Modern Library 100 Best Novels

Board's List

Selected by the Modern Library as the 100 best novels of the 20th century.

Reader's List

	1. James Joyce. Ulysses Leopold Bloom wanders through Dublin, talking, observing, musing -- and always remembering Molly, his passionate, wayward wife. Set in the shadow of Homer's Odyssey, internal thoughts give physical reality extra color and perspective.
	2. F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby Gatsby embodies the naive American notion that it is possible to invent oneself and persuade the world to accept that definition. Gatsby 's youthful neighbor, Nick Carraway, fascinated by both the display of enormous wealth and the essential integrity that he perceives in Gatsby 's vision, becomes his confidante and accomplice in his plan to recapture the heart of Daisy Buchanan.
	3. James Joyce. A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man First published in 1916, this classic portrays Stephen Dedalus's Dublin childhood and growing awareness of his artistic vocation.
	4. Vladimir Nabokov. Lolita Lolita tells the story of Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged man who is aroused to erotic desire only by a young girl.
	5. Aldous Huxley. Brave New World A fantasy of the future that sheds a blazing critical light on the present-- considered to be Aldous Huxley's most enduring masterpiece.
	6. William Faulkner. The Sound And The Fury By turns lyrical and dramatic, hilarious and heartbreaking, The Sound and the Fury is the tragic story of beautiful Caddy Comapson and the dissolution of her family.
	7. Joseph Heller. Catch-22 Catch-22 is like no other novel we have ever read. It has its own style, its own rationale, its own extraordinary character. It moves back and forth from hilarity to horror. It is outrageously funny and strangely affecting.
	8. Arthur Koestler. Darkness at Noon A fictional portrayal of the nightmare politics of our time. Its hero is an aging revolutionary, imprisoned and psychologically tortured by the Party to which he has dedicated his life. As the pressure to confess preposterous crimes increases, he re-lives a career that embodies the terrible ironies and human betrayals of a totalitarian movement masking itself as an instrument of deliverance.
	9. D.H. Lawrence. Sons and Lovers Included here are poems about the tie to the mother, about Miriam, about the trauma of the mother's lingering mortal illness, and about the poignant aftermath of her death during which the son suffered self-abandonment to grief and a sense of desolation described in the novel as a nuit blanche or 'white night.'
	10. John Steinbeck. The Grapes Of Wrath Although it follows the movement of thousands of men and women and the transformation of an entire nation, "The Grapes of Wrath" is also the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads, who are driven off their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California.
	11. Malcolm Lowry. Under The Volcano The Consul staggers from bar to bar hoping to find salvation. The dissolute life suits him until his former wife Yvonne returns with Hugh, the Consul's half-brother. As the trio enjoys a local Mexican festival, they discover the dead body of a peasant, thus beginning a series of events that will decide the Consul's fate. In the course of one day an entire life is chronicled.
	12. Samuel Butler. The Way of All Flesh  Based on Samuel Butler's own life and published posthumously, it indicts Victorian bourgeois values as personified in five generations of the Pontifex family.
	13. George Orwell. Nineteen Eighty-Four To Winston Smith, a young man who works in the Ministry of Truth (Minitru for short), come two people who transform his life completely. One is Julia, whom he meets after she hands him a slip reading, "I love you." The other is O'Brien, who tells him, "We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness." The way in which Winston is betrayed by the one and, against his own desires and instincts, ultimately betrays the other, makes a story of mounting drama and suspense.
	14. Robert Graves. I, Claudius Considered an idiot because of his physical infirmities, Claudius survived the intrigues and poisonings of the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius, and the Mad Caligula to become emperor in 41 A.D. A masterpiece.
	15. Virginia Woolf. To the Lighthouse A landmark of modern fiction, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse explores the subjective reality of everyday life in the Hebrides for the Ramsay family.
	16. Theodore Dreiser. An American Tragedy A story of a poor boy whose ambition for wealth and social prestige leads him to commit murder.
	17. Carson McCullers. The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter A sensitive teenage girl discovers the meaning of loneliness.
	18. Kurt Vonegut. Slaughterhouse-Five Centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.
	19. Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man An African-American man's search for success and the American dream leads him out of college to Harlem and a growing sense of personal rejection and social invisibility.
	20. Richard Wright. Native Son Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny: by chance, it was for murder and rape. "Native Son" tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic.
	21. Saul Bellow. Henderson the Rain King Bellow's glorious, spirited story of an eccentric American millionaire who finds a home of sorts in deepest Africa.
	22. John O'Hara. Appointment in Samarra In December 1930, just before Christmas, the Gibbsville social circuit is electrified with parties and dances, where the music plays late into the night and the liquor flows freely. At the center of the social elite stand Julian and Caroline English - the envy of friends and strangers alike. But in one rash moment born inside a highball glass, Julian breaks with polite society and begins a rapid descent toward self-destruction.
	23. John Dos Passos. U.S.A. A novelistic view of America, from the robber barons to the labor radicals to the great American artists of the early twentieth century.
	24. Sherwood Anderson. Winesburg, Ohio A collection of short stories dealing with a small town in Ohio.
	25. E.M. Forster. A Passage to India A classic account of the clash of cultures in British India after the turn of the century.
	26. Henry James. The Wings of the Dove The story of a gravely ill young woman searching for happiness and self-fulfillment.
	27. Henry James. The Ambassadors James recounts the continental journey of Louis Lambert Strether--a fiftysomething man of the world who has been dispatched abroad by a rich widow, Mrs. Newsome. His mission: to save her son Chadwick from the clutches of a wicked (i.e., European) woman, and to convince the prodigal to return to Woollett, Massachusetts. Instead, this all-American envoy finds Europe growing on him.
	28. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Tender Is the Night A powerful and moving depiction of the human frailties that affect privileged and ordinary people alike.
	29. James T. Farrell. The Studs Lonigan Trilogy
	30. Ford Madox Ford. The Good Soldier 'A Tale of Passion', as its sub-title declares, The Good Soldier tells of the complex social and sexual relationships between two couples, one English, one American, and the growing awareness by the American narrator John Dowell of the intrigues and passions behind their orderly Edwardian facade.
	31. George Orwell. Animal Farm Farm is a devastating satire of the Soviet Union by the man V. S. Pritchett called "the conscience of his generation". A fable about an uprising of farm animals against their human masters, it illustrates how new tyranny replaces old in the wake of revolutions and power corrupts even the noblest of causes.
	32. Henry James. The Golden Bowl A rich American art-collector and his daughter Maggie buy in for themselves and to their greater glory a beautiful young wife and a noble husband. They do not know that Charlotte and Prince Amerigo were formerly lovers, nor that on the eve of the Prince's marriage they had discovered, in a Bloomsbury antique shop, a golden bowl with a secret flaw.
	33. Theodore Dreiser. Sister Carrie The story of a country girl's rise to riches as the mistress of a wealthy man.
	34. Evelyn Waugh. A Handful of Dust Laced with cynicism and truth, "A Handful of Dust" satirizes a certain stratum of English life where all the characters have money, but lack practically every other credential. Murderously urbane, it depicts the breakup of a marriage in the London gentry, where the errant wife suffers from terminal boredom, and becomes enamoured of a social parasite and professional luncheon-goer.
	35. William Faulkner. As I Lay Dying The harrowing, darkly comic tale of the Bundren family's trek across Mississippi to bury Addie, their wife and mother, as told by each of the family members--including Addie herself.
	36. Robert Penn Warren. All the King's Men This classic book is generally regarded as the finest novel ever written on american politics. It describes the career of Willie Stark, a back-country lawyer whose idealism is overcome by his lust for power.
	37. Thornton Wilder. The Bridge of San Luis Rey "The Bridge of San Luis Rey" opens in the aftermath of an inexplicable tragedy-- a tiny foot-bridge in Peru breaks, and five people hurtle to their deaths. For Brother Juniper, a humble monk who witnesses the catastrophe, the question in inescapable. Why those five? Suddenly, Brother Juniper is committed to discover what manner of lives they led-- and whether it was divine intervention or a capricious fate that took their lives.
	38. E.M. Forster. Howard's End E.M. Forster unveils the English character as never before, exploring the underlying class warfare involving three distinct groups--a wealthy family bound by the rules of tradition and property, two independent, cultured sisters, and a young man living on the edge of poverty. The source of their conflict--Howards End, a house in the countryside which ultimately becomes a symbol of conflict within British society.
	39. James Baldwin. Go Tell It on the Mountain James Baldwin's portrayal of black people in Harlem caught up in a dramatic struggle, and of a society confronting inevitable change.
	40. Graham Greene. The Heart of the Matter Scobie, a police officer serving in a war-time West African state, is distrusted, being scrupulously honest and immune to bribery. But then he falls in love, and in doing so is forced to betray everything he believes in, with tragic consequences.
