Librarians’ Top 100 Novels of 20th Century
Another excellent guide to a world of excellent novels with a number of selections not found on the Modern Library’s list of the same name.
- To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
- The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
- The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien
- Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
- Beloved, Toni Morrison
- The Color Purple, Alice Walker
- 1984, George Orwell
- Animal Farm, George Orwell
- Lord of the Flies, William Golding
- Catch-22, Joseph L. Heller
- The Good Earth, Pearl Buck
- Charlotte’s Web, E. B. White
- The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
- One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry
- Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
- Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
- Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
- The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
- A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
- The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien
- One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, Ken Kesey
- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
- My Antonia, Willa Cather
- The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
- Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D. H. Lawrence
- Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
- Exodus, Leon Uris
- Sophie’s Choice, William Styron
- Native Son, Richard Wright
- Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder
- A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
- Winnie the Pooh, A. A. Milne
- The Jungle, Upton Sinlair
- The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
- The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
- Rabbit Run, John Updike
- On the Road, Jack Kerouac
- Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
- Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegne
- All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
- Ulysses, James Joyce
- The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
- The Stranger, Albert Camus
- The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
- Possession, A. S. Byatt
- Stone Diaries, Carol Shields
- Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
- The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan
- Roots, Alex Haley
- The Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, James Joyce
- Look Homeward Angel, Thomas Wolfe
- Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Katherine Anne Porter
- Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton
- The Lover, Marguerite Duras
- A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
- Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson
- To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
- The World According to Garp, John Irving
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum
- The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C. S. Lewis
- The Hound of the Baskervilles, A. Conan Doyle
- The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
- The Burger’s Daughter, Nadine Gordimer
- Call of the Wild, Jack London
- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
- The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
- I, Claudius, Robert Graves
- From Here to Eternity, James Jones
- East of Eden, John Steinbeck
- Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton
- Advise and Consent, Allen Drury
- A Passage to India, E.M. Forster
- 2001 A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke
- The Good Soldier, Ford Maddox Ford
- Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
- The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
- Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth
- The Plague, Albert Camus
- The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery
- The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
- The Bean Trees, Barbara Kingsolver
- Tarzan of the Apes, Edgar Rice Burroughs
- Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser
- A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannery O’Connor
- Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust
- Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow
- Ordinary People, Judith Guest
- Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham
- Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
- Babbit, Sinclair Lewis
- All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren
- Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence
- Kate Vaiden, Reynolds Price
- U.S.A. (trilogy), John Dos Passos
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
- A Death in the Family, James Agee
- The Once and Future King, T. H. White