneers—shaped American democracy. Turner suggested that Americans had essentially “evolved” from a more European mindset to a distinctly American one, and argued that this evolution was a product of the American population moving west.  The frontier mindset was distrustful of centralized authorities and hierarchies, more violent, and less artistic—and that, Turner thought, explained a great deal about the United States.

13.  BLACK BOY by Richard Wright

Originally titled American Hunger, this book is an autobiographical account of life in the Jim Crow South. Renowned for its radical portrayal of the realities of African American life under the oppression of Jim Crow, Black Boy was an instant success, a landmark achievement that earned Wright an audience unlike any other African American writer of the time commanded. Wright's powerful, pressing work foretold his eventual ascendance to being one of the most important American authors of the twentieth century, and paved the way for authors like James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lorraine Hansberry after him

14.  ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL by E. M. Forster

A series of lectures on the essential parts of the novel, delivered in 1927 by the author of Howards End, A Room with a View, A Passage to India, Where Angels Fear to Tread, and others. Forster distinguishes between “flat” vs. “round” characters, discusses the importance of rhythm, and explains the difference between plot and story: “ ‘The King died, and then the Queen died’ is a story; ‘the King died and then the Queen died of grief’ is a plot.”

15.  THE CIVIL WAR by Shelby Foote

Shelby Foote’s tremendous, sweeping narrative of a war that lasted four long, bitter years begins with Jefferson Davis’s resignation from the United States Senate and Abraham Lincoln’s departure from Springfield for the national capital. These two leaders are only the first of scores of exciting personalities that in effect make The Civil War a multiple biography set against the crisis of an age. When the novelist Walker Percy read the final book, he wrote to Foote: “It’s a noble work. I’m still staggered by the size of the achievement. . . . It is The Iliad.”

16.  THE GUNS OF AUGUST by Barbara Tuchman

In this Pulitzer Prize–winning account, renowned historian Barbara W. Tuchman re-creates the first month of World War I: thirty days in the summer of 1914 that determined the course of the conflict, the century, and ultimately our present world. Beginning with the funeral of Edward VII and spectacularly peopled by the war’s key players, Tuchman’s magnum opus is a classic for the ages. The Chicago Tribune called it “more dramatic than fiction . . . a magnificent narrative—beautifully organized, elegantly phrased, skillfully paced and sustained.”

17.  THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND by Isaiah Berlin

When Isaiah Berlin died in 1997, one of his obituaries declared him “the world’s greatest talker, the century’s most inspired reader, [and] one of the finest minds of our time.” The Proper Study of Mankind brings together essays on everything from Machiavelli’s morality, Tolstoy’s theory of history, the meaning of liberty, and his own conversations with the great poet Anna Akhmatova. The New York Review of Books praised Berlin as the “everyman's guide to everything exciting in the history of ideas.”

18.  THE NATURE AND DESTINY OF MAN by Reinhold Niebuhr

A collection of theological lectures delivered by Niebuhr in 1939, The Nature and Destiny of Man tackles the Christian concept of human nature, the powerlessness of man, and Christianity’s impact on human history. Delivered just before the outbreak of World War II, these lectures were so influential that Cold War containment policies and aspects of realpolitik can be traced back to them.  Highly recommended for fans of ontology.

19.  NOTES OF A NATIVE SON by James Baldwin

Written by the author of Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, Another Country, and The Fire Next Time, this series of essays confronts the issue of race in both the United States and Europe.  Reviewing the collection for the New York Times, the poet Langston Hughes wrote: “Few American writers handle words more effectively in the essay form than James Baldwin. . . . I much prefer Notes of a Native Son to his novel Go Tell It on the Mountain.”

20.  THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS by Gertrude Stein

A faux-memoir told in the voice of Stein’s partner, Alice B. Toklas, the wryly titled The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is an account of life in the avant-garde and love on the Left Bank. The Autobiography became a runaway success for its portrayal of life as, and among, artists, invoking a cast of characters like Picasso, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, which cemented its legacy as a classic account of an American in Paris. Hemingway called it a “damned pitiful book,” but many cherish it today as a testament of love to Alice, Gertrude’s enduring muse.

