Select 100

This is one of the 759 lists we use to generate our main The Greatest Books list.

About this list

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 100 Books

"This list was compiled by tabulating nominations by UWM faculty, staff and students for the Select 100. It includes changes which have resulted from nominations received since the original list was released. We asked you to recommend books which you have found to be so useful and important that no one could consider himself/herself an educated or enlightened person without having read them. This is your cumulative response."

This list was originally published in 2015 and was added to this site over 11 years ago.

View: List Grid Table
Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
22 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain 1884 American English
55 Animal Farm George Orwell 1945 British English
835 The Art of War Sun Tzu -500 Chinese Classical chinese
79 As I Lay Dying William Faulkner 1930 American English
461 Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand 1957 American English
19 The Bible Unknown -1400 Jewish Hebrew, aramaic, greek
50 Brave New World Aldous Huxley 1932 British English
18 The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky 1880 Russian Russian
80 Candide Voltaire 1759 French French
1323 A Canticle for Leibowitz Walter M. Miller 1960 American English
33 Catch-22 Joseph Heller 1961 American English
4 The Catcher in the Rye J. D. Salinger 1951 American English
4454 The City in History Lewis Mumford 1961 American English
153 A Clockwork Orange Anthony Burgess 1962 British English
157 The Color Purple Alice Walker 1982 American English
324 Communist Manifesto Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels 1848 German German
129 First Folio William Shakespeare 1623 British English
203 A Confederacy of Dunces John Kennedy Toole 1980 American English
133 Confessions Augustine 397 Roman Latin
11 Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoevsky 1866 Russian Russian
9714 The Crucible Arthur Miller 1953 American English
265 Cry, the Beloved Country Alan Paton 1948 South African English
14983 The Dancing Wu Li Masters Gary Zukav 1979 American English
30 The Divine Comedy Dante Alighieri 1308 Italian Italian
112 Doctor Zhivago Boris Pasternak 1957 Russian Russian
8 Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes 1605 Spanish Spanish
304 The Double Helix James D. Watson 1968 American English
100 Dune Frank Herbert 1965 American English
620 The Elements of Style E. B. White, William Strunk Jr. 1918 American English
17117 Entropy Jeremy Rifkin, Ted Howard 1980 American English
490 Ethan Frome Edith Wharton 1911 American English
150 Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury 1953 American English
67 A Farewell to Arms Ernest Hemingway 1929 American English
96 Faust Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1808 German German
683 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Hunter S. Thompson 1971 American English
404 The Federalist Papers Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay 1787 American English
1476 Flatland Edwin A. Abbott 1884 British English
2248 Forbidden Colors Yukio Mishima 1951 Japanese Japanese
361 Foundation Isaac Asimov 1951 American English
434 The Fountainhead Ayn Rand 1943 American English
6517 Free to Choose Milton Friedman, Rose Friedman 1980 American English
58 Gone With the Wind Margaret Mitchell 1936 American English
26 The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck 1939 American English
254 Gravity's Rainbow Thomas Pynchon 1973 American English
38 Great Expectations Charles Dickens 1860 British English
3 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925 American English
65 Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift 1726 British English
132 The Handmaid's Tale Margaret Atwood 1985 Canadian English
451 Hiroshima John Hersey 1946 American English
17117 How Democracies Perish Jean François Revel 1983 French French
37 The Iliad Homer -750 Greek Ancient greek
36 Invisible Man Ralph Ellison 1952 American English
29 Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë 1847 British English
77 Leaves of Grass Walt Whitman 1855 American English
44 The Little Prince Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 1943 French French
17 The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien 1959 English English
52 Lord of the Flies William Golding 1954 British English
20 Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert 1857 French French
582 Man's Search for Meaning Viktor Frankl 1946 Austrian German
1011 Mere Christianity C. S. Lewis 1952 British English
7 Moby-Dick Herman Melville 1851 American English
6212 The Monkey Wrench Gang Edward Abbey 1975 American English
160 My Antonia Willa Cather 1918 American English
6 Nineteen Eighty Four George Orwell 1949 British English
24 The Odyssey Homer -740 Greek Ancient greek
292 Of Human Bondage W. Somerset Maugham 1915 British English
170 Of Mice and Men John Steinbeck 1937 American English
54 The Old Man and the Sea Ernest Hemingway 1952 American English
41 On the Road Jack Kerouac 1957 American English
5 One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez 1967 Colombian Spanish
180 On the Origin of Species Charles Darwin 1859 British English
127 Paradise Lost John Milton 1667 British English
76 The Plague Albert Camus 1947 French French
13 Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen 1813 British English
152 The Prince Niccolo Machiavelli 1532 Italian Italian
505 The Quran Unknown 610 Arabic Arabic
220 The Republic Plato -379 Greek Ancient greek
2479 The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich William L. Shirer 1960 American English
1301 The Road Less Traveled M. Scott Peck 1978 American English
173 A Room of One's Own Virginia Woolf 1929 British English
1892 A Sand County Almanac Aldo Leopold 1949 American English
140 The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir 1949 French French
1068 The Seven Storey Mountain Thomas Merton 1948 American English
163 Siddhartha Hermann Hesse 1922 German German
84 Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut 1969 American English
1762 Small Is Beautiful E. F. Schumacher 1973 British English
171 Steppenwolf Hermann Hesse 1927 German German
23 The Stranger Albert Camus 1942 French French
368 Stranger in a Strange Land Robert A. Heinlein 1961 American English
417 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Thomas Kuhn 1962 American English
12224 The Tao of Physics Fritjof Capra 1975 Austrian English
585 Tao Te Ching Lao Tsu -300 Chinese Classical chinese
6670 Future Shock Alvin Toffler 1980 American English
1 Ulysses James Joyce 1922 Irish English
4496 The Unsettling of America Wendell Berry 1977 American English
881 Utopia Thomas More 1516 British Latin
108 Walden Henry David Thoreau 1854 American English
12 War and Peace Leo Tolstoy 1869 Russian Russian
634 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Robert M. Pirsig 1974 American English
1387 Gödel, Escher, Bach Douglas Hofstadter 1979 American English