Random House Modern Library’s “100 Best Books of 20th Century”

Compiled by a board of authors, historians, critics, and other publishing luminaries along with the editors of Random House Modern Library in 1998. The books in green are the ones that I have already read

  • My Reading Stats
    • 2013: 6 of 100 read (6%)
    • 2014: 8 of 100 read (8%)
    • 2015: 12 of 100 read (12%)
    • 2016: 14 of 100 read (14%)
    • 2017: 16 of 100 read (16%)
    • 2018: 17 of 100 read (17%)
    • 2019: 17 of 100 read (17%)
    • 2020: 17 of 100 read (17%)
    • 2021: 17 of 100 read (17%)
    • 2022: 17 of 100 read (17%)
  1. Ulysses by James Joyce
  2. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  3. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
  4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabakov
  5. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  6. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
  7. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
  8. Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
  9. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
  10. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
  11. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowery
  12. The Way of All by Samuel Butler
  13. 1984 by George Orwell
  14. I, Claudius by Robert Graves
  15. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
  16. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
  17. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
  18. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
  19. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
  20. Native Son by Richard Wright
  21. Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow
  22. Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara
  23. U.S.A. Trilogy by John Dos Passos
    1. The 42nd Parallel
    2. 1919
    3. The Big Money
  24. Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
  25. A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
  26. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
  27. The Ambassadors by Henry James
  28. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  29. Studs Lonigan by James T. Farrell
  30. The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion by Ford Madox Ford
  31. Animal Farm by George Orwell
  32. The Golden Bowl by Henry James
  33. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
  34. A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
  35. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
  36. All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
  37. The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
  38. Howard’s End by E.M. Forster
  39. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
  40. The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
  41. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
  42. Deliverance by James Dickey
  43. A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
  44. Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley
  45. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
  46. The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale by Joseph Conrad
  47. Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard by Joseph Conrad
  48. The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence
  49. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
  50. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
  51. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
  52. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
  53. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
  54. Light in August by William Faulkner
  55. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
  56. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
  57. Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford
  58. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
  59. Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm
  60. The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
  61. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
  62. From Here to Eternity by James Jones
  63. The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever
  64. The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
  65. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
  66. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
  67. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
  68. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
  69. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
  70. Alexandria Quartet Boxed Set by Lawrence Durrell
    1. Justine
    2. Balthazar
    3. Mountolive
    4. Clea
  71. High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Arthur Warren Hughes
  72. A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul
  73. The Day of the Locusts by Nathanael West
  74. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
  75. Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
  76. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
  77. Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce
  78. Kim by Rudyard Kipling
  79. A Room With a View by E. M. Forster
  80. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
  81. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
  82. Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
  83. A Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul
  84. The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen
  85. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
  86. Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow
  87. The Old Wive’s Tale by Arnold Bennett
  88. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
  89. Loving by Henry Green
  90. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
  91. Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell
  92. Ironweed by William J. Kennedy
  93. The Magus by John Fowler
  94. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
  95. Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
  96. Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
  97. The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
  98. The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain
  99. The Ginger Man by J. P. Donleavy
  100. The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington

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