21.  THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE by William Strunk and E. B. White

William Strunk Jr. was a professor at Cornell University when he self-published a simple guide to American grammar in 1919. Decades later, Strunk’s former student E. B. White worked with Strunk to revise the text; the resulting book was published in 1959 and it swiftly became a revered guide to grammar and usage. Dorothy Parker quipped: “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”

22.  AN AMERICAN DILEMMA by Gunnar Myrdal

Published in 1944 and nearly 1,500 pages long, An American Dilemma is a thorough study of race and democracy in America. Funded by the Carnegie Corporation and written by a Swedish American (in an attempt to find an unbiased author), the book details the many ways in which racism impedes African-American success and social mobility. Myrdal came to the happy conclusion that democracy would triumph over racism—and, while that day of ultimate triumph is still TBA, Myrdal’s book was cited in the landmark case of Brown v Board of Education.

23.  PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell

A three-volume examination of formal logic, this text is most popularly known for proving that 1+1=2 and was hailed by the poet T.S. Eliot as “perhaps a greater contribution to our language than [it is] to mathematics.” Principia Mathematica created a new kind of mathematical notation—one that all mathematicians could use—as well as fostering connections between mathematics and philosophy. A fundamental text, but not a fun read. 

24.  THE MISMEASURE OF MAN by Stephen Jay Gould

Published in 1981, The Mismeasure of Man argues that the notion of an IQ—that intelligence can be accurately measured—is not only wrong, but often classist and racist. This book, part theory, part history of science, explores how the definition of intelligence has been shaped by unconscious bias and sloppy conflations of correlation and causation—effectively calling out scientists for limp reasoning and forcing their facts to fit their hypotheses. Gould reserved special scorn for The Bell Curve, a bestseller which argued that poverty was the result of inherited lower intelligence. Recommended reading for those opposed to eugenics.

25.  THE MIRROR AND THE LAMP by Meyer Howard Abrams

A work of scholarly analysis, The Mirror and the Lamp explores the difference between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English literature. The “mirror” is a metaphor for the eighteenth-century approach, which held that literature should reflect the real world. The “lamp” is a metaphor for the approach of the Romantics, who believed that the soul of the author should illuminate their work. If you’ve ever wanted to know how John Locke’s notion of mind-dependent secondary qualities influenced Wordsworth, this is the book for you.

26.  THE ART OF THE SOLUBLE by Peter B. Medawar

Dubbed “the wittiest of all science writers” (Richard Dawkins) and “perhaps the greatest science writer of his generation” (New Scientist), Sir Peter Medawar won a Nobel Prize in 1960 for his work on skin grafts. The Art of the Soluble is a meditation on the joys of science that also compares scientists who prioritize data over hypotheses to “cows grazing on the pasture of knowledge.” Equal parts snark and brilliant observation.

27.  THE ANTS by Bert Hoelldobler and Edward O. Wilson

Winner of the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, this scientific textbook details everything you ever wanted to know (and then some) about ants. The Ants received rave reviews from nonscientists, with The Chicago Tribune calling it “a monumental achievement,” and The New York Times Book Review noting that “science is rarely good literature. The Ants is an exalting exception.” At 746 pages, it’s a long read but—if you like ants—a riveting one.

28.  A THEORY OF JUSTICE by John Rawls

Regarded as the twentieth century’s most important work of political philosophy, A Theory of Justice explores how a modern civil society can be just and fair to as many of its citizens as possible. A Theory of Justice was widely reviewed and discussed when it was published in 1971, with many critics comparing it to the work of Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  Writing in Civilization, Will Blythe praised “the simple carpentry of its arguments, its egalitarian leanings, and its preoccupation with fairness” and claimed that “A Theory of Justice is as American a book as, say, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

29.  ART AND ILLUSION by Ernest H. Gombrich

“Works of art are not mirrors,” Gombrich wrote, “but they share with mirrors that elusive magic of transformation which is hard to put into words.” Nevertheless, Gombrich tried to do just that in this exploration of how and why art changes over time. Blending the history of art with a scientific theory of perception, Gombrich writes crisply and clearly about a wide range of topics, including (but not limited to) Ancient Greek society, Renaissance art, and how artists develop style. A useful book if you’ve ever wondered why babies in Medieval paintings look nothing like babies in Renaissance paintings.  

30.  THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS by E. P. Thompson

Published in 1963, Thompson’s book focuses on the working class of the Industrial Revolution: the weavers, artisans, and croppers whose collective class identity, he argues, was formed during this time. Thompson’s conclusions were highly controversial, since hypothesizing about the hopes and dreams of an entire socioeconomic class is tricky business. But by choosing to focus on the story of a class, rather than an individual with power and clout, Thompson changed how history is studied. An excellent book for readers interested in mass political identity.

