Inspired by the 2018 PBS special The Great American Read, I assembled more than 170 best-of-books lists (see sources here) and aggregated them to create one master list of the all-time books. While these are mostly novels, there are some non-fiction books and even a few children’s picture books. Here are the results:
- Various writers The Holy Bible: King James Version (1610)
- Mao Tse-Tung Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (aka “Little Red Book”) (1964)
- Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
- J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
- F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (1925)
- George Orwell 1984 (1949)
- Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote (1615)
- J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings (trilogy: 1954-55)
- Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
- John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
- Vladimir Nabokov Lolita (1955)
- Joseph Heller Catch-22 (1961)
- Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
- James Joyce Ulysses (1922)
- Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice (1813)
- Herman Melville Moby-Dick (1851)
- Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
- Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights (1847)
- Leo Tolstoy War and Peace (1869)
- William Golding Lord of the Flies (1954)
- Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre (1847)
- J.K. Rowling Harry Potter (series, 1997-2007)
- J.R.R. Tolkien The Hobbit (1937)
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment (1866)
- Toni Morrison Beloved (1987)
- Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness (1899)
- Aldous Huxley Brave New World (1932)
- Anne Frank The Diary of a Young Girl (aka The Diary of Anne Frank) (1947)
- C.S. Lewis The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950)
- E.B. White Charlotte’s Web (1952)
- Homer The Odyssey (800 B.C.)
- Margaret Mitchell Gone with the Wind (1936)
- Charles Dickens Great Expectations (1861)
- Jack Kerouac On the Road (1957)
- Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina (1877)
- William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury (1929)
- Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
- Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
- George Orwell Animal Farm (1945)
- Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises (1926)
- Louisa May Alcott Little Women (1869)
- Muhammad Qu’ran (632 CE)
- Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time, aka Remembrance of Things Past (A La Recherche du Temps Perdu) (series: 1913-1927)
- Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale (1986)
- Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
- Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (1952)
- Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
- Mary Shelley Frankenstein (1818)
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince) (1943)
- Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary (1857)
- Homer The Iliad (800 B.C.)
- Alice Walker The Color Purple (1982)
- Stephen Hawking A Brief History of Time (1988)
- Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
- George Eliot Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1872)
- Daphne Du Maurier Rebecca (1938)
- Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter (1850)
- Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse (1927)
- Truman Capote In Cold Blood (1966)
- Frank Herbert Dune (1965)
- Charles Dickens David Copperfield (1850)
- Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy (Divina Commedia) (1320)
- Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
- Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart (1958)
- Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange (1962)
- Richard Adams Watership Down (1972)
- Victor Hugo Les Misérables (1862)
- James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
- Ernest Hemingway The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
- John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men (1937)
- Kenneth Grahame The Wind in the Willows (1908)
- Albert Camus L’Etranger (The Stranger, aka The Outsider) (1942)
- Ernest Hemingway For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
- Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children (1981)
- Charles Darwin The Origin of Species (1859)
- Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged (1957)
- Philip Pullman The Golden Compass (aka Northern Lights) (1995), first book of His Dark Materials series (1995-2000)
- Ken Kesey One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962)
- Maurice Sendak Where the Wild Things Are (1964)
- Niccolo Machiavelli The Prince (1532)
- Jack London The Call of the Wild (1903)
- Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
- L.M. Montgomery Anne of Green Gables (1908)
- Henry David Thoreau Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854)
- Plato The Republic (380 B.C.)
- Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence (1920)
- Alexandre Dumas The Count of Monte Cristo (1844)
- Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games (trilogy: 2008-2010)
- A.A. Milne Winnie-the-Pooh (1926)
- Rachel Carson Silent Spring (1962)
- Alex Haley and Malcolm X The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)
- Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe (1719)
- Georges Simenon Maigret (series, 1931-1972)
- Robert Louis Stevenson Treasure Island (1883)
- Markus Zusak The Book Thief (2005)
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1887)
- Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
- E.M. Forster A Passage to India (1924)
- Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
- William Shakespeare Hamlet (1603)
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