Saturday, December 31, 2005

Time Magazine: Top 100 All-Time Novels

First posted 6/10/2020.

From LincolnLibraries.org: “In 2005, Time® magazine’s literary critics, Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo selected what they considered to be the top 100 English-language novels published from 1923 to 2005 (1923 being the year Time® began publishing). As usual, with any “top 100” list, these were their subjective choices, and obviously do not reflect the views of any other reader. However, their list inarguably includes numerous works of influential English-languge literature.”

Note: the original list was unranked, presented alphabetically by book titles. The rankings here are based on GoodReads.com.

  1. Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
  2. George Orwell 1984 (1949)
  3. J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings (trilogy: 1954-55)
  4. J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
  5. F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (1925)
  6. C.S. Lewis The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950)
  7. William Golding Lord of the Flies (1954)
  8. George Orwell Animal Farm (1954)
  9. Joseph Heller Catch-22 (1961)
  10. John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

  11. Margaret Mitchell Gone with the Wind (1936)
  12. Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
  13. Vladimir Nabokov Lolita (1955)
  14. Ken Kesey One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962)
  15. Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange (1962)
  16. Judy Blume Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret (1972)
  17. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons Watchmen (1986)
  18. Kazuo Ishiguro Never Let Me Go (2005)
  19. Ian McEwan Atonement (2001)
  20. Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart (1958)

  21. Toni Morrison Beloved (1987)
  22. Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (1952)
  23. Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
  24. Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises (1926)
  25. Jack Kerouac On the Road (1957)
  26. A.S. Byatt Possession (1990)
  27. Raymond Chandler The Big Sleep (1939)
  28. E.M. Forster A Passage to India (1924)
  29. Robert Graves I, Claudius (1934)
  30. Zora Neal Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

  31. William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury (1929)
  32. Robert Penn Warren All the King’s Men (1946)
  33. Margaret Atwood The Blind Assassin (2000)
  34. Richard Wright Native Son (1940)
  35. Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse (1927)
  36. E.L. Doctorow Ragtime (1975)
  37. John Fowles The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969)
  38. Carson McCullers The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940)
  39. William Faulkner Light in August (1932)
  40. William Burroughs Naked Lunch (1959)

  41. John Le Carré The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963)
  42. Cormac McCarthy Blood Meridian (1985)
  43. Don DeLillo White Noise (1985)
  44. David Foster Wallace Infinite Jest (1995)
  45. Neal Stephenson Snow Crash (1992)
  46. Richard Yates Revolutionary Road (1961)
  47. Evelyn Waugh Brideshead Revisited (1945)
  48. Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children (1981)
  49. Muriel Spark The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1960)
  50. Willa Cather Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)

  51. Thornton Wilder The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1928)
  52. William Gibson Neuromancer (1984)
  53. Jonathan Franzen The Corrections (2001)
  54. Philip Roth American Pastoral (1998)
  55. Graham Greene The Power and the Glory (1939)
  56. Thomas Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
  57. Philip Roth Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)
  58. Jean Rhys Wide Saragosso Sea (1966)
  59. Thomas Pynchon Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)
  60. Dashiell Hammett Red Harvest (1929)

  61. John Updike Rabbit, Run (1960)
  62. Zadie Smith White Teeth (2000)
  63. Malcolm Lowry Under the Volcano (1947)
  64. Jerzy Kosinski The Painted Bird (1976)
  65. James Baldwin Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)
  66. V.S. Naipaul A House for Mr. Biswas (1961)
  67. Joan Didion Play It As It Lays (1970)
  68. Kingsley Amis Lucky Jim (1954)
  69. Philip K. Dick Ubik (1969)
  70. Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook (1962)

  71. Graham Greene The Heart of the Matter (1948)
  72. Vladimir Nabokov Pale Fire (1962)
  73. Walker Percy The Moviegoer (1961)
  74. William Styron The Confessions of Nat Turner (1968)
  75. Henry Miller Tropic of Cancer (1934)
  76. John O’Hara Appointment in Samarra (1934)
  77. Martin Amis Money: A Suicide Note (1984)
  78. James Dickey Deliverance (1970)
  79. Nathanael West The Day of the Locust (1939)
  80. Marilynn Robinson Housekeeping (1981)

  81. Christina Stead The Man Who Loved Children (1940)
  82. John Barth The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)
  83. Saul Bellow The Adventures of Augie March (1953)
  84. Saul Bellow Herzog (1964)
  85. Flann O’Brien At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)
  86. Henry Roth Call It Sleep (1935)
  87. Paul Bowles The Sheltering Sky (1949)
  88. Evelyn Waugh A Handful of Dust (1934)
  89. Richard Ford The Sportswriter (1986)
  90. Christopher Isherwood The Berlin Stories (1945)

  91. James Agee A Death in the Family (1958)
  92. William Gaddis The Recognitions (1955)
  93. Robert Stone Dog Soldiers (1975)
  94. Bernard Malamud The Assistant (1957)
  95. Henry Green Loving (1945)
  96. Iris Murdoch Under the Net (1954)
  97. Anthony Powell A Dance to the Music of Time (1975)
  98. Theodore Dreiser An American Tragedy (1925)
  99. John Cheever Falconer (1977)
  100. Elizabeth Bowen The Death of the Heart (1938)

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