	41. William Golding. Lord Of The Flies The classic tale of a group of English school boys who are left stranded on an unpopulated island, and who must confront not only the defects of their society but the defects of their own natures.
	42. James Dickey. Deliverance A canoe trip down a wild North Georgia river turns into a primitive nightmare that will leave one man dead--and three men changed forever.
	43. Anthony Powell. A Dance to the Music of Time Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London.
	44. Aldous Huxley. Point Counter Point
	45. Ernest Hemingway. The Sun Also Rises The story of a group of Americans and English on a sojourn from Paris to Paloma, evokes in poignant detail, life among the expatriates on Paris's Left Bank during the 1920s and conveys in brutally realistic descriptions the power and danger of bullfighting in Spain.
	46. Joseph Conrad. The Secret Agent One of the great detective novels of all time, "The Secret Agent", written in 1903, is a magisterial thriller of terrorists and police in London in the early years of the 20th century.
	47. Joseph Conrad. Nostromo In his evocation of the republic of Costaguana, set amid the exotic and grandiose scenery of South America, Conrad reveals not only the lives and fates of his characters but also the physical and political composition of a whole country.
	48. D.H. Lawrence. The Rainbow Set in the rural midlands of England, D.H. Lawrence's 'The Rainbow' explores the lives of three generations of the Brangwen family, conveying how their rural existence is gradually but profoundly changed by the influx of industry and urbanism. But it is young Ursula Brangwen, discovering herself through her sexual awakening, who becomes the focus of Lawrence's classic work.
	49. D.H. Lawrence. Women in Love A novel of regeneration and dark, destructive human passion, Women in Love reflects the impact on writer D.H. Lawrence of the First World War in the potential both for annihilation and salvation of the self. A full Introduction and detailed notes offer an illuminating discourse on one of Lawrence's most extraordinary, innovative, and unsettling works.
	50. Henry Miller. Tropic Of Cancer Chronicles the bohemian life of a penniless artist living in Paris between the world wars.
	51. Norman Mailer. The Naked and the Dead Written in gritty, journalistic detail, the story follows a platoon of Marines who are stationed on the Japanese-held island of Anopopei. Composed in 1948 with the wisdom of a man twice Mailer's age and the raw courage of the young man he was.
	52. Philip Roth. Portnoy's Complaint Thrust through life by his unappeasable sexuality and at the same time held back by the iron grip of his childhood, Alexander Portnoy is one of Philip Roth's most intriguing and hilarious characters.
	53. Vladimir Nabokov. Pale Fire In Pale Fire Nabokov offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures: a 999-line poem by the reclusive genius John Shade; an adoring foreword and commentary by Shade's self-styled Boswell, Dr. Charles Kinbote; a darkly comic novel of suspense, literary idolatry and one-upmanship, and political intrigue.
	54. William Faulkner. Light In August The story od Lena Grove's search for the father of her unborn child, and features one of Faulkner's most memorable characters: Joe Christmas, a desperate drifter consumed by his mixed ancestry.
	55. Jack Kerouac. On The Road On the Road chronicles Kerouac's years traveling the North American continent, from East Coast to West Coast to Mexico, with his friend Neal Cassady, "a sideburned hero of the snowy West". As "Sal Paradise" and "Dean Moriarty", the two roam the country in a quest for self-knowledge and experience.
	56. Dashiell Hammett. The Maltese Falcon killer. In this search for both the murderer and the Maltesr Falcon, a statue rumored to be of incalculable value, Spade runs mortal risks as he comes closer to the answer--what he finds almost destroys him.
	57. Ford Madox Ford. Parade's End This monumental novel, divided into four separate books, celebrates the end of an era, the irrevocable destruction of the comfortable, predictable society that vanished during World War I.
	58. Edith Wharton. The Age of Innocence When the Countess Ellen Olenska returns from Europe, fleeing her brutish husband, her rebellious independence and passionate awareness of life stir the educated sensitivity of Newland Archer, already engaged to be married to her cousin May Welland. As the consequent drama unfolds, Edith Wharton's sharp ironic wit and Jamesian mastery of form create a disturbingly accurate picture of men and women caught in a society that denies humanity while desperately defending "civilization".
	59. Max Beerbohm. Zuleika Dobson Originally published in 1911, Max Beerbohm's sparklingly wicked satire concerns the unlikely events that occur when a femme fatale briefly enters the supremely privileged, all-male domain of Judas College, Oxford.
	60. Walker Percy. The Moviegoer Kate's desperate struggle to maintain her sanity forces her cousin Binx to relinquish his dreamworld.
	61. Willa Cather. Death Comes for the Archbishop Death Comes for the Archbishop is Willa Cather's best-known novel, a narrative whose spare beauty achieves epic--and even mythic--qualities as it recounts a life lived simply in the silence of the southwestern desert.
	62. James Jones. From Here to Eternity In this magnificent but brutal classic of a soldier's life, James Jones portrays the courage, violence and passions of men and women who live by unspoken codes and with unutterable despair...in the most important American novel to come out of World War II, a masterpiece that captures as no ther the honor and savagery of men.
	63. John Cheever. The Wapshot Chronicle John Cheever follows the destinies of the impecunious and wildly eccentric Wapshots of St. Botolphs, Massachusetts.
	64. J.D. Salinger. The Catcher In The Rye Holden, knowing he is to be expelled from school, decides to leave early. He spends three days in New York City and tells the story of what he did and suffered there.
	65. Anthony Burgess. A Clockwork Orange Anthony Burgess's modern classic of youthful violence and social redemption, reissued to include the controversial last chapter not previously published in this country, with a new introduction by the author. This disturbing novel creates an alarming futuristic vision of violence, high technology, and authoritarianism.
	66. W. Somerset Maugham. Of Human Bondage Philip Carey, a handicapped orphan, is brought up by a clergyman, but Philip sheds his religious faith and begins to study art in Paris.
	67. Joseph Conrad. Heart Of Darkness His narrator, Marlow, travels into the heart of the Congo to retrieve Mr. Kurtz, a promising young agent who has disappeared into the bush. Throughout Marlow's harrowing journey, Conrad maintains an unflinching focus on the crassness and avarice of which human society is capable, ultimately revealing that "the horror" Kurtz fears lies within us all.
	68. Sinclair Lewis. Main Street Main Street attacks the conformity and dullness of early 20th century midwestern village life in the story of Carol Milford, the city girl who marries the town doctor. Her efforts to bring culture to the prairie village are met by a wall of gossip, greed and petty small-minded bigotry.
	69. Edith Wharton. The House of Mirth Lily Bart is a poor relation of a wealthy woman who is hopelessly addicted to the pleasures of the moneyed world of luxury and grace. Ironically, it is her delicacy of taste and moral sensibility that render her unfit for survival in this world.
	70. Lawrence Durrell. The Alexandria Quartet
	71. Richard Hughes. A High Wind in Jamaica The dreamlike action of this masterful narrative begins among the decaying plantations of late-nineteenth-century Jamaica. It then moves to the high seas, as Richard Hughes tells the story of a group of children thrown upon the mercy of down-at-the-heels pirates. A tale of seduction and betrayal, of weird humor and unforeseen violence, this twentieth-century classic is an unequaled exploration of the nature, and limits, of innocence.
	72. V.S. Naipaul. A House for Mr. Biswas This richly comic novel tells the moving story of a man without a single asset who enters a life devoid of opportunity, and whose tumble-down house becomes a potent symbol of the search for identity in a postcolonial world.
	73. Nathanael West. The Day of the Locust
	74. Ernest Hemingway. A Farewell To Arms By turns romantic and harshly realistic, Hemingway's story of a tragic romance set against the brutality and confusion of World War I cemented his fame as a stylist and as a writer of extraordinary literary power. A volunteer ambulance driver and a beautiful English nurse fall in love when he is wounded on the Italian front.
	75. Evelyn Waugh. Scoop In "Scoop, " surreptitiously dubbed "a newspaper adventure," Waugh flays Fleet Street and the social pastimes of its war correspondants as he tells how William Boot became the star of British super-journalism an how, leaving part of his shirt in the claws of the lovely Katchen, he returned from Ishmaelia to London as the "Daily's Beast's" more accoladed overseas reporter.
	76. Muriel Spark. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie The critically acclaimed story of an independent-minded Scottish schoolteacher.
	77. James Joyce. Finnegan's Wake A story with no real beginning or end (it ends in the middle of a sentence and begins in the middle of the same sentence), this "book of Doublends Jined" is as remarkable for its prose as for its circular structure.  "A nocturnal state...That is what I want to convey: what goes on in a dream, during a dream".
	78. Rudyard Kipling. Kim Reared in the teeming streets of India at the turn of the century, the orphan Kim is the 'Friend of all the world', an imp with an endless interest in the extraordinary characters he meets daily. One of them, an old Tibetan lama, sets him on the path that will lead him to travel the Great Trunk Road, and become a spy for the British.
