200 Greatest Novels of the 20th Century
Criteria: These novels published in the 1900s are ranked according to their initial and lasting acclaim, influence as well as initial and lasting popularity.
Disclaimer: This list is strongly influenced by the Western canon of literature. This means that in the broader scope of a global literature certain regions may be underrepresented, among them India, China, Africa and Latin America.
Disclaimer: This list is strongly influenced by the Western canon of literature. This means that in the broader scope of a global literature certain regions may be underrepresented, among them India, China, Africa and Latin America.
Greatest Novels of the 20th Century
1. Ulysses
by James Joyce
2. In Search of Lost Time
by Marcel Proust
3. One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
4. The Trial
by Franz Kafka
5. The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
6. The Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner
7. To the Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf
8. The Stranger
by Albert Camus
9. The Lord of the Rings
by J.R.R. Tolkien
10. The Magic Mountain
by Thomas Mann
by James Joyce
2. In Search of Lost Time
by Marcel Proust
3. One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
4. The Trial
by Franz Kafka
5. The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
6. The Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner
7. To the Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf
8. The Stranger
by Albert Camus
9. The Lord of the Rings
by J.R.R. Tolkien
10. The Magic Mountain
by Thomas Mann
11. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
by James Joyce
12. Nineteen Eighty Four
by George Orwell
13. Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
14. The Catcher in the Rye
by J.D. Salinger
15. Sons and Lovers
by D.H. Lawrence
16. Absalom, Absalom!
by William Faulkner
17. Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
18. Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley
19. The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck
20. Beloved
by Toni Morrison
21. The Ambassadors
by Henry James
22. Catch-22
by Joseph Heller
23. Molloy/Malone Dies/The Unnamable
by Samuel Beckett
24. The Man Without Qualities
by Robert Musil
25. Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
26. To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee
27. The Sun Also Rises
by Ernest Hemingway
28. Journey to the End of Night
by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
29. Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf
30. The Castle
by Franz Kafka
31. Buddenbrooks
by Thomas Mann
32. Women in Love
by D.H. Lawrence
33. Finnegans Wake
by James Joyce
34. Gravity's Rainbow
by Thomas Pynchon
35. Gone with the Wind
by Margaret Mitchell
36. Things Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe
37. The Old Man and the Sea
by Ernest Hemingway
38. A Passage to India
by E.M. Forster
39. Midnight's Children
by Salman Rushdie
40. For Whom the Bell Tolls
by Ernest Hemingway
41. The Little Prince
by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
42. Native Son
by Richard Wright
43. Animal Farm
by George Orwell
44. Lord of the Flies
by William Golding
45. On the Road
by Jack Kerouac
46. Love in the Time of Cholera
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
47. The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov
48. The Plague
by Albert Camus
49. Pale Fire
by Vladimir Nabokov
50. As I Lay Dying
by William Faulkner
51. The Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton
52. The Tin Drum
by Günter Grass
53. Nostromo
by Joseph Conrad
54. My Antonia
by Willa Cather
55. An American Tragedy
by Theodore Dreiser
56. Babbitt
by Sinclair Lewis
57. Nausea
by Jean-Paul Sartre
58. Steppenwolf
by Hermann Hesse
59. The Color Purple
by Alice Walker
60. The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton
61. The Good Soldier
by Ford Madox Ford
62. The Good Soldier Svejk
by Jaroslav Hašek
63. Infinite Jest
by David Foster Wallace
64. Under the Volcano
by Malcolm Lowry
65. A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
66. Slaughterhouse-Five
by Kurt Vonnegut
67. The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
68. And Quiet Flows the Don
by Mikhail Sholokhov
69. Orlando: A Biography
by Virginia Woolf
70. Rebecca
by Daphne du Maurier
71. A Clockwork Orange
by Anthony Burgess
72. Charlotte's Web
by E.B. White
73. Wide Sargasso Sea
by Jean Rhys
74. Howards End
by E.M. Forster
75. Rabbit, Run
by John Updike
76. Fahrenheit 451
by Ray Bradbury
77. Nineteen Nineteen/The 42nd Parallel/The Big Money
by John Dos Passos
78. Tender Is the Night
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
79. Death in Venice
by Thomas Mann
80. Light in August
by William Faulkner
81. Herzog
by Saul Bellow
82. A Confederacy of Dunces
by John Kennedy Toole
83. The Golden Notebook
by Doris Lessing
84. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
by Hunter S. Thompson
85. All the King's Men
by Robert Penn Warren
86. Doctor Faustus
by Thomas Mann
87. The Big Sleep
by Raymond Chandler
88. All Quiet on the Western Front
by Erich Maria Remarque
89. Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
90. The Call of the Wild
by Jack London
91. Memoirs of Hadrian
by Marguerite Yourcenar
92. Blindness
by José Saramago
93. The Wind in the Willows
by Kenneth Grahame
94. A Prayer for Owen Meany
by John Irving
95. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
by Ken Kesey
96. Rabbit Is Rich
by John Updike
97. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
by C.S. Lewis
98. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
by J.K. Rowling
99. The Moviegoer
by Walker Percy
100. Pedro Paramo
by Juan Rulfo
101. The Maltese Falcon
by Dashiell Hammett
102. Of Human Bondage
by W. Somerset Maugham
103. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
by Muriel Spark
104. Doctor Zhivago
by Boris Pasternak
105. The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
106. Confessions of Zeno
by Italo Svevo
107. Of Mice and Men
by John Steinbeck
108. Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh
109. The Hound of the Baskervilles
by Arthur Conan Doyle
110. The Waves
by Virginia Woolf
111. Rabbit Redux
by John Updike
112. The Hobbit
by J.R.R. Tolkien
113. The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath
114. The Leopard
by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
115. A Room With a View
by E.M. Forster
116. The Sea, The Sea
by Iris Murdoch
117. Bonfire of the Vanities
by Tom Wolfe
118. The House of the Spirits
by Isabel Allende
119. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
by Haruki Murakami
120. Independent People
by Halldor Laxness
121. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
by Betty Smith
122. The World According to Garp
by John Irving
123. The Stand
by Stephen King
124. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
by Douglas Adams
125. Song of Solomon
by Toni Morrison
126. Portnoy's Complaint
by Philip Roth
127. Atlas Shrugged
by Ayn Rand
128. Stranger in a Strange Land
by Robert A. Heinlein
129. Kim
by Rudyard Kipling
130. Rabbit at Rest
by John Updike
131. Go Tell It on the Mountain
by James Baldwin
132. Dune
by Frank Herbert
133. The Power and the Glory
by Graham Greene
134. Berlin Alexanderplatz
by Alfred Döblin
135. Petersburg
by Andrei Bely
136. Hopscotch
by Julio Cortázar
137. The Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco
138. White Teeth
by Zadie Smith
139. The Death of Artemio Cruz
by Carlos Fuentes
140. Cry, The Beloved Country
by Alan Paton
141. Ethan Frome
by Edith Wharton
142. A House for Mr. Biswas
by V.S. Naipaul
143. Season of Migration to the North
by Al-Tayyib Salih
144. Children of Gebelawi
by Naguib Mahfouz
145. Brighton Rock
by Graham Greene
146. Disgrace
by J.M. Coetzee
147. The End of the Affair
by Graham Greene
148. American Pastoral
by Philip Roth
149. Wise Blood
by Flannery O'Connor
150. Ceremony
by Leslie Marmon Silko
151. The Jungle
by Upton Sinclair
152. Parade's End
by Ford Madox Ford
153. The Godfather
by Mario Puzo
154. The Forsyte Saga
by John Galsworthy
155. Darkness at Noon
by Arthur Koestler
156. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
157. Naked Lunch
by William S. Burroughs
158. Tropic of Cancer
by Henry Miller
159. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
by Milan Kundera
160. The Naked and the Dead
by Norman Mailer
161. The Secret Agent
by Joseph Conrad
162. Pippi Longstocking
by Astrid Lindgren
163. The Rainbow
by D.H. Lawrence
164. Zorba the Greek
by Nikos Kazantzakis
165. The Fall
by Albert Camus
166. I, Claudius
by Robert Graves
167. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
by Carson McCullers
168. White Noise
by Don DeLillo
169. The Fountainhead
by Ayn Rand
170. The Adventures of Augie March
by Saul Bellow
171. Revolutionary Road
by Richard Yates
172. Tarzan of the Apes
by Edgar Rice Burroughs
173. The Killer Angels
by Michael Shaara
174. The Poisonwood Bible
by Barbara Kingsolver
175. Main Street
by Sinclair Lewis
176. The Good Earth
by Pearl S. Buck
177. The Book of Disquiet
by Fernando Pessoa
178. Death of Virgil
by Hermann Broch
179. Man's Fate
by André Malraux
180. The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
by Joao Guimaraes Rosa
181. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
by J.K. Rowling
182. The Secret History
by Donna Tartt
183. The God of Small Things
by Arundhati Roy
