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The Most Influential Novels and

Books

Related pages:
Lists on this Page:
- The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time - The Literary 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Novelists,
Playwrights, and Poets of All Time
- Time Magazine's "All-Time 100 Best Novels" - greatest
- The Fictional 100 and 100 Best Characters in Fiction Since 1900
English-language novels from 1923 to 2005
(including info about authors who created the characters)
- 100 Books That Shaped World History
Related websites:
- The Modern Library Board's 100 Best Novels
- The Modern Library Board's 100 Best Non-Fiction Books

The Novel 100:

A Ranking of the
Greatest Novels of All Time
The list below is from the book The Novel 100: A Ranking of Greatest Novels All Time (Checkmark Books/Facts On
File, Inc.: New York, 2004), written by Daniel S. Burt.
Burt holds a Ph.D from New York University with a specialty in Victorian fiction and was for nine years a dean at
Wesleyan University, where he has also taught literature courses since 1989. He is also the author of The Novel 100:
A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time.
Note that in compiling the list of novels that was the basis for this book, Burt had to impose a number of constraints
about what should be considered a novel. Although some works recognized as classics of science fiction (or, more
broadly, speculative fiction) are on the list (e.g., Frankenstein; Dracula; Nineteen Eighty-Four), Burt specifically
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excluded works that seemed to veer too much from primarily naturalistic and contemporary-oriented narratives, thus
excluding from consideration most science fiction and fantasy. Books such as Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Card's
Ender's Game, Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz and Frank Herbert's Dune were excluded from consideration as
"novels." Burt's functional definition of "novel" used here (i.e., books belonging to the "novel genre" or, in most cases,
the "literary novel genre") is thus narrower than how the word is used by the general public. From the book's
introduction, pages ix-x:
What makes a listing of the greatest novels even more problematic is the lack of any consensus about which works
rightfully constitute the genre... the novel is such a hybrid and adaptive genre, assimilating other prose and verse forms...
A standard definition of the novel--an extended prose narrative--is so broad that it fails to limit the field usefully... I have
been influenced in this regard, like many, by literary critic Ian Watt's groundbreaking 1957 study, The Rise of the Novel,
which contends that the novel as a distinctive genre emerged in 18th-century England through the shifting of the
emphasis of previous prose romances and their generalized and idealized characters, settings, and situations to a
particularity of individual experience. In other words, the novel replaced the romance's interest in the general and the ideal
with a concern for the particular. The here and now substituted for the romance's interest in the long ago and far away. As
18th-century novelist Clara Reece observed, "The Novel is a picture of real life and manners, and of the times in which it
was written. The Romance, in lofty and elevated language, describes what has never happened nor is likely to." Novelists
began to represent the actual world accurately, governed by the laws of probability.
...It would be far too reductive and misleading, however, to define the novel only by its realism or accurate representation
of ordinary life... It would be far more accurate to say that the novel as a distinct genre attempts a synthesis between
romance and realism, between a poetic, imaginative alternative to actuality and a more authentic representation. For
purposes of my listing, I have narrowed the field by categorizing as novels works that engage in that synthesis. Some
narrative works judged too far in the direction of fantasy--Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, Bunyan's The Pilgrim's
Progress, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Carroll's Alice in Wonderland--have been excluded. I have also made judgment calls
on the question of the required length of a novel and have ruled out of contention such important fictional works as
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis as falling short of the amplitude expected
when confronting a novel.
Rank
Title of Great Novel
1
Don Quixote

11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24

Year
1605,
1630
War and Peace
1869
Ulysses
1922
In Search of Lost Time
1913-27
The Brothers Karamazov
1880
Moby-Dick
1851
Madame Bovary
1857
Middlemarch
1871-72
The Magic Mountain
1924
The Tale of Genji
11th
Century
Emma
1816
Bleak House
1852-53
Anna Karenina
1877
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 1884
Tom Jones
1749
Great Expectations
1860-61
Absalom, Absalom!
1936
The Ambassadors
1903
One Hundred Years of Solitude 1967
The Great Gatsby
1925
To The Lighthouse
1927
Crime and Punishment
1866
The Sound and the Fury
1929
Vanity Fair
1847-48

Author
Miguel de Cervantes

Religious Affiliation of Author

Catholic

2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

Leo Tolstoy
James Joyce
Marcel Proust
Feodor Dostoevsky
Herman Melville
Gustave Flaubert
George Eliot
Thomas Mann
Murasaki Shikibu

Russian Orthodox
Catholic (lapsed)
Jewish Catholic
Russian Orthodox
Transcendentalist
Catholic
Anglican; agnostic
Lutheran
Buddhist/Shinto culture

Jane Austen
Charles Dickens
Leo Tolstoy
Mark Twain
Henry Fielding
Charles Dickens
William Faulkner
Henry James
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Virginia Woolf
Feodor Dostoevsky
William Faulkner
William Makepeace
Thackeray
Ralph Ellison
James Joyce
Robert Musil
Thomas Pynchon

Anglican
Anglican
Russian Orthodox
Presbyterian

25
26
27
28

Invisible Man
Finnegans Wake
The Man Without Qualities
Gravity's Rainbow

1952
1939
1930-43
1973

Anglican
Presbyterian
Anglican
Catholic
Catholic
Neo-pagan
Russian Orthodox
Presbyterian

Catholic (lapsed)
Catholic
Catholic; agnostic

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29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37

1881
1920
1830
1760-67
1842
1891
1901
1835
1916

Henry James
D. H. Lawrence
Stendhal
Laurence Sterne
Nikolai Gogol
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Mann
Honore de Balzac
James Joyce

Anglican

1847
1959
1951-53

Emily Bronte
Gunter Grass
Samuel Beckett

Anglican
Catholic
Church of Ireland (Anglican)

41
42
43
44
45
46

The Portrait of a Lady

Women in Love
The Red and the Black
Tristram Shandy
Dead Souls
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Buddenbrooks
Le Pere Goriot
A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man
Wuthering Heights
The Tin Drum
Molloy; Malone Dies; The
Unnamable
Pride and Prejudice
The Scarlet Letter
Fathers and Sons
Nostromo
Beloved
An American Tragedy

1813
1850
1862
1904
1987
1925

Jane Austen
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Ivan Turgenev
Joseph Conrad
Toni Morrison
Theodore Dreiser

Anglican
Transcendentalist
Russian Orthodox; agnostic
Catholic; atheist

47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55

Lolita
The Golden Notebook
Clarissa
Dream of the Red Chamber
The Trial
Jane Eyre
The Red Badge of Courage
The Grapes of Wrath
Petersburg

1955
Vladimir Nabokov
1962
Doris Lessing
1747-48 Samuel Richardson
1791
Cao Xueqin
1925
Franz Kafka
1847
Charlotte Bronte
1895
Stephen Crane
1939
John Steinbeck
1916/1922 Andrey Bely

56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65

Things Fall Apart

The Princess of Cleves
The Stranger
My Antonia
The Counterfeiters
The Age of Innocence
The Good Soldier
The Awakening
A Passage to India
Herzog

1958
1678
1942
1918
1926
1920
1915
1899
1924
1964

Chinue Achebe
Madame de Lafayette
Albert Camus
Willa Cather
Andre Gide
Edith Wharton
Ford Madox Ford
Kate Chopin
E. M. Forster
Saul Bellow

66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78

Germinal
Call It Sleep
U.S.A. Trilogy
Hunger
Berlin Alexanderplatz
Cities of Salt
The Death of Artemio Cruz
A Farewell to Arms
Brideshead Revisited
The Last Chronicle of Barset
The Pickwick Papers
Robinson Crusoe
The Sorrows of Young Werther

1855
1934
1930-38
1890
1929
1984-89
1962
1929
1945
1866-67
1836-67
1719
1774

79
80
81
82
83
84
85

Candide
Native Son
Under the Volcano
Oblomov
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Waverley
Snow Country

1759
1940
1947
1859
1937
1814
1937,
1948

Emile Zola
Henry Roth
John Dos Passos
Knut Hamsun
Alfred Doblin
'Abd al-Rahman Munif
Carlos Fuentes
Ernest Hemingway
Evelyn Waugh
Anthony Trollope
Charles Dickens
Daniel Defoe
Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe
Voltaire
Richard Wright
Malcolm Lowry
Ivan Goncharov
Zora Neale Hurston
Sir Walter Scott
Kawabata Yasunari

38
39
40

Catholic
Anglican (Church of Ireland clergyman)
Russian Orthodox
Lutheran
Catholic
Catholic (lapsed)

Catholic; Congregationalist; Chrisitan

Science
Russian Orthodox

Jewish
Anglican
Methodist
Episcopalian
Russian Orthodox; Theosophy;
Spiritualism

Catholic; Existentialism
Episcopalian

Catholic; agnostic
Catholic
Orthodox Jew (lapsed);
Anthroposophist
Catholic
Jewish
Catholic
Catholic
Catholic
Catholic
Catholic
Anglican
Anglican
Protestant Dissenter (Presbyterian)
Deist
raised in Jansenism; later Deist
Seventh-day Adventist; Communist
Methodist; Anglican; agnostic

Anglican

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86
87

Nineteen Eighty-Four
The Betrothed

88
89
90
91
92
93

The Last of the Mohicans

Uncle Tom's Cabin
Les Miserables
On the Road
Frankenstein
The Leopard

1949
1827,
1840
1826
1852
1862
1957
1818
1958

94
95
96
97
98
99
100

The Catcher in the Rye

The Woman in White
The Good Soldier Svejk
Dracula
The Three Musketeers
The Hound of Baskervilles
Gone with the Wind

1951
1860
1921-23
1897
1844
1902
1936

George Orwell
Alessandro Manzoni

Anglican
Catholic

James Fenimore Cooper

Harriet Beecher Stowe
Victor Hugo
Jack Kerouac
Mary Shelley
Giuseppe Tomasi di
Lampedusa
J.D. Salinger
Wilkie Collins
Jaroslav Hasek
Bram Stoker
Alexandre Dumas
Arthur Conan Doyle
Margaret Mitchell

Episcopalian
Episcopalian; Congregationalist
Catholic
Catholic; Buddhism
Catholic
Jewish Catholic; Scientologist
Catholic
Church of Ireland (Anglican)
agnostic; Catholic
Catholic; Spiritualist
Catholic

All-Time 100 Best Novels List

100 Best Novels, 1923 to present
Source: Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo, "TIME's Critics pick the 100 Best Novels, 1923 to present", published in
Time Magazine, 2005 (http://www.time.com/time/2005/100books/the_complete_list.html; viewed 31 October 2005):
TIME Critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo pick the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present.
Listed alphabetically by title.

Title
The Adventures of Augie March
All the King's Men
American Pastoral
An American Tragedy
Animal Farm
Appointment in Samarra
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
The Assistant
At Swim-Two-Birds
Atonement
Beloved
The Berlin Stories
The Big Sleep
The Blind Assassin
Blood Meridian
Brideshead Revisited
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Call It Sleep
Catch-22
The Catcher in the Rye
A Clockwork Orange
The Confessions of Nat Turner
The Corrections
The Crying of Lot 49
A Dance to the Music of Time
The Day of the Locust
Death Comes for the Archbishop
A Death in the Family
The Death of the Heart

Author
Saul Bellow
Robert Penn Warren
Philip Roth
Theodore Dreiser
George Orwell
John O'Hara
Judy Blume
Bernard Malamud
Flann O'Brien
Ian McEwan
Toni Morrison
Christopher Isherwood
Raymond Chandler
Margaret Atwood
Cormac McCarthy
Evelyn Waugh
Thornton Wilder
Henry Roth
Joseph Heller
J.D. Salinger
Anthony Burgess
William Styron
Jonathan Franzen
Thomas Pynchon
Anthony Powell
Nathanael West
Willa Cather
James Agee
Elizabeth Bowen

Religious Affiliation
Orthodox Jew (lapsed); Anthroposophist
Jewish
Catholic; Congregationalist; Chrisitan Science
Anglican
Jewish
Jewish
atheist
Hindu (Vedanta Society)
Humanist
Catholic
Catholic
Congregationalist
Jewish
Jewish
Jewish Catholic
Catholic

Catholic; agnostic
Jewish
Episcopalian
Episcopalian
Church of Ireland (Anglican)

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Deliverance
James Dickey
Dog Soldiers
Robert Stone
Falconer
John Cheever
The French Lieutenant's Woman
John Fowles
The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing
Go Tell it on the Mountain
James Baldwin
Gone With the Wind
Margaret Mitchell
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck
Gravity's Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Handful of Dust
Evelyn Waugh
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers
The Heart of the Matter
Graham Greene
Herzog
Saul Bellow
Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson
A House for Mr. Biswas
V.S. Naipaul
I, Claudius
Robert Graves
Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
Light in August
William Faulkner
The Lion, The Witch and the WardrobeC.S. Lewis
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov
Lord of the Flies
William Golding
The Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien
Loving
Henry Green
Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis
The Man Who Loved Children
Christina Stead
Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie
Money
Martin Amis
The Moviegoer
Walker Percy
Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf
Naked Lunch
William Burroughs
Native Son
Richard Wright
Neuromancer
William Gibson
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
1984
George Orwell
On the Road
Jack Kerouac
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Ken Kesey
The Painted Bird
Jerzy Kosinski
Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov
A Passage to India
E.M. Forster
Play It As It Lays
Joan Didion
Portnoy's Complaint
Philip Roth
Possession
A.S. Byatt
The Power and the Glory
Graham Greene
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark
Rabbit, Run
John Updike
Ragtime
E.L. Doctorow
The Recognitions
William Gaddis
Red Harvest
Dashiell Hammett
Revolutionary Road
Richard Yates
The Sheltering Sky
Paul Bowles
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut
Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson
The Sot-Weed Factor
John Barth
The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner
The Sportswriter
Richard Ford
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold John le Carre
The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee
To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf
Tropic of Cancer
Henry Miller

Atheist

Catholic
Episcopalian
Catholic; agnostic
Catholic
Catholic
Catholic
Orthodox Jew (lapsed); Anthroposophist
Hindu
occult

Presbyterian
Anglican
Russian Orthodox
Catholic

Islam (lapsed); atheist)

agnostic
raised agnostic Presbyterian; Catholic convert
Neo-pagan
Seventh-day Adventist; Communist

Anglican
Catholic; Buddhism
Jewish
Russian Orthodox

Jewish
Quaker (lapsed)
Catholic
Catholic
Lutheran
Jewish

Humanist
?
Presbyterian

Catholic

Neo-pagan

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Ubik
Under the Net
Under the Volcano
Watchmen
White Noise
White Teeth
Wide Sargasso Sea

Philip K. Dick
Episcopalian
Iris Murdoch
Malcolm Lowry
Methodist; Anglican; agnostic
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons?
Don DeLillo
Catholic
Zadie Smith
Jean Rhys

Multiple Listings:
9 authors wrote two of the books listed on TIME Magazine's list of the best English-language novels published since
1923:
Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited; A Handful of Dust)
George Orwell (1984; Animal Farm)
Graham Greene (The Heart of the Matter; The Power and the Glory)
Philip Roth (American Pastoral; Portnoy's Complaint)
Saul Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March; Herzog)
Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49; Gravity's Rainbow)
Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway; To the Lighthouse)
Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita; Pale Fire)
William Faulkner (Light in August; The Sound and the Fury)
Authors on Two Separate Lists
TIME Magazine's list of "100 Best Movies" released since 1923 is a companion to TIME Magazine's list of "100 Best
Novels" (written in English) published since 1923. A total of 92 authors are represented on the "Best Novels" list.
About 500 directors, writers and starring actors are noted in the "100 Best Movies" list. The names of 3 authors
appear on both lists (the 100 Best Novels and 100 Best Movies):
J.R.R. Tolkien: author of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which was adapted to film)
Philip K. Dick: author of Ubik on the "100 Best Novels" list; author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, adapted
as Blade Runner on "100 Best Movies" list
Raymond Chandler: author of Raymond Chandler on "100 Best Novels" list; screenwriter of Double Indemnity
(adapted from James M. Cain's novel) on the "100 Best Movies" list
Notes about how the list was created
Excerpts from: Richard Lacayo, "How We Picked the List"
(http://www.time.com/time/2005/100books/0,24459,our_choices,00.html; viewed 31 October 2005):

...The parameters: English language novels published anywhere in the world since 1923, the
year that TIME Magazine began, which, before you ask, means that Ulysses (1922) doesn't
make the cut... This [list] is chosen by me, Richard Lacayo, and my colleague Lev
Grossman... Grossman and I each began by drawing up inventories of our nominees. Once
we traded notes, it turned out that more than 80 of our separately chosen titles matched.
(Even some of the less well-known ones, like At-Swim Two Birds.) We decided then that we
would more or less divide the remaining slots between us. That would allow each of us to
include books that the other might not have chosen. Or might not even have read... And that
would extend the list into places where mere agreement wouldn't take it.
...There were writers we had to admit we love more for their short stories than their novels -Donald Barthelme, Annie Proulx, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty. We could agree that
some of Gore Vidal's novels are an essential pleasure, but it's his non-fiction that's essential
period. Then there was the intellectual massif of Norman Mailer, indisputably one of the great
writers of our time, but his supreme achievements are his headlong reconfigurations of the
whole idea of non-fiction, books like Armies of the Night; The Executioner's Song...
This project, which got underway in January, was not just a reading effort. It was a re-reading
effort. It meant revisiting a lot of novels both of us had not looked into for some time. A few
titles that seemed indispensable some years ago turned out on a second tasting to be, well,
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dispensable... Lists like this one have two purposes. One is to instruct. The other of course is
to enrage. We're bracing ourselves for the e-mails that start out: "You moron! You pathetic
bourgeoise insect! How could you have left off...(insert title here)."

100 Books That Shaped World History

The list below comes from the book 100 Books That Shaped World History, Bluewood Books (2002), written by
Miriam Raftery.
The books in the list below are NOT ranked by their relative influence. They are listed chronologically.

Epic of Gilgamesh (C. 2700-1500 B.C.)

The Egyptian Book of the Dead (C. 2400-1420 B.C.)
Iliad (C. 800 B.C.)
Aesop's Fables (C. 600-560 B.C.)
Hippocratic Corpus (C. 5th Century B.C.)
The History of Herodotus (C. 440 B.C.)
The Analects of Confucius (429 B.C.)
Republic (C. 378 B.C.)
Nicomachean Ethics (C. 330 B.C.)
On the Republic (51 B.C.)
Koran (C. A.D. 652)
The Tale of Genji (C. 1010)
The Travels of Marco Polo (C. 1300)
The Divine Comedy (C. 1320)
Gutenberg Bible (1455)
The Prince (1513)
Utopia (1516)
Ninety-Five Theses (1517)
The Fabric of the Human Body (1543)
On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres (1543)
Romeo and Juliet (1594)
Don Quixote De La Mancha (1605)
Treatise on Painting (1651)
The Pilgrim's Progress (1678; 1684)
Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1689)
Two Treatises of Government (1690)
Robinson Crusoe (1719)
Poor Richard's Almanack (1732-1757)
The Social Contract (1762)
Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776)
Common Sense (1776)
The Federalist Papers (1787-1788)
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
Cartagena Manifesto (1812)
Pride and Prejudice (1813)
The Last of the Mohicans (1826)
Nature (1836)
A Christmas Carol (1843)
Tales (1845)
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)
Wuthering Heights (1847)
Civil Disobedience (1849)
David Copperfield (1849-1850)
The Scarlet Letter (1850)
Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851-1852)
Moby Dick (1851)
On the Origin of Species (1859)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
Das Kapital (1867)

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Little Women (1868)

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870)
The Brothers Karamazov (1879-1880)
Treasure Island (1883)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
War and Peace (1886)
A Study in Scarlet (1887)
The Jewish State (1896)
The War of the Worlds (1898)
The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
Up From Slavery (1901)
The Story of my Life (1902)
The Call of the Wild (1903)
The Jungle (1906)
Riders of the Purple Sage (1912)
O Pioneers! (1913)
Sons and Lovers (1913)
Relativity: The Special and General Theory (1916)
Siddhartha (1922)
Ulysses (1922)
The Great Gatsby (1925)
Mein Kampf (1925; 1927)
The Sun also Rises (1926)
The Oxford English Dictionary (1928)
All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)
The Sound and the Fury (1929)
The Maltese Falcon (1930)
The Good Earth (1931)
Brave New World (1932)
Story of Civilization (1935-1975)
Gone with the Wind (1936)
The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
Native Son (1940)
The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946)
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (1947)
Cry, The Beloved Country (1948)
The Second World War (1948-1954)
The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
Lord of the Flies (1954)
To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
Catch-22 (1961)
Silent Spring (1962)
The Feminine Mystique (1963)
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964)
Unsafe at any Speed (1965)
Quotations of Chairman Mao (1966)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee (1971)
The Gulag Archipelago (1973-1975)
Beloved (1987)
A Brief History of Time, Updated and Expanded (1998)

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