	79. E.M. Forster. A Room with a View Visiting Italy with her prim and proper cousin Charlotte as a chaperone, Lucy Honeychurch meets the unconventional lower-class Mr. Emerson and his son, George. Upon her return to England she becomes engaged to the supercilious Cecil Vyse, but finds herself increasingly torn between the expectations of the world in which she moves and the passionate yearnings of her heart.
	80. Evelyn Waugh. Brideshead Revisited Waugh tells the story of the Marchmain family. Aristocratic, beautiful and charming, the Marchmains are indeed a symbol of England and her decline in this novel of the upper class of the 1920s and the abdication of responsibility in the 1930s.
	81. Saul Bellow. The Adventures of Augie Marsh
	82. Wallace Stegner. Angle of Repose Four generations in the life of an American family are chronicled as retired historian Lyman Ward, confined to a wheelchair, decides to write his grandparent's history.
	83. V.S. Naipaul. A Bend in the River A novel about exile and the tumultuous Third World.
	84. Elizabeth Bowen. The Death of the Heart As she deftly and delicately exposes the cruelty that lurks behind the polished surfaces of conventional society, Bowen offers the piercing story of innocence betrayed at a 1930s British seaside resort.
	85. Joseph Conrad. Lord Jim Jim is one of Conrad's most complex creations, and Conrad explores, along the vast horizon of this gorgeous novel, the phenomena of shame, guilt, retribution -- and redemption. How right it is for our times!
	86. E.L. Doctorow. Ragtime Three remarkable American families--rich white, Harlem black, immigrant Jew--catch the spirit of this country and the shimmering, shattering forces that come together in wonder and terror, in an age when all things seemed possible.
	87. Arnold Bennett. The Old Wives' Tale Bennett follows the lives of two sisters, Constance and Sophia, from simple days in mid-Victorian England through the chaos and tumult of the modern age.
	88. Jack London. The Call Of The Wild The adventures of an unusual dog, part St. Bernard, part Scotch shepherd, that is forcibly taken to the Klondike gold fields where he eventually becomes the leader of a wolf pack.
	89. Henry Green. Loving
	90. Salman Rushdie. Midnight's Children A fascinating family saga about the birth and maturity of a land and its people - a brilliant incarnation of the human comedy.
	91. Erskine Caldwell. Tobacco Road Caldwell's classic tells the story of the Lester family--ignorant and poverty stricken.
	92. William Kennedy. Ironweed Francis Phelan is a man trying to make peace with the ghosts of his past and present.
	93. John Fowles. The Magus Nicholas Urfe, an evasive young Englishman, accepts a teaching position on a remote Greek island, where his friendship with a reclusive, demonic millionaire lures him into "the godgame": an elaborate series of staged hallucinations, riddles, and psychological traps meant to test his concept of being and reality.
	94. Jean Rhys. Wide Sargasso Sea Beautiful, wealthy Antoinette Cosway's passionate love for the arrogant Mr. Rochester threatens to destroy her idyllic Caribbean existence and her very life, in a novel based on Jane Eyre.
	95. Iris Murdoch. Under the Net Writer Jake Donaghue's adventures in London and Paris include falling in and out of love, kidnapping a canine film star, and trailing a onetime friend.
	96. William Styron. Sophie's Choice Three stories are told: a young Southerner wants to become a writer; a turbulent love-hate affair between a brilliant Jew and a beautiful Polish woman; and of an awful wound in that woman's past--one that impels both Sophie and Nathan toward destruction.
	97. Paul Bowles. The Sheltering Sky Bowles examines the ways in which three American travelers apprehend an alien culture in the cities and deserts of North Africa after World War II -- and the ways in which their incomprehension destroys them.
	98. James M. Cain. The Postman Always Rings Twice A young vagrant and the sexy, bored wife of a restaurant owner plan to murder her husband, with unexpected results.
	99. J.P. Donleavy. The Ginger Man Set in Ireland just after World War II, The Ginger Man is J.P. Donleavy's wildly funny, picaresque classic novel of the misadventures of Sebastian Dangerfield, a young American ne'er-do-well studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Dangerfield's appetite for women, liquor, and general roguishness is insatiable -- and he satisfies it with endless charm.
	100. Booth Tarkington. The Magnificent Ambersons In addition, it is a view of Indianapolis' evolution from a major marketing center to a great industrial city. It adds a new dimension to one's understanding of the coming of the Industrial Age of the State of Indiana.