184. Watership Down
by Richard Adams
185. All the Pretty Horses
by Cormac McCarthy
186. The Confusions of Young Törless
by Robert Musil
187. The Wings of the Dove
by Henry James
188. The War of the End of the World
by Mario Vargas Llosa
189. The English Patient
by Michael Ondaatje
190. The Counterfeiters
by André Gide
191. Neuromancer
by William Gibson
192. We
by Yevgeny Zamyatin
193. Sophie's World
by Jostein Gaarder
194. Satanic Verses
by Salman Rushdie
195. And Then There Were None
by Agatha Christie
196. The Alchemist
by Paulo Coelho
197. A Game of Thrones
by George R.R. Martin
198. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
by Yukio Mishima
199. Snow Country
by Yasunari Kawabata
200. History
by Elsa Morante
by James Joyce
12. Nineteen Eighty Four
by George Orwell
13. Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
14. The Catcher in the Rye
by J.D. Salinger
15. Sons and Lovers
by D.H. Lawrence
16. Absalom, Absalom!
by William Faulkner
17. Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
18. Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley
19. The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck
20. Beloved
by Toni Morrison
21. The Ambassadors
by Henry James
22. Catch-22
by Joseph Heller
23. Molloy/Malone Dies/The Unnamable
by Samuel Beckett
24. The Man Without Qualities
by Robert Musil
25. Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
26. To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee
27. The Sun Also Rises
by Ernest Hemingway
28. Journey to the End of Night
by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
29. Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf
30. The Castle
by Franz Kafka
31. Buddenbrooks
by Thomas Mann
32. Women in Love
by D.H. Lawrence
33. Finnegans Wake
by James Joyce
34. Gravity's Rainbow
by Thomas Pynchon
35. Gone with the Wind
by Margaret Mitchell
36. Things Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe
37. The Old Man and the Sea
by Ernest Hemingway
38. A Passage to India
by E.M. Forster
39. Midnight's Children
by Salman Rushdie
40. For Whom the Bell Tolls
by Ernest Hemingway
41. The Little Prince
by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
42. Native Son
by Richard Wright
43. Animal Farm
by George Orwell
44. Lord of the Flies
by William Golding
45. On the Road
by Jack Kerouac
46. Love in the Time of Cholera
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
47. The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov
48. The Plague
by Albert Camus
49. Pale Fire
by Vladimir Nabokov
50. As I Lay Dying
by William Faulkner
51. The Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton
52. The Tin Drum
by Günter Grass
53. Nostromo
by Joseph Conrad
54. My Antonia
by Willa Cather
55. An American Tragedy
by Theodore Dreiser
56. Babbitt
by Sinclair Lewis
57. Nausea
by Jean-Paul Sartre
58. Steppenwolf
by Hermann Hesse
59. The Color Purple
by Alice Walker
60. The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton
61. The Good Soldier
by Ford Madox Ford
62. The Good Soldier Svejk
by Jaroslav Hašek
63. Infinite Jest
by David Foster Wallace
64. Under the Volcano
by Malcolm Lowry
65. A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
66. Slaughterhouse-Five
by Kurt Vonnegut
67. The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
68. And Quiet Flows the Don
by Mikhail Sholokhov
69. Orlando: A Biography
by Virginia Woolf
70. Rebecca
by Daphne du Maurier
71. A Clockwork Orange
by Anthony Burgess
72. Charlotte's Web
by E.B. White
73. Wide Sargasso Sea
by Jean Rhys
74. Howards End
by E.M. Forster
75. Rabbit, Run
by John Updike
76. Fahrenheit 451
by Ray Bradbury
77. Nineteen Nineteen/The 42nd Parallel/The Big Money
by John Dos Passos
78. Tender Is the Night
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
79. Death in Venice
by Thomas Mann
80. Light in August
by William Faulkner
81. Herzog
by Saul Bellow
82. A Confederacy of Dunces
by John Kennedy Toole
83. The Golden Notebook
by Doris Lessing
84. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
by Hunter S. Thompson
85. All the King's Men
by Robert Penn Warren
86. Doctor Faustus
by Thomas Mann
87. The Big Sleep
by Raymond Chandler
88. All Quiet on the Western Front
by Erich Maria Remarque
89. Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
90. The Call of the Wild
by Jack London
91. Memoirs of Hadrian
by Marguerite Yourcenar
92. Blindness
by José Saramago
93. The Wind in the Willows
by Kenneth Grahame
94. A Prayer for Owen Meany
by John Irving
95. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
by Ken Kesey
96. Rabbit Is Rich
by John Updike
97. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
by C.S. Lewis
98. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
by J.K. Rowling
