100 Best Books

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

About this list

Montana State University, 106 Books

Michael Sexson, English teacher at Montana State University, in 2000 had his class of 45 students compose a list of the 100 greatest works of literature ever written, in their collective opinions.

This list was originally published in 2010 and was added to this site over 11 years ago.

View: List Grid Table
Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
129 First Folio William Shakespeare 1623 British English
19 The Bible Unknown -1400 Jewish Hebrew, aramaic, greek
8 Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes 1605 Spanish Spanish
37 The Iliad Homer -750 Greek Ancient greek
24 The Odyssey Homer -740 Greek Ancient greek
175 Metamorphoses Ovid 8 Roman Latin
257 Finnegans Wake James Joyce 1939 Irish English
285 Oresteia Aeschylus -458 Greek Ancient greek
585 Tao Te Ching Lao Tsu -300 Chinese Classical chinese
18 The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky 1880 Russian Russian
35 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Lewis Carroll 1865 British English
27 To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf 1927 British English
5 One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez 1967 Colombian Spanish
72 Pale Fire Vladimir Nabokov 1962 American English
30 The Divine Comedy Dante Alighieri 1308 Italian Italian
465 Collected Poems Wallace Stevens 1954 American English
46 One Thousand and One Nights Unknown 800 Multiple Arabic
12 War and Peace Leo Tolstoy 1869 Russian Russian
49 Beloved Toni Morrison 1987 American English
45 Fictions Jorge Luis Borges 1944 Argentinian Spanish
31 Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad 1899 British English
5170 Anecdotes of Destiny Isak Dinesen 1958 Danish Danish
106 Oedipus the King Sophocles -429 Greek Ancient greek
383 Oedipus at Colonus Sophocles -401 Greek Ancient greek
125 Antigone Sophocles -441 Greek Ancient greek
3088 The Marriage Of Cadmus And Harmony Roberto Calasso 1988 Italian Italian
3933 Tales from the Kathasaritsagara Somadeva 1070 Indian Sanskrit
128 The Stories of Anton Chekhov Anton Chekhov 1900 Russian Russian
323 Mahabharata Vyasa -400 Indian Sanskrit
1 Ulysses James Joyce 1922 Irish English
322 Household Tales Brothers Grimm 1812 German German
36 Invisible Man Ralph Ellison 1952 American English
43 Absalom, Absalom! William Faulkner 1936 American English
227 Women in Love D. H. Lawrence 1920 British English
14 Lolita Vladimir Nabokov 1955 American English
388 The Complete Works of Plato Plato -387 Greek Ancient greek
2 In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust 1913 French French
91 The Tin Drum Günter Grass 1959 German German
350 The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor Flannery O'Connor 1971 American English
38 Great Expectations Charles Dickens 1860 British English
151 Molloy Samuel Beckett 1951 Irish French
270 Malone Dies Samuel Beckett 1951 Irish French
326 The Unnamable Samuel Beckett 1953 Irish French
177 The Interpretation of Dreams Sigmund Freud 1899 Austrian German
110 The Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer 1400 British Middle english
479 Four Quartets T. S. Eliot 1943 British English
20 Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert 1857 French French
64 Midnight's Children Salman Rushdie 1981 Indian English
51 The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne 1759 British English
268 Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats William Butler Yeats 1933 Irish English
1141 The Golden Bough James George Frazer 1890 British English
136 The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame 1908 British English
13 Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen 1813 British English
1136 The Black Prince Iris Murdoch 1973 British English
797 The Manuscript Found in Saragossa Jan Potocki 1805 Polish French
943 The Bacchae Euripides -405 Greek Ancient greek
105 Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray 1847 British English
66 The Metamorphosis Franz Kafka 1915 Czech German
70 The Aeneid Virgil -19 Roman Latin
1186 Tristan Gottfried von Strassburg 1210 German Middle high german
1112 The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake William Blake 1827 British English
512 The Golden Ass Apuleius 158 Roman Latin
101 Waiting for Godot Samuel Beckett 1953 Irish French
2865 Endgame Samuel Beckett 1957 Irish French
156 Poems of Emily Dickinson Emily Dickinson 1890 American English
7 Moby-Dick Herman Melville 1851 American English
514 Speak, Memory Vladimir Nabokov 1951 American English
1177 Phèdre Jean Racine 1677 French French
1297 Poetics Aristotle -322 Greek Greek
179 Fathers and Sons Ivan Turgenev 1862 Russian Russian
876 Lysistrata Aristophanes -411 Greek Ancient greek
424 A Doll's House Henrik Ibsen 1879 Norwegian Norwegian
1382 The Importance of Being Earnest Oscar Wilde 1895 Irish English
67 A Farewell to Arms Ernest Hemingway 1929 American English
102 Charlotte's Web E. B. White 1952 American English
22 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain 1884 American English
77 Leaves of Grass Walt Whitman 1855 American English
318 If on a Winter's Night a Traveller Italo Calvino 1979 Italian Italian
29 Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë 1847 British English
9031 The Storyteller Mario Vargas Llosa 1987 Peruvian Spanish
1364 Fragments Heraclitus -500 Greek Ancient greek
15 Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë 1847 British English
264 The Epic Of Gilgamesh Unknown -2100 Multiple Akkadian
57 The Idiot Fyodor Dostoevsky 1869 Russian Russian
117 Tess of the d'Urbervilles Thomas Hardy 1891 British English
130 The Tale of Genji Murasaki Shikibu 1001 Japanese Classical japanese
75 Essays Michel de Montaigne 1580 French French
108 Walden Henry David Thoreau 1854 American English
107 Native Son Richard Wright 1940 American English
3238 The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson Ralph Waldo Emerson 2000 American English
135 Doctor Faustus Thomas Mann 1947 German German
16 To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee 1960 American English
145 Gargantua and Pantagruel Francois Rabelais 1532 French French
127 Paradise Lost John Milton 1667 British English
134 Tom Jones Henry Fielding 1749 British English
4 The Catcher in the Rye J. D. Salinger 1951 American English
2807 The Art of Memory Frances A. Yates 1966 British English
28 Middlemarch George Eliot 1871 British English
4739 At Play in the Fields of the Lord Peter Matthiessen 1965 American English
751 All the Pretty Horses Cormac McCarthy 1992 American English
80 Candide Voltaire 1759 French French
1539 On the Genealogy of Morality Friedrich Nietzsche 1887 German German
78 A Passage to India E. M. Forster 1924 British English
454 The Sea, The Sea Iris Murdoch 1978 British English
485 Tristes Tropiques Claude Lévi-Strauss 1955 French French
68 Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston 1937 American English