Daily Telegraph's 100 Books of the Century, 1900-1999

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

About this list

Daily Telegraph, 96 Books

The Daily Telegraph asked 100 contributors/authors/experts to choose 1 book as their favorite or most notable book of the last 100 years (1900-1999). This list was originally published in the newspaper

This list was originally published in 1999 and was added to this site over 2 years ago.

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Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
5241 My Father And Myself J. R. Ackerley 1968 British English
618 Poems of W. H. Auden W. H. Auden 1930 British English
3622 The Atrocity Exhibition J. G. Ballard 1970 British English
5501 Steps To An Ecology Of Mind Gregory Bateson 1972 American English
101 Waiting for Godot Samuel Beckett 1953 Irish French
666 Humboldt's Gift Saul Bellow 1975 American English
4711 Flesh Brigid Brophy 1962 British English
34 The Master and Margarita Mikhail Bulgakov 1967 Russian Russian
162 Silent Spring Rachel Carson 1962 American English
1016 Poems Of C. P. Cavafy C. P. Cavafy 1935 Greek Greek
979 The Worst Journey in the World Apsley Cherry-Garrard 1922 British English
2752 The Worm Forgives The Plough John Stewart Collis 1947 British English
2773 Man-Eaters of Kumaon Jim Corbett 1944 British English
2775 Travels in Arabia Deserta Charles M. Doughty 1888 British English
59 Rebecca Daphne du Maurier 1938 British English
111 The Waste Land T. S. Eliot 1922 British English
9 The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner 1929 American English
3 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925 American English
85 The Good Soldier Ford Madox Ford 1915 British English
78 A Passage to India E. M. Forster 1924 British English
2783 Mountain Interval Robert Frost 1916 American English
2784 North Of Boston Robert Frost 1914 American English
166 Love in the Time of Cholera Gabriel García Márquez 1985 Colombian Spanish
5 One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez 1967 Colombian Spanish
136 The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame 1908 British English
3637 Pack My Bag Henry Green 1940 British English
214 Life and Fate Vasily Grossman 1980 Russian Russian
752 Poems Of Thomas Hardy Thomas Hardy 1898 British English
825 In Our Time Ernest Hemingway 1925 American English
5241 Cavaliers And Roundheads Christopher Hibbert 1968 British English
716 Mein Kampf Adolf Hitler 1925 German German
919 The Poems Of Gerard Manley Hopkins Gerald Manley Hopkins 1918 British English
2727 Last Poems A. E. Housman 1922 British English
50 Brave New World Aldous Huxley 1932 British English
376 The Golden Bowl Henry James 1904 American English
1 Ulysses James Joyce 1922 Irish English
3261 The Perfect Storm Sebastian Junger 1997 American English
21 The Trial Franz Kafka 1925 Czech German
41 On the Road Jack Kerouac 1957 American English
319 The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money John Maynard Keynes 1936 British English
247 Kim Rudyard Kipling 1901 British English
144 Sons and Lovers D. H. Lawrence 1913 British English
288 Independent People Halldor Laxness 1934 Icelandic Icelandic
1055 Story of Ferdinand Munro Leaf 1936 American English
126 If This Is a Man Primo Levi 1947 Italian Italian
256 Babbitt Sinclair Lewis 1922 American English
3637 Blasting And Bombardiering Wyndham Lewis 1937 British English
3637 Van Loon's Lives Hendrik Willem van Loon 1942 Dutch English
1378 The Towers Of Trebizond Rose Macauley 1956 British English
1246 Danube Claudio Magris 1986 Italian Italian
2198 The Last Lion William Manchester 1983 American English
446 Joseph and His Brothers Thomas Mann 1933 German German
3637 Being Geniuses Together Robert McAