The Best Classics

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

About this list

The Times selection of the 100 best classic works of literature.

This list was originally published in 2006 and was added to this site over 11 years ago.

Rank	Book	Authors	Year	Country	Language
153	One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest	Ken Kesey	1962	American	English
873	Call to Arms	Lu Xun	1922	Chinese	Chinese
157	Wide Sargasso Sea	Jean Rhys	1966	British	English
11	Crime and Punishment	Fyodor Dostoevsky	1866	Russian	Russian
341	Notes from the Underground	Fyodor Dostoevsky	1864	Russian	Russian
1344	Story of the Eye	Georges Bataille	1928	French	French
15786	A Spy In The House Of Love	Anaïs Nin	1954	French	English
197	Lady Chatterley's Lover	D. H. Lawrence	1928	British	English
4714	Venus in Furs	Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch	1870	Austrian	German
109	The Canterbury Tales	Geoffrey Chaucer	1400	British	Middle english
18	The Brothers Karamazov	Fyodor Dostoevsky	1880	Russian	Russian
31	Heart of Darkness	Joseph Conrad	1899	British	English
15786	Diamonds Are Forever	Ian Fleming	1956	British	English
34	The Master and Margarita	Mikhail Bulgakov	1967	Russian	Russian
469	The Secret Agent	Joseph Conrad	1907	British	English
288	A Room With a View	E. M. Forster	1908	British	English
15	Wuthering Heights	Emily Brontë	1847	British	English
1465	Don Juan	Lord Byron	1819	British	English
5265	Cat on a Hot Tin Roof	Tennessee Williams	1955	American	English
1206	Love in a Cold Climate	Nancy Mitford	1949	British	English
47	David Copperfield	Charles Dickens	1849	British	English
30	Middlemarch	George Eliot	1871	British	English
2267	Long Walk To Freedom	Nelson Mandela	1994	South African	English
170	Of Mice and Men	John Steinbeck	1937	American	English
894	She	H. Rider Haggard	1887	British	English
92	The Age of Innocence	Edith Wharton	1920	American	English
364	The Hunchback of Notre-Dame	Victor Hugo	1831	French	French
285	Jude the Obscure	Thomas Hardy	1895	British	English
8237	The Old Curiosity Shop	Charles Dickens	1841	British	English
217	The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde	Robert Louis Stevenson	1886	British	English
53	Dracula	Bram Stoker	1897	British	English
39	Frankenstein	Mary Shelley	1818	British	English
188	The Turn of the Screw	Henry James	1898	American	English
104	Vanity Fair	William Makepeace Thackeray	1847	British	English
345	The Castle of Otranto	Horace Walpole	1764	British	English
14	Lolita	Vladimir Nabokov	1955	American	English
704	Breakfast at Tiffany's	Truman Capote	1958	American	English
84	Emma	Jane Austen	1815	British	English
42	On the Road	Jack Kerouac	1957	American	English
24	The Odyssey	Homer	-740	Greek	Ancient greek
26	The Grapes of Wrath	John Steinbeck	1939	American	English
35	Alice's Adventures in Wonderland	Lewis Carroll	1865	British	English
3	The Great Gatsby	F. Scott Fitzgerald	1925	American	English
327	Household Tales	Brothers Grimm	1812	German	German
88	The Picture of Dorian Gray	Oscar Wilde	1890	Irish	English
3866	The Beautiful and Damned	F. Scott Fitzgerald	1922	American	English
304	The Autobiography of Malcolm X	Alex Haley	1965	American	English
1426	Vile Bodies	Evelyn Waugh	1930	British	English
583	Against Nature	J. K. Huysmans	1884	French	French
23	The Stranger	Albert Camus	1942	French	French
55	Animal Farm	George Orwell	1945	British	English
323	Communist Manifesto	Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels	1848	German	German
40	Les Misérables	Victor Hugo	1862	French	French
293	The Time Machine	H. G. Wells	1895	British	English
2228	The Man in the High Castle	Philip K. Dick	1962	American	English
916	The Day of the Triffids	John Wyndham	1951	British	English
321	We	Yevgeny Zamyatin	1924	Russian	Russian
154	A Clockwork Orange	Anthony Burgess	1962	British	English
1968	The Invisible Man	H. G. Wells	1897	British	English
6142	Hell's Angels	Hunter S. Thompson	1966	American	English
192	A Tale of Two Cities	Charles Dickens	1859	British	English
501	Another Country	James Baldwin	1962	American	English
108	In Cold Blood	Truman Capote	1966	American	English
1867	Junky	William S. Burroughs	1953	American	English
393	The Moonstone	Wilkie Collins	1868	British	English
273	The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau	Jean-Jacques Rousseau	1782	French	French
6	Nineteen Eighty Four	George Orwell	1949	British	English
6204	The Monkey Wrench Gang	Edward Abbey	1975	American	English
3287	The Subterraneans	Jack Kerouac	1958	American	English
152	The Prince	Niccolo Machiavelli	1532	Italian	Italian
426	Death Of A Salesman	Arthur Miller	1949	American	English
138	The Woman in White	Wilkie Collins	1860	British	English
120	The Big Sleep	Raymond Chandler	1939	American	English
205	The Complete Sherlock Holmes	Arthur Conan Doyle	1927	British	English
343	The Thirty-Nine Steps	John Buchan	1915	British	English
21	Madame Bovary	Gustave Flaubert	1857	French	French
758	Thérèse Raquin	Émile Zola	1867	French	French
210	Dangerous Liaison	Pierre Choderlos de Laclos	1782	French	French
73	The Scarlet Letter	Nathaniel Hawthorne	1850	American	English
10	Anna Karenina	Leo Tolstoy	1877	Russian	Russian
452	I, Claudius	Robert Graves	1934	British	English
1332	Hangover Square	Patrick Hamilton	1941	British	English
1256	Lives of the Caesars	Suetonius	121	Roman	Latin
115	Treasure Island	Robert Louis Stevenson	1883	British	English
37	The Iliad	Homer	-750	Greek	Ancient greek
87	The Count of Monte Cristo	Alexandre Dumas	1844	French	French
2094	From Russia with Love	Ian Fleming	1957	British	English
13	War and Peace	Leo Tolstoy	1869	Russian	Russian
480	Cold Comfort Farm	Stella Gibbons	1932	British	English
945	The Diary of a Nobody	George Grossmith, Weedon Grossmith	1892	British	English
275	The Pickwick Papers	Charles Dickens	1836	British	English
433	Scoop	Evelyn Waugh	1938	British	English
392	Lucky Jim	Kingsley Amis	1954	British	English