113 Great 20th Century Novels

Columns: RANK and point values (PTS) explained below; READ year is most recent reading (red color indicates read since August 2011 retirement, “+” indicates at least one earlier reading). See also 46 Great 20th Century Crime Novels and 45+ Great 20th Century SciFi/Fantasy Novels.

Current progress: read 86 of 113 novels (76%).

#	DATE	READ	TITLE	AUTHOR
1	32,11	2011	Lolita	Vladimir Nabokov
2	29,10	2013+	The Great Gatsby	F. Scott Fitzgerald
2	29,10	2013+	The Catcher in the Rye	J.D. Salinger
2	29,10	2013+	Nineteen Eighty-Four	George Orwell
5	28,11	<1987	The Grapes of Wrath	John Steinbeck
6	26,9	2014	On the Road	Jack Kerouac
7	25,8	2014	A Passage to India	E.M. Forster
8	24,9		Ulysses	James Joyce
8	24,9	2013	Midnight's Children	Salman Rushdie
10	23,7	2014	To the Lighthouse	Virginia Woolf
11	21,7	2014	Invisible Man	Ralph Ellison
12	20,7	2013	Catch-22	Joseph Heller
13	20,6	<1987	The Sound and the Fury	William Faulkner
14	19,8	2013+	To Kill a Mockingbird	Harper Lee
14	19,8	2015	One Hundred Years of Solitude	Gabriel Garcia Marquez
16	19,7	2012+	Brave New World	Aldous Huxley
17	19,6	2012+	The Big Sleep	Raymond Chandler
18	18,8		Gone with the Wind	Margaret Mitchell
19	18,7		In Search of Lost Time	Marcel Proust
19	18,7	2014	Beloved	Toni Morrison
21	18,6	2016+	Lord of the Flies	William Golding
22	17,6	2015	Things Fall Apart	Chinua Achebe
23	17,5		U.S.A. (trilogy)	John Dos Passos
23	17,5	2015	Native Son	Richard Wright
25	16,5	2018	The Golden Notebook	Doris Lessing
26	16,4	2016	Under the Volcano	Malcolm Lowry
26	16,4	2015	The Day of the Locust	Nathanael West
26	16,4	2013+	Portnoy's Complaint	Philip Roth
29	15,6	2009+	The Trial	Franz Kafka
29	15,6	2013+	The Stranger	Albert Camus
29	15,6	2003+	The Lord of the Rings	J.R.R. Tolkien
29	15,6	2017	Atonement	Ian McEwan
33	15,5	2016	Brideshead Revisited	Evelyn Waugh
33	15,5	<1987+	Animal Farm	George Orwell
35	15,4	2013	Wide Sargasso Sea	Jean Rhys
35	15,4	2016	The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie	Muriel Spark
37	14,5	2013	Mrs Dalloway	Virginia Woolf
38	14,4	2005	The Sun Also Rises	Ernest Hemingway
38	14,4	2017	The Moviegoer	Walker Percy
38	14,4	2015	The Good Soldier	Ford Madox Ford
38	14,4	2015	An American Tragedy	Theodore Dreiser
38	14,4	2016	All the King's Men	Robert Penn Warren
38	14,4	2012	A Clockwork Orange	Anthony Burgess
44	13,5		The Magic Mountain	Thomas Mann
44	13,5	2018	The Age of Innocence	Edith Wharton
44	13,5	2017	Sons and Lovers	D.H. Lawrence
44	13,5	2011+	One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest	Ken Kesey
48	13,4	2017	Scoop	Evelyn Waugh
48	13,4	2013	Lucky Jim	Kingsley Amis
50	13,3	2022	Light in August	William Faulkner
50	13,3	2013	Deliverance	James Dickey
50	13,3	2017	Appointment in Samarra	John O'Hara
53	12,4		Nostromo	Joseph Conrad
53	12,4		Herzog	Saul Bellow
53	12,4	2012	A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man	James Joyce
53	12,4	2015	American Pastoral	Philip Roth
57	12,3		Under the Net	Iris Murdoch
57	12,3	2017	Go Tell It on the Mountain	James Baldwin
57	12,3		A Dance to the Music of Time	Anthony Powell
60	11,5	<1987	Charlotte's Web	E.B. White
61	11,4	2015	The Tin Drum	Gunter Grass
62	11,3	2021	The Bridge of San Luis Rey	Thornton Wilder
62	11,3		The Adventures of Augie March	Saul Bellow
62	11,3	2015	Sophie's Choice	William Styron
62	11,3	2015+	Slaughterhouse-Five	Kurt Vonnegut
62	11,3	2015	Ragtime	E.L. Doctorow
62	11,3		Pale Fire	Vladimir Nabokov
62	11,3		I, Claudius	Robert Graves
69	10,4	2004+	Ironweed	William Kennedy
69	10,4	2015	Heart of Darkness	Joseph Conrad
71	10,3	2009	Rabbit, Run	John Updike
71	10,3	2015	A Bend in the River	V.S. Naipaul
73	10,2		Tropic of Cancer	Henry Miller
73	10,2	2016	The Sheltering Sky	Paul Bowles
73	10,2	2013	The Heart of the Matter	Graham Greene
73	10,2	2017	The Heart is a Lonely Hunter	Carson McCullers
73	10,2	2020	The Death of the Heart	Elizabeth Bowen
73	10,2		Loving	Henry Green
73	10,2	2017	Death Comes for the Archbishop	Willa Cather
73	10,2	2014	A House for Mr Biswas	V.S. Naipaul
73	10,2	2012	A Handful of Dust	Evelyn Waugh
82	9,3		The Man Without Qualities	Robert Musil
82	9,3	<1987	The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe	C.S. Lewis
82	9,3	<1987	Kim	Rudyard Kipling
82	9,3		Journey to the End of the Night	Louis-Ferdinand Celine
82	9,3		Gravity's Rainbow	Thomas Pynchon
82	9,3	<1987	As I Lay Dying	William Faulkner
82	9,3	2001	Angle of Repose	Wallace Stegner
82	9,3	2006	A Farewell to Arms	Ernest Hemingway
90	8,4		Possession	A.S. Byatt
91	8,3	2013	Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy	John le Carre
92	8,2		Women in Love	D.H. Lawrence
92	8,2	2019	Winesburg, Ohio	Sherwood Anderson
92	8,2	2015	The Spy Who Came in from the Cold	John le Carre
92	8,2	2019	The Sportswriter	Richard Ford
92	8,2		The Rainbow	D.H. Lawrence
92	8,2	2012+	The Maltese Falcon	Dashiell Hammett
92	8,2	2017	Their Eyes Were Watching God	Zora Neale Hurston
92	8,2		The Ginger Man	J.P. Donleavy
92	8,2	2001	Tender is the Night	F. Scott Fitzgerald
92	8,2	2014	Of Human Bondage	W. Somerset Maugham
92	8,2	2017	Money	Martin Amis
92	8,2		Lord Jim	Joseph Conrad
92	8,2	2015	Howard's End	E.M. Forster
92	8,2		Housekeeping	Marilynne Robinson
92	8,2		Finnegans Wake	James Joyce
92	8,2		Call it Sleep	Henry Roth
92	8,2	2011	Blood Meridian	Cormac McCarthy
109	7,4	1997	The Name of the Rose	Umberto Eco
109	7,4	2018+	The Handmaid's Tale	Margaret Atwood
111	7,3		Song of Solomon	Toni Morrison
111	7,3		For Whom the Bell Tolls	Ernest Hemingway
113	7,2	2011	The House of Mirth	Edith Wharton

