An unavoidably controversial list of the last century’s best novels and an excellent reference to lots of good reading.

1. Ulysses, James Joyce
2. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. The Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, James Joyce
4. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
5. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
6. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
7. Catch-22, Joseph L. Heller
8. Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler
9. Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence
10. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
11. Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry [not currently available]
12. The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler [not currently available]
13. 1984, George Orwell
14. I, Claudius, Robert Graves
15. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
16. An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
17. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
18. Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
19. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
20. Native Son, Richard Wright
21. Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow
22. Appointment in Samarra, John O’Hara
23. U.S.A. (trilogy), John Dos Passos
24. Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson
25. A Passage to India, E.M. Forster
26. The Wings of the Dove, Henry James
27. The Ambassadors, Henry James
28. Tender Is the Night, F.Scott Fitzgerald
29. The Studs Lonigan Trilogy, James T. Farrell
30. The Good Soldier, Ford Maddox Ford
31. Animal Farm, George Orwell
32. The Golden Bowl, Henry James
33. Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser
34. A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
35. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
36. All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren
37. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder
38. Howards End, E.M. Forster
39. Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin
40. The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene
41. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
42. Deliverance, James Dickey
43. A Dance to the Music of Time(series),Anthony Powell
44. Point Counter Point, Aldous Huxley
45. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
46. The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad
47. Nostromo, Joseph Conrad
48. The Rainbow, D.H. Lawrence
49. Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence
50. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
51. Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
52. Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth
53. Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
54. Light in August, William Faulkner
55. On the Road, Jack Kerouac
56. The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
57. Parade’s End, Ford Maddox Ford [not currently available]
58. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
59. Zuleika Dobson, Max Beerbohm
60. The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
61. Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather
62. From Here to Eternity, James Jones [not currently available]
63. The Wapshot Chronicle, John Cheever
64. The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
65. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
66. Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham
67. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
68. Main Street, Sinclair Lewis [not currently available]
69. The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
70. The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell [not currently available]
71. High Wind in Jamaica, Richard Hughes [not currently available]
72. A House for Mr. Biswas, V.S. Naipaul
73. The Day of the Locust, Nathaniel West
74. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
75. Scoop, Evelyn Waugh [not currently available]
76. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark [not currently available]
77. Finnegans Wake, James Joyce
78. Kim, Rudyard Kipling
79. A Room With a View, E.M. Forster
80. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
81. The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
82. Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner
83. A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul
84. The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen
85. Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad
86. Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow
87. The Old Wives’ Tale, Arnold Bennett
88. Call of the Wild, Jack London
89. Loving, Henry Green
90. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
91. Tobacco Road, Erskine Caldwell
92. Ironweed, William Kennedy
93. The Magus, John Fowles
94. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
95. Under the Net, Iris Murdoch
96. Sophie’s Choice, William Styron
97. The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles
98. The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain
99. The Ginger Man, J.P. Donleavy
100. The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington