The Great American Read

Updated 10/24/2018.

image from wttw.com

From PBS.org: “The Great American Read was an eight-part series with viewer participation to select America’s favorite novel, told through the prism of America’s 100 best-loved novels. It investigated writers’ fictional worlds, how we as readers are affected by these stories, and what the 100 different books have to say about our diverse nation and our shared human experience.”

The results of the vote are posted here. You can read more about individual books by clicking on titles below or going to the original page at PBS.org.

---

1. Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
2. Diana Gabaldon Outlander (series, 1991-2014)
3. J.K. Rowling Harry Potter (series, 1997-2007)
4. Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice (1813)
5. J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings (trilogy) (1955)
6. Margaret Mitchell Gone with the Wind (1936)
7. E.B. White Charlotte’s Web (1952)
8. Louisa May Alcott Little Women (1869)
9. C.S. Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia (series, 1950-1956)
10. Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre (1847)

11. L.M. Montgomery Anne of Green Gables (1908)
12. John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
13. Betty Smith A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943)
14. Markus Zusak The Book Thief (2005)
15. F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (1925)
16. Kathryn Stockett The Help (2009)
17. Mark Twain The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
18. George Orwell 1984 (1949)
19. Agatha Christie And Then There Were None (1939)
20. Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged (1957)

21. Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights (1847)
22. Larry McMurty Lonesome Dove (1985)
23. Ken Follett The Pillars of the Earth (1989)
24. Stephen King The Stand (1978)
25. Daphne Du Maurier Rebecca (1938)
26. John Irving A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989)
27. Alice Walker The Color Purple (1982)
28. Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
29. Charles Dickens Great Expectations (1861)
30. J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

31. Wilson Rawls Where the Red Fern Grows (1974)
32. S.E. Hinton The Outsiders (1968)
33. Dan Brown The Da Vinci Code (2004)
34. Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale (1986)
35. Frank Herbert Dune (1965)
36. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry The Little Prince (1943)
37. Jack London The Call of the Wild (1903)
38. Jean M. Auel The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980)
39. Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
40. Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games (trilogy, 2008-2010)

41. Alexandre Dumas The Count of Monte Cristo (1844)
42. Amy Tan The Joy Luck Club (1989)
43. Mary Shelley Frankenstein (1818)
44. Lois Lowry The Giver (1994)
45. Arthur Golden Memoirs of a Geisha (1997)
46. Herman Melville Moby-Dick (1851)
47. Joseph Heller Catch-22 (1961)
48. George R.R. Martin The Game of Thrones (series, 1996-2011)
49. Isaac Asimov The Foundation Trilogy (series, 1951-1953)
50. Leo Tolstoy War and Peace (1869)

51. Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
52. Michael Crichton Jurassic Park (1990)
53. Mario Puzo The Godfather (1969)
54. Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
55. Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
56. Nicholas Sparks The Notebook (1996)
57. William P. Young The Shack (2007)
58. John Kennedy Toole A Confederacy of Dunces (1980)
59. Tom Clancy The Hunt for Red October (1984)
60. Toni Morrison Beloved (1987)

61. Andy Weir The Martian (2011)
62. Robert Jordan Wheel of Time (series, 1990-2013)>
63. Herman Hesse Siddhartha (1922)
64. Fyodor Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment (1866)
65. Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises (1926)
66. Mark Haddon The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003)
67. John Knowles A Separate Peace (1959)
68. Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote (1615)
69. Alice Sebold The Lovely Bones (2002)
70. Paulo Coelho O Alquimista (The Alchemist) (1987)

71. Gary Paulsen Hatchet (1987)
72. Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (1952)
73. Stephenie Meyer The Twilight Saga (series, 2005-2008)
74. Armistead Maupin Tales of the City (series, 1978-2014)
75. Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
76. Ernest Cline Ready Player One (2011)
77. Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins Left Behind (1995-2007)
78. Gillian Flynn Gone Girl (2012)
79. Dean Koontz The Watchers (1987)
80. John Bunyan The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)

81. James Patterson Alex Cross Mysteries (series, 1993-2018)
82. Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart (1958)
83. Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness (1899)
84. Marilynne Robinson Gilead (2005)
85. V.C. Andrews Flowers in the Attic (1979)
86. E.L. James Fifty Shades (series, 2011-2012)
87. Kurt Vonnegut The Sirens of Titan (1959)
88. Frank E. Peretti This Present Darkness (1986)
89. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Americanah (2013)
90. James Baldwin Another Country (1962)

91. Rudolfo Anaya Bless Me, Ultima (1972)
92. John Green Looking for Alaska (2005)
93. Junot Diaz The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008)
94. Robert R. McCammon Swan Song (1987)
95. Dave Hunt The Mind Invaders (1989)
96. Zadie Smith White Teeth (2000)
97. Jason Reynolds Ghost (2016)
98. Sister Soujah The Coldest Winter Ever (1999)
99. Colson Whitehead The Intuitionist (1999)
100. Romulo Gallegos Doña Bárbara (1929)

---

J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings: Last Book Published 20 Years Ago Today

Last updated 7/5/2020.

The Lord of the Rings J.R.R. Tolkien

First Publication: 7/29/1954 (Fellowship of the Ring) First Publication: 11/11/1954 (The Two Towers) First Publication: 10/20/1955 (The Return of the King) Category: fantasy fiction Sales: 150 million (trilogy)

Accolades (click on badges to see full lists):

About the Book: The Lord of the Rings was written in stages between 1937 and 1949 as a sequel to The Hobbit (1937). For economic reasons, it was published over the course of a year in three volumes: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King. WK The trilogy “has since been reprinted numerous times and translated into 38 languages.” WK “Lord of the Rings” is a reference “to the story's main antagonist, the Dark Lord Sauron, who had in an earlier age created the One Ring to rule the other Rings of Power as the ultimate weapon in his campaign to conquer and rule all of Middle-earth.” WK “After it was taken from him, he gathered the rest of the rings, but continued to search for the One Ring to complete his dominion.” AZ “After many ages it fell by chance into the hands of the hobbit Bilbo Baggins,” AZ who, on his eleventy-first birthday, bequeathed it to his nephew Frodo. A party is assembled to “journey across Middle-earth, deep into the shadow of the Dark Lord, and destroy the Ring by casting it into the Cracks of Doom.” AZ Accompanying Frodo are Gandalf the Wizard; the hobbits Merry, Pippin, and Sam; Gimli the Dwarf; Legolas the Elf; Boromir of Gondor; and a tall, mysterious stranger called Strider.” AZ Tolkien, who “was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford,” AZ crafted his works out of his interest in classic language as well as “philology, mythology, religion and the author’s distaste for the effects of industrialization, as well as earlier fantasy works and Tolkien's experiences in World War I.” WK “Frodo and friends journey to Mordor to destroy the ring, making the young Hobbit one of the greatest fictional heroes of all time. More than 100 million copies have been sold of the trilogy that brought fantasy to a mainstream literary audience.” TG Resources and Related Links: AZ Amazon TG Telegraph: The Perfect Library WK Wikipedia Amazon: buy the live-action movie trilogy. Amazon: watch the 1978 cartoon version.