The 100 Greatest American Novels, 1893 – 1993

This is one of the 743 lists we use to generate our main The Greatest Books list.

About this list

Jeff O'Neal at Bookriot.com, 100 Books

The 100 greatest american novels picked by Jeff O’Neal, Editor-in-Chief & Co-founder of Bookriot.com

This list was originally published in 2013 and was added to this site almost 12 years ago.

View: List Grid Table
Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
14810 Maggie Stephen Crane 1893 American English
1427 The Country of the Pointed Firs Sarah Orne Jewett 1896 American English
270 The Awakening Kate Chopin 1899 American English
231 The Call of the Wild Jack London 1903 American English
374 The Golden Bowl Henry James 1904 American English
218 The House of Mirth Edith Wharton 1905 American English
181 The Jungle Upton Sinclair 1906 American English
1154 Three Lives Gertrude Stein 1909 American English
160 My Antonia Willa Cather 1918 American English
1227 The Magnificent Ambersons Booth Tarkington 1918 American English
310 Winesburg, Ohio Sherwood Anderson 1919 American English
563 Main Street Sinclair Lewis 1920 American English
14689 Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man James Weldon Johnson 1912 American English
853 Cane Jean Toomer 1923 American English
3 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925 American English
195 An American Tragedy Theodore Dreiser 1925 American English
63 The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway 1926 American English
643 The Bridge of San Luis Rey Thornton Wilder 1927 American English
4791 Home to Harlem Claude McKay 1928 American English
9 The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner 1929 American English
253 Look Homeward, Angel Thomas Wolfe 1929 American English
143 The Maltese Falcon Dashiell Hammett 1930 American English
3575 Flowering Judas and Other Stories Katherine Anne Porter 1930 American English
283 The Good Earth Pearl S. Buck 1931 American English
519 Call It Sleep Henry Roth 1934 American English
242 Tropic of Cancer Henry Miller 1934 American English
2252 Appointment in Samarra John O'Hara 1934 American English
58 Gone With the Wind Margaret Mitchell 1936 American English
68 Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston 1937 American English
346 The Day of the Locust Nathanael West 1939 American English
120 The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler 1939 American English
26 The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck 1939 American English
106 Native Son Richard Wright 1940 American English
117 The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter Carson McCullers 1940 American English
439 The Fountainhead Ayn Rand 1943 American English
243 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Betty Smith 1943 American English
149 All the King's Men Robert Penn Warren 1946 American English
1375 Tales of the South Pacific James A. Michener 1947 American English
429 The Naked and the Dead Norman Mailer 1948 American English
619 The Sheltering Sky Paul Bowles 1949 American English
1070 The Lottery and Other Stories Shirley Jackson 1948 American English
4 The Catcher in the Rye J. D. Salinger 1951 American English
36 Invisible Man Ralph Ellison 1952 American English
366 Go Tell it on the Mountain James Baldwin 1953 American English
279 The Adventures of Augie March Saul Bellow 1953 American English
150 Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury 1953 American English
1113 Andersonville MacKinlay Kantor 1955 American English
42 On the Road Jack Kerouac 1957 American English
2860 Gimpel the Fool Isaac Bashevis Singer 1953 Polish Yiddish
1151 The Wapshot Chronicle John Cheever 1957 American English
14 Lolita Vladimir Nabokov 1955 American English
6429 The Magic Barrel Bernard Malamud 1958 American English
2848 Goodbye, Columbus Philip Roth 1959 American English
257 Naked Lunch William S. Burroughs 1959 American English
1884 Little Disturbances Grace Paley 1959 American English
14068 Brown Girl, Brownstones Paule Marshall 1959 American English
16 To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee 1960 American English
174 Rabbit, Run John Updike 1960 American English
1421 The Sot-Weed Factor John Barth 1960 American English
183 The Moviegoer Walker Percy 1961 American English
33 Catch-22 Joseph Heller 1961 American English
611 Revolutionary Road Richard Yates 1961 American English
153 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Ken Kesey 1962 American English
102 The Bell Jar Sylvia Plath 1963 American English
717 A Sport and a Pastime James Salter 1967 American English
1539 The Confessions of Nat Turner William Styron 1967 American English
527 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick 1968 American English
85 Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut 1969 American English
2862 House Made of Dawn N. Scott Momaday 1968 American English
688 Them Joyce Carol Oates 1969 American English
10152 The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford Jean Stafford 1969 American English
463 Play It As It Lays Joan Didion 1970 American English
349 The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor Flannery O'Connor 1971 American English
1281 Mumbo Jumbo Ishmael Reed 1972 American English
657 Angle of Repose Wallace Stegner 1971 American English
255 Gravity's Rainbow Thomas Pynchon 1973 American English
417 Ragtime E. L. Doctorow 1975 American English
3845 JR William Gaddis 1975 American English
787 Roots Alex Haley 1976 American English
1082 Ceremony Leslie Marmon Silko 1977 American English
408 The World According to Garp John Irving 1978 American English
17010 Airships Barry Hannah 1978 American English
330 Housekeeping Marilynne Robinson 1980 American English
203 A Confederacy of Dunces John Kennedy Toole 1980 American English
1378 The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty Eudora Welty 1980 American English
159 The Color Purple Alice Walker 1982 American English
1328 Cathedral Raymond Carver 1983 American English
1316 Love Medicine Louise Erdrich 1984 American English
892 Neuromancer William Gibson 1984 American, Canadian English
362 White Noise Don DeLillo 1985 American English
198 Blood Meridian Cormac McCarthy 1985 American English
631 Lonesome Dove Larry McMurtry 1985 American English
10169 City of Glass Paul Auster 1985 American English
49 Beloved Toni Morrison 1987 American English
737 The Joy Luck Club Amy Tan 1989 American English
7136 The Shawl Cynthia Ozick 1989 American English
653 The Things They Carried Tim O'Brien 1990 American English
1496 How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents Julia Alvarez 1991 Dominican English
721 Bastard Out of Carolina Dorothy Allison 1992 American English
185 U.S.A. Trilogy John Dos Passos 1930 American English