There are 90 different authors on the list. Six authors are represented by three books apiece: Conrad, Faulkner, Hemingway, Joyce, Lawrence and Waugh. Eleven authors placed two books on the list: Bellow, Fitzgerald, Forster, le Carre, Morrison, Naipaul, Nobokov, Orwell, Roth, Wharton and Woolf.

My intention was to consider only books published in the 20th century (1901-2000). Several of the 20th century lists I consulted include Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which was published in 1899. I decided to allow it. Most of Conrad’s English output fits within the timeframe; it would seem odd to exclude his best-known work. On the other hand, I disallowed Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles—completed in 1902—because Holmes is a 19th-century character. I’m not sure it would have made this list, but it certainly would have made the Crime Novels list.

The list is ordered by the “points” I assigned based on a decidedly non-scientific parsing of fifteen lists scraped from the Internet. I assigned a number of points to each list based on my own feeling about its value. This point value was added to the total of each book appearing on a list. The number following the comma for each entry represents the number of lists the book made. This was used as a tiebreaker. Here are the source lists showing point values in parentheses:

Note that the use of some of these source lists tilt the playing field in favor of books written later in the century. Time magazine’s list, in particular (given its relative weight), places books published prior to 1923 at a significant disadvantage. I am rather pleased with this bias, however, as I would prefer to highlight books written later rather than earlier. It is also worth mentioning that though I do not restrict my list to novels written in English, some of the source lists do. Consequently my list consists almost exclusively of books published originally in English (after a quick scan through the list, I can identify Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Kafka’s The Trial and Camus’s The Stranger as exceptions—there are others).

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113 Great 20th Century Novels

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