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Radcliffe Publishing Course, 100 Books

Compiled in July 1998, Radcliffe’s 100 Best Novels was chosen by exactly 100 students enrolled in the six-week Radcliffe Publishing Course, a Harvard-based boot camp for aspiring editors and marketers. Acting on a challenge from Random House’s Modern Library, the class had two days to create a “rival” canon: they voted on the same 400 English-language novels of the 20th century that the Modern Library board had just considered, marking their favourites on a simple ballot, after which the tallies were aggregated and ranked from 1-100. Because the voters were young, predominately female, and drawn from across the U.S. publishing pipeline, their final list leaned toward mid-century classroom staples, women and writers of colour, and even a few children’s and genre classics—offering a snapshot of how the next generation of industry professionals balanced literary reputation with cultural resonance on the eve of the new millennium.

This list was originally published in 1998 and was added to this site over 12 years ago.