31.  THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK by W.E.B. Du Bois

When first published in 1903, The Souls of Black Folk redefined the history of the black experience in America and introduced the now famous “problem of the color line.” Today it ranks as one of the most influential and resonant works in the history of American thought. It was so contentious when first published that the Nashville Banner warned its readers that “This book is dangerous for the Negro to read, for it will only incite discontent and fill his imagination with things that do not exist, or things that should not bear upon his mind.”

32.  PRINCIPIA ETHICA by G. E. Moore

Regarded among philosophers as a revolutionary guide to ethics and logic, this knotty text defines right acts as those acts that produce the most good, and also states that “good” is indefinable. Filled with sentences like, “Philosophers are constantly endeavoring to prove that ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ will answer questions, to which neither answer is correct, owing to the fact that what they have before their minds is not one question, but several, to some of which the true answer is ‘No,’ to others ‘Yes.’” 

33.  PHILOSOPHY AND CIVILIZATION by John Dewey

A collection of eighteen essays by one of the most influential minds in twentieth-century education reform. Dewey wrote extensively about the importance of educating children in order to advance civilization, and feared that American philosophy was hampered by its reliance on borrowed ideas and borrowed institutions. Though copies are now hard to find, you might agree with the review in the January 1934 edition of The International Journal of Ethics, which declared this book “an imaginative delight.”

34.  ON GROWTH AND FORM by D'Arcy Thompson

Written in 1917, this heavy tome—over 1,100 pages—introduced many readers to the field of mathematic biology. Examining everything from soap bubbles to molluscs to humans, Thompson explores how living things grow and, more amazingly, why they take a particular shape when they do. Scientists, architects, and anthropologists alike have all praised the book for its intellectual daring, though the science writer Phillip Ball noted that “like Newton’s Principia, D’Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form is a book more often cited than read.” 

35.  IDEAS AND OPINIONS by Albert Einstein

A collection of the essays, letters, speeches, and interviews of Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions provides a quick glimpse into the mind of one of the most brilliant men of all time. Discussing everything from classic literature to Marie Curie to explanations of general relativity, this book brings a reader into close contact with Einstein’s genius, his wide-ranging interests, and even his sense of humor.

36.  THE AGE OF JACKSON by Arthur Schlesinger by Jr.

Winner of the 1946 Pulitzer Prize for History, The Age of Jackson was praised by The New York Times as “a remarkable piece of analytical history, full of vitality, rich in insights and new facts, and casting a broad shaft of illumination over one of the most interesting periods of our national life.” (It has since been criticized for failing to discuss slavery and the plight of Native Americans.) Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. would later serve as a Special Assistant to President John F. Kennedy and would win another Pulitzer Prize for A Thousand Days, his book about JFK’s presidency.

37.  THE MAKING OF THE ATOMIC BOMB by Richard Rhodes

A character-driven narrative about the history of the atomic bomb, from the nineteenth century to Nagasaki, this nonfiction classic reads like a compelling novel (it opens with Leo Szilard, the scientist who patented the nuclear reactor, being grumpy about the rain in London). Isaac Asimov described The Making of the Atomic Bomb as “the best, the richest, and the deepest description of the development of physics in the first half of this century that I have yet read, and it is certainly the most enjoyable.” Could you wish for a better recommendation?

38.  BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON by Rebecca West

Born in 1892, Rebecca West was a British journalist, early feminist, and writer. The famously witty George Bernard Shaw claimed that “Rebecca West could handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could and much more savagely” and President Truman called her “the world’s best reporter.” Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is West’s combined history and travelogue of modern-day Yugoslavia, based on a six-week journey she made in 1937. West dedicated the book “To my friends in Yugoslavia, who are now all dead or enslaved.” (The Nazis invaded Yugoslavia shortly after she left.) Larry McMurtry, the author of Lonesome Dove, wrote “there are only a few great travel books. Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is one.”

39.  AUTOBIOGRAPHIES by W. B. Yeats

Autobiographies brings together six volumes of Yeats’s personal memoirs, each one detailing a different period of his life. From his Reveries over Childhood and Youth to his 1923 Nobel Prize lecture, the Autobiographies lay bare the inner thoughts of this famous Anglo-Irish poet. The Autobiographies do roam from subject to subject, but readers who are fond of Yeats’s poetry may be interested in gaining an in-depth understanding of the man.

40.  SCIENCE AND CIVILIZATION IN CHINA by Joseph Needham

Joseph Needham was a well-known historian and biochemist when he began working on this series of books in 1954. Over the course of fifty years and seven volumes (the most recent volume was published in 2004), Joseph Needham and his research team sought to understand the long history of Chinese science, mathematics, astronomy, nautical technology, mechanical engineering, windmills, aeronautics, civil engineering, metallurgy, botany, physiological alchemy, and printing. More textbook than beach read.

41.  GOODBYE TO ALL THAT by Robert Graves

A classic of World War I literature that is a memoir of childhood and a farewell to the pre-WWI way of life. Graves’s honest account of trench warfare, which faithfully records the heroism and brutality of military life, was extremely unpopular with the reading public. One contemporaneous reader wrote to Graves: “You are a discredit to the Service, disloyal to your comrades and typical of that miserable breed which tries to gain notoriety by belittling others.” 

42.  HOMAGE TO CATALONIA by George Orwell

A personal account of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), written by the author of 1984 and Animal Farm. Orwell was thirty-three when he traveled to Spain to fight against the nationalist and fascist forces led by General Franco. Homage to Catalonia depicts the evils of both sides of the war, the filth and the grime, the idealism and the intrigue. According to the historian Raymond Carr: “The Spanish Civil war produced a spate of bad literature. Homage to Catalonia is one of the few exceptions and the reason is simple. Orwell was determined to set down the truth as he saw it.”

43.  THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN by Mark Twain

Dictated during the last years of his life, The Autobiography of Mark Twain is more like a transcription of a standup routine than a traditional memoir. Filled with scathing, winding anecdotes—many of which Twain did not want published until he had been dead for a century—The Autobiography is Mark Twain in exactly, precisely his own words, from his concerns about money to his dislike of Theodore Roosevelt and everything in between.

44.  CHILDREN OF CRISIS by Robert Coles

A Pulitzer Prize–winning series of interviews with American children, Children of Crisis focuses on how children of different ages, races, and social classes confront change and construct personal identities. In his attempt to “evoke, apprehend, and come to terms with the psychological realities of particular men, women, and children,” Robert Coles lived with the migrant workers, urban poor, and sharecroppers whose children he interviewed, and his study destroyed long-held stereotypes about these men and women. 

45.  A STUDY OF HISTORY by Arnold J. Toynbee

Toynbee traces the rise and fall of nineteen different civilizations in this twelve-volume, 7,000- page work of history. Arguing that civilizations arise out of society-wide responses to challenges, Toynbee attempted to create a universal theory of civilizations, identifying and labeling different phases. The first volume was published in 1934, and the last in 1961; this monumental effort was hailed by Clifton Fadiman as the book “most assured of being read a hundred years from now.”  (We’ll let you, the reader, be the judge of that.)

46.  THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY by John Kenneth Galbraith

The Affluent Society tackles how the post-WWII American economy was making the rich richer, yet keeping the poor just as poor.  Galbraith was a committed capitalist who also argued for a government willing to invest in roads, schools, and hospitals as well as businesses. Ultimately, Galbraith was interested in finding tailored solutions to l

On July 21, 1998, the Radcliffe Publishing Course compiled and released its own list of the century’s top 100 novels, at the request of the Modern Library editorial board.

• Which books would you omit and which would you add to our list? What is your top ten, or top one hundred?

• Any list of “best novels” is open to debate. What do you think should be the criteria for judging the best novels of the century? What makes a book one of the best?

• A majority of the writers on the list are Americans. In what ways does this reflect a twentieth-century literary balance of power? How does the racial composition of the list reflect these issues?

• If books of all languages had been considered, which other great novels might have made the list? What might the linguistic composition of the list look like? Predict a top ten list of books of all languages. And predict a top ten list of the best books of all time.

• How do you think the novel will have changed a hundred years from now? Do you think novels will be read on paper then, or will all books be electronic? Will this fundamentally change the experience of reading a novel?

• Novelists go in and out of fashion and many of these books were what today would be called quite unsuccessful. Are literary and commercial success incompatible?

• Is it possible to compare books as different as Ulysses, The Great Gatsby, and Brave New World? Are there any features that unite these three books? More widely, are there any literary features that unite the best books as a whole? How would you compare one of the books on the list to your favorite book that did not make the list?

• There are eight women novelists represented on the list. Which other women novelists might have been included? Would there be more women novelists on a list compiled from books published in the nineteenth century? From a list of books published in the last fifty years?