The Graphic Canon

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Book, 171 Books

The classic canon of Western civilization meets the artists and illustrators who have remade reading in the last years of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century in Russ Kick's magisterial, three-volume, full-color The Graphic Canon, volumes 1, 2, and 3. - Amazon

This list was originally published in 2012 and was added to this site over 11 years ago.

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Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
71 Hamlet William Shakespeare 1600 British English
264 The Epic Of Gilgamesh Unknown -2100 Multiple Akkadian
37 The Iliad Homer -750 Greek Ancient greek
24 The Odyssey Homer -740 Greek Ancient greek
900 The Poems of Sappho Sappho -569 Greek Ancient greek
307 Medea Euripides -431 Greek Ancient greek
876 Lysistrata Aristophanes -411 Greek Ancient greek
585 Tao Te Ching Lao Tsu -300 Chinese Classical chinese
323 Mahabharata Vyasa -400 Indian Sanskrit
621 Analects Confucius -479 Chinese Classical chinese
405 De Rerum Natura Lucretius 55 Roman Latin
70 The Aeneid Virgil -19 Roman Latin
669 Beowulf Unknown 1000 Unknown Old english
130 The Tale of Genji Murasaki Shikibu 1001 Japanese Classical japanese
46 One Thousand and One Nights Unknown 800 Multiple Arabic
30 The Divine Comedy Dante Alighieri 1308 Italian Italian
110 The Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer 1400 British Middle english
548 Le Morte d'Arthur Thomas Malory 1485 British Middle english
367 Journey to the West Wu Cheng'en 1592 Chinese Chinese
1284 The Faerie Queene Edmund Spenser 1590 British English
1661 A Midsummer Night's Dream William Shakespeare 1595 British English
131 King Lear William Shakespeare 1608 British English
155 Macbeth William Shakespeare 1606 British English
343 The Sonnets William Shakespeare 1609 British English
8 Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes 1605 Spanish Spanish
1239 The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne John Donne 1952 British English
127 Paradise Lost John Milton 1667 British English
65 Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift 1726 British English
80 Candide Voltaire 1759 French French
774 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Mary Wollstonecraft 1792 British English
210 Dangerous Liaison Pierre Choderlos de Laclos 1782 French French
188 A Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens 1859 British English
20 Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert 1857 French French
93 Little Women Louisa May Alcott 1868 American English
74 The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne 1850 American English
6177 The Complete Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1828 British English
1652 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1798 British English
1229 Songs of Innocence and Experience William Blake 1789 British English
13 Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen 1813 British English
1273 Selected Poems of Lord Byron Lord Byron 1800 British English
2016 The Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley Percy Bysshe Shelley 1810 British English
974 The Poems of John Keats John Keats 1817 British English
39 Frankenstein Mary Shelley 1818 British English
322 Household Tales Brothers Grimm 1812 German German
1112 The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake William Blake 1827 British English
225 Fairy Tales and Stories Hans Christian Andersen 1835 Danish Danish
339 The Adventures of Oliver Twist Charles Dickens 1837 British English
98 The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe 1902 American English
29 Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë 1847 British English
15 Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë 1847 British English
7 Moby-Dick Herman Melville 1851 American English
108 Walden Henry David Thoreau 1854 American English
77 Leaves of Grass Walt Whitman 1855 American English
180 On the Origin of Species Charles Darwin 1859 British English
40 Les Misérables Victor Hugo 1862 French French
156 Poems of Emily Dickinson Emily Dickinson 1890 American English
1870 The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters Gustave Flaubert 1921 French French
35 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Lewis Carroll 1865 British English
547 Through the Looking Glass Lewis Carroll 1871 British English
11 Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoevsky 1866 Russian Russian
28 Middlemarch George Eliot 1871 British English
10 Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy 1877 Russian Russian
22 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain 1884 American English
222 Thus Spake Zarathustra Friedrich Nietzsche 1883 German German
218 The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson 1886 British English
89 The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde 1890 Irish English
31 Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad 1899 British English
271 The Awakening Kate Chopin 1899 American English
177 The Interpretation of Dreams Sigmund Freud 1899 Austrian German
340 The Wonderful Wizard of Oz L. Frank Baum 1900 American English
289 A Room With a View E. M. Forster 1908 British English
330 Dubliners James Joyce 1914 Irish English
66 The Metamorphosis Franz Kafka 1915 Czech German
10071 Prufrock and Other Observations T. S. Eliot 1917 British English
655 Stories of Ernest Hemingway Ernest Hemingway 1987 American English
4 The Catcher in the Rye J. D. Salinger 1951 American English
311 Winesburg, Ohio Sherwood Anderson 1919 American English
268 Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats William Butler Yeats 1933 Irish English
92 The Age of Innocence Edith Wharton 1920 American English
14156 The Poems of Wilfred Owen Wilfred Owen 1920 British English
295 Franz Kafka Franz Kafka 1971 Czech Unknown
27 To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf 1927 British English
2212 Collected Stories W. Somerset Maugham 1951 British English
1 Ulysses James Joyce 1922 Irish English
465 Collected Poems Wallace Stevens 1954 American English
1468 The Collected Stories of William Faulkner William Faulkner 1950 American English
163 Siddhartha Hermann Hesse 1922 German German
3 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925 American English
171 Steppenwolf Hermann Hesse 1927 German German
196 Lady Chatterley's Lover D. H. Lawrence 1928 British English
9 The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner 1929 American English
142 The Maltese Falcon Dashiell Hammett 1930 American English
50 Brave New World Aldous Huxley 1932 British English
245 Nausea Jean Paul Sartre 1938 French French
26 The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck 1939 American English
45 Fictions Jorge Luis Borges 1944 Argentinian Spanish
23 The Stranger Albert Camus 1942 French French
55 Animal Farm George Orwell 1945 British English
350 The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor Flannery O'Connor 1971 American English
6 Nineteen Eighty Four George Orwell 1949 British English
587 The Man with the Golden Arm Nelson Algren 1949 American English
101 Waiting for Godot Samuel Beckett 1953 Irish French
52 Lord of the Flies William Golding 1954 British English
14 Lolita Vladimir Nabokov 1955 American English
41 On the Road Jack Kerouac 1957 American English
259 Naked Lunch William S. Burroughs 1959 American English
154 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Ken Kesey 1962 American English
103 The Bell Jar Sylvia Plath 1963 American English
34 The Master and Margarita Mikhail Bulgakov 1967 Russian Russian
5 One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez 1967 Colombian Spanish
254 Gravity's Rainbow Thomas Pynchon 1973 American English
841 Crash J. G. Ballard 1973 British English
2057 Sixty Stories Donald Barthelme 1981 American English
1473 What We Talk About When We Talk About Love Raymond Carver 1981 American English
2481 Blood and Guts in High School Kathy Acker 1978 American English
198 Blood Meridian Cormac McCarthy 1985 American English
1505 The Famished Road Ben Okri 1991 Nigerian English
473 The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Haruki Murakami 1994 Japanese Japanese
333 Infinite Jest David Foster Wallace 1996 American English
240 Death in Venice Thomas Mann 1912 German German