Newsweek’s list was assembled by aggregating ten other lists. Unfortunately, the ten are not all referenced, but the article does say it included Modern Library, Oprah Winfrey’s book club selections, a reading list for St. John’s College, and Britain’s Daily Telegraph list of “the perfect library.”
- Leo Tolstoy War and Peace (1869)
- George Orwell 1984 (1949)
- James Joyce Ulysses (1922)
- Vladimir Nabokov Lolita (1955)
- William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury (1929)
- Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (1952)
- Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse (1927)
- Homer The Odyssey (800 B.C.) / The Iliad (800 B.C.)
- Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice (1813)
- Dante Alighieri Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy) (1304)
- Geoffrey Chaucer The Canterbury Tales (1387)
- Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
- George Eliot Middlemarch, a Study of Provincial Life (1872)
- Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart (1958)
- J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
- Margaret Mitchell Gone with the Wind (1936)
- Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
- F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (1925)
- Joseph Heller Catch-22 (1961)
- Toni Morrison Beloved (1987)
- John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
- Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children (1981)
- Aldous Huxley Brave New World (1932)
- Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
- James Baldwin Notes of a Native Son (1955)
- Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America (1840)
- Charles Darwin The Origin of Species (1859)
- Herodotus The Histories of Herodotus (5th century)
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau The Social Contract (1762)
- Karl Marx Das Kapital (1867)
- Niccolo Machiavelli The Prince (1532)
- St. Augustine of Hippo The Confessions (400 A.D.)
- Thomas Hobbes Leviathan (1651)
- Thucydides The History of the Peloponnesian War (5th century)
- J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings (trilogy: 1954-55)
- A.A. Milne Winnie-the-Pooh (1926)
- C.S. Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia (series, 1950-1956)
- E.M. Forster A Passage to India (1924)
- Jack Kerouac On the Road (1957)
- Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
- various writers The Holy Bible: King James Version (1451)
- Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange (1962)
- William Faulkner Light in August (1932)
- W.E. Burghardt Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (1903)
- Jean Rhys Wide Saragosso Sea (1966)
- Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary (1857)
- John Milton Paradise Lost (1667)
- Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina (1877)
- William Shakespeare Hamlet (1603)
- William Shakespeare King Lear (1608)
- William Shakespeare Othello (1609)
- William Shakespeare The Sonnets (1609)
- Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass (1855)
- Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
- Rudyard Kipling Kim (1901)
- Mary Shelley Frankenstein (1818)
- Toni Morrison Song of Solomon (1977)
- Ken Kesey One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962)
- Ernest Hemingway For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
- Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
- George Orwell Animal Farm (1954)
- William Golding Lord of the Flies (1954)
- Truman Capote In Cold Blood (1966)
- Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook (1962)
- Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time (1913)
- Raymond Chandler The Big Sleep (1939)
- William Faulkner As I Lay Dying (1930)
- Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises (1926)
- Robert Graves I, Claudius (1934)
- Carson McCullers The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940)
- D.H. Lawrence Sons and Lovers (1913)
- Robert Penn Warren All the King’s Men (1946)
- James Baldwin Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)
- E.B. White Charlotte’s Web (1952)
- Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness (1899)
- Elie Wiesel Night (Un di Velt Hot Geshvign) (1958)
- John Updike Rabbit, Run (1960)
- Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence (1920)
- Philip Roth Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)
- Theodore Dreiser An American Tragedy (1925)
- Nathanael West The Day of the Locust (1939)
- Henry Miller Tropic of Cancer (1934)
- Dashiell Hammett The Maltese Falcon (1929)
- Philip Pullman His Dark Materials (trilogy: 1995-2000)
- Willa Cather Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)
- Sigmund Freud The Interpreation of Dreams (1900)
- Henry Adams The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
- Mao Zedong Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Little Red Book) (1966)
- William James The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
- Evelyn Waugh Brideshead Revisited (1945)
- Rachel Carson Silent Spring (1962)
- John Maynard Keynes General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936)
- Joseph Conrad Lord Jim (1900)
- Robert Graves Goodbye to All That (1929)
- John Kenneth Galbraith The Affluent Society (1958)
- William Grahame The Wind in the Willows (1908)
- Alex Haley & Malcolm X The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)
- Lytton Strachey Eminent Victorians (1918)
- Alice Walker The Color Purple (1982)
- Winston Churchill The Second World War (6 volumes, 1953)
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