The New York Public Library's Books of the Century

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

About this list

New York Public Library, 175 Books

The following is a complete list of the titles included in the exhibition Books of the Century at The New York Public Library's Center for the Humanities, May 20, 1995-July 13, 1996, and in The New York Public Library's Books of the Century, published by Oxford University Press.

who voted?
there is a list of the librarians (named) in the actual book - about 32 of them

A celebration of the NYPL's centenary. The books were selected by public service and research librarians

This list was originally published in 1996 and was added to this site over 6 years ago.

View: List Grid Table
Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
572 Three Sisters Anton Chekhov 1901 Russian Russian
2 In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust 1913 French French
1733 Tender Buttons Gertrude Stein 1914 American English
66 The Metamorphosis Franz Kafka 1915 Czech German
3637 Renascence and Other Poems Edna St. Vincent Millay 1917 American English
2751 The Wild Swans at Coole William Butler Yeats 1917 Irish English
1386 Six Characters in Search of an Author Luigi Pirandello 1921 Italian Italian
111 The Waste Land T. S. Eliot 1922 British English
1 Ulysses James Joyce 1922 Irish English
25 The Magic Mountain Thomas Mann 1924 German German
3 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925 American English
27 To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf 1927 British English
447 Gypsy Ballads Federico García Lorca 1928 Spanish Spanish
107 Native Son Richard Wright 1940 American English
3637 The Portable Faulkner William Faulkner 1946 American English
1238 The Age of Anxiety W. H. Auden 1947 British English
101 Waiting for Godot Samuel Beckett 1953 Irish French
36 Invisible Man Ralph Ellison 1952 American English
14 Lolita Vladimir Nabokov 1955 American English
45 Fictions Jorge Luis Borges 1944 Argentinian Spanish
41 On the Road Jack Kerouac 1957 American English
5 One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez 1967 Colombian Spanish
241 Portnoy's Complaint Philip Roth 1969 American English
260 Song of Solomon Toni Morrison 1977 American English
3637 The Life of the Bee Maurice Maeterlinck 1901 Belgian French
1052 Treatise on Radioactivity Marie Curie 1910 French French
315 Relativity Albert Einstein 1916 German German
2253 A Field Guide to the Birds Roger Tory Peterson 1934 American English
1892 A Sand County Almanac Aldo Leopold 1949 American English
2219 King Solomon's Ring Konrad Lorenz 1949 Austrian German
162 Silent Spring Rachel Carson 1962 American English
1896 Smoking and Health Surgeon General 1964 American English
304 The Double Helix James D. Watson 1968 American English
4376 The Diversity of Life E. O. Wilson 1992 American English
3637 The Battle with the Slum Jacob A. Riis 1902 Danish English
557 The Souls of Black Folk W. E. B. Du Bois 1903 American English
183 The Jungle Upton Sinclair 1906 American English
2249 Twenty Years at Hull-House Jane Addams 1910 American English
3637 The House on Henry Street Lillian D. Wald 1915 American English
3637 The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens Lincoln Steffens 1931 American English
185 U.S.A. Trilogy John Dos Passos 1930 American English
26 The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck 1939 American English
456 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men James Agee 1941 American English
1756 Strange Fruit Lillian Smith 1944 American English
3230 Growing Up Absurd Paul Goodman 1960 American English
749 The Fire Next Time James Baldwin 1963 American English
306 The Autobiography of Malcolm X Alex Haley 1965 American English
1873 And the Band Played On Randy Shilts 1987 American English
6835 There Are No Children Here Alex Kotlowitz 1991 American English
137 Lord Jim Joseph Conrad 1900 British English
247 Kim Rudyard Kipling 1901 British English
2751 Satyagraha in South Africa Gandhi 1928 Indian Gujarati
78 A Passage to India E. M. Forster 1924 British English
23 The Stranger Albert Camus 1942 French French
3637 Charter of the United Nations United Nations 1945 Multiple English
265 Cry, the Beloved Country Alan Paton 1948 South African English
4429 The Family of Man Edward Steichen 1955 American English
60 Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe 1958 Nigerian English
2272 The Wretched of the Earth Frantz Fanon 1961 Algerian French
158 Wide Sargasso Sea Jean Rhys 1966 British English
516 Season of Migration to the North Al-Tayyib Salih 1966 Sudanese Arabic
6187 Guerrillas V. S. Naipaul 1975 Trinidadian English
4720 The Bride Price Buchi Emecheta 1976 Nigerian English
6446 The Emperor Ryszard Kapuscinski 1978 Polish Polish
3088 I, Rigoberta Menchú Rigoberta Menchú Tum 1983 Guatemalan Spanish
296 The Lover Marguerite Duras 1984 French French
2653 Suicide Emile Durkheim 1897 French French
177 The Interpretation of Dreams Sigmund Freud 1899 Austrian German
1601 Studies in the Psychology of Sex Havelock Ellis 1897 British English
646 The Varieties of Religious Experience William James 1902 American English
462 The Prophet Kahlil Gibran 1923 Lebanese English
3637 Why I Am Not a Christian Bertrand Russell 1927 British English
905 Coming of Age in Samoa Margaret Mead 1928 American English
638 Being and Nothingness Jean Paul Sartre 1943 French French
795 Baby And Child Care Benjamin Spock 1946 American English
19 The Bible Unknown -1400 Jewish Hebrew, aramaic, greek
1854 The Courage to Be Paul Tillich 1952 German English
154 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Ken Kesey 1962 American English
5447 The Politics of Ecstasy Timothy Leary 1968 American English
3091 On Death and Dying Elisabeth Kübler-Ross 1969 Swiss English
1887 The Uses of Enchantment Bruno Bettelheim 1976 Austrian English
53 Dracula Bram Stoker 1897 British English
189 The Turn of the Screw Henry James 1898 American English
164 The Hound of the Baskervilles Arthur Conan Doyle 1902 British English
309 Tarzan of the Apes Edgar Rice Burroughs 1912 American English
886 Riders of the Purple Sage Zane Grey 1912 American English
801 The Mysterious Affair at Styles Agatha Christie 1920 British English
1207 How to Win Friends and Influence People Dale Carnegie 1936 American English
58 Gone With the Wind Margaret Mitchell 1936 American English
120 The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler 1939 American English
347 The Day of the Locust Nathanael West 1939 American English
1294 Peyton Place Grace Metalious 1956 American English
778 The Cat in the Hat Dr. Seuss 1957 American English
368 Stranger in a Strange Land Robert A. Heinlein 1961 American English
33 Catch-22 Joseph Heller 1961 American English
109 In Cold Blood Truman Capote 1966 American English
3100 Ball Four Jim Bouton 1970 American English
1688 Carrie Stephen King 1974 American English
310 Bonfire of the Vanities Tom Wolfe 1987 American English
92 The Age of Innocence Edith Wharton 1920 American English
3637 Woman Suffrage and Politics Carrie Chapman Catt 1923 American English
2751 My Fight for Birth Control Margaret Sanger 1931 American English
2751 Dust Tracks on a Road Zora Neale Hurston 1942 American English
709 The Feminine Mystique Betty Friedan 1963 American English
521 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Maya Angelou 1969 American English
2844 Sisterhood Is Powerful Robin Morgan 1970 American English
2220 Against Our Will Susan Brownmiller 1975 American English
157 The Color Purple Alice Walker 1982 American English
934 The Theory of the Leisure Class Thorstein Veblen 1899 American English
911 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Max Weber 1905 German German
377 The Education of Henry Adams Henry Adams 1907 American English
319 The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money John Maynard Keynes 1936 British English
829 The Road to Serfdom Friedrich von Hayek 1944 Austrian English
4580 A Theory Of The Consumption Function Milton Friedman 1957 American English
506 The Affluent Society John Kenneth Galbraith 1958 American English
1007 The Death and Life of Great American Cities Jane Jacobs 1961 American English
5606 Superhighway--superhoax Helen Leavitt 1970 American English
1763 Small Is Beautiful E. F. Schumacher 1973 British English
8636 The Whole Internet Ed Krol 1992 American English
294 The Time Machine H. G. Wells 1895 British English