99. The Moviegoer
by Walker Percy
100. Pedro Paramo
by Juan Rulfo
101. The Maltese Falcon
by Dashiell Hammett
102. Of Human Bondage
by W. Somerset Maugham
103. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
by Muriel Spark
104. Doctor Zhivago
by Boris Pasternak
105. The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
106. Confessions of Zeno
by Italo Svevo
107. Of Mice and Men
by John Steinbeck
108. Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh
109. The Hound of the Baskervilles
by Arthur Conan Doyle
110. The Waves
by Virginia Woolf
111. Rabbit Redux
by John Updike
112. The Hobbit
by J.R.R. Tolkien
113. The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath
114. The Leopard
by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
115. A Room With a View
by E.M. Forster
116. The Sea, The Sea
by Iris Murdoch
117. Bonfire of the Vanities
by Tom Wolfe
118. The House of the Spirits
by Isabel Allende
119. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
by Haruki Murakami
120. Independent People
by Halldor Laxness
121. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
by Betty Smith
122. The World According to Garp
by John Irving
123. The Stand
by Stephen King
124. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
by Douglas Adams
125. Song of Solomon
by Toni Morrison
126. Portnoy's Complaint
by Philip Roth
127. Atlas Shrugged
by Ayn Rand
128. Stranger in a Strange Land
by Robert A. Heinlein
129. Kim
by Rudyard Kipling
130. Rabbit at Rest
by John Updike
131. Go Tell It on the Mountain
by James Baldwin
132. Dune
by Frank Herbert
133. The Power and the Glory
by Graham Greene
134. Berlin Alexanderplatz
by Alfred Döblin
135. Petersburg
by Andrei Bely
136. Hopscotch
by Julio Cortázar
137. The Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco
138. White Teeth
by Zadie Smith
139. The Death of Artemio Cruz
by Carlos Fuentes
140. Cry, The Beloved Country
by Alan Paton
141. Ethan Frome
by Edith Wharton
142. A House for Mr. Biswas
by V.S. Naipaul
143. Season of Migration to the North
by Al-Tayyib Salih
144. Children of Gebelawi
by Naguib Mahfouz
145. Brighton Rock
by Graham Greene
146. Disgrace
by J.M. Coetzee
147. The End of the Affair
by Graham Greene
148. American Pastoral
by Philip Roth
149. Wise Blood
by Flannery O'Connor
150. Ceremony
by Leslie Marmon Silko
151. The Jungle
by Upton Sinclair
152. Parade's End
by Ford Madox Ford
153. The Godfather
by Mario Puzo
154. The Forsyte Saga
by John Galsworthy
155. Darkness at Noon
by Arthur Koestler
156. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
157. Naked Lunch
by William S. Burroughs
158. Tropic of Cancer
by Henry Miller
159. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
by Milan Kundera
160. The Naked and the Dead
by Norman Mailer
161. The Secret Agent
by Joseph Conrad
162. Pippi Longstocking
by Astrid Lindgren
163. The Rainbow
by D.H. Lawrence
164. Zorba the Greek
by Nikos Kazantzakis
165. The Fall
by Albert Camus
166. I, Claudius
by Robert Graves
167. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
by Carson McCullers
168. White Noise
by Don DeLillo
169. The Fountainhead
by Ayn Rand
170. The Adventures of Augie March
by Saul Bellow
171. Revolutionary Road
by Richard Yates
172. Tarzan of the Apes
by Edgar Rice Burroughs
173. The Killer Angels
by Michael Shaara
174. The Poisonwood Bible
by Barbara Kingsolver
175. Main Street
by Sinclair Lewis
176. The Good Earth
by Pearl S. Buck
177. The Book of Disquiet
by Fernando Pessoa
178. Death of Virgil
by Hermann Broch
179. Man's Fate
by André Malraux
180. The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
by Joao Guimaraes Rosa
181. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
by J.K. Rowling
182. The Secret History
by Donna Tartt
183. The God of Small Things
by Arundhati Roy
184. Watership Down
by Richard Adams
185. All the Pretty Horses
by Cormac McCarthy
186. The Confusions of Young Törless
by Robert Musil
187. The Wings of the Dove
by Henry James
188. The War of the End of the World
by Mario Vargas Llosa
189. The English Patient
by Michael Ondaatje
190. The Counterfeiters
by André Gide
191. Neuromancer
by William Gibson
192. We
by Yevgeny Zamyatin
193. Sophie's World
by Jostein Gaarder
194. Satanic Verses
by Salman Rushdie
195. And Then There Were None
by Agatha Christie
196. The Alchemist
by Paulo Coelho
197. A Game of Thrones
by George R.R. Martin
198. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
by Yukio Mishima
199. Snow Country
by Yasunari Kawabata
200. History
by Elsa Morante
|
Ulysses
|
In Search of Lost Time
|
|
One Hundred Years
of Solitude |
The Trial
|
|
The Great Gatsby
|
The Sound and the Fury
|
|
To the Lighthouse
|
The Stranger
|
Edited By: Tim
List Begun: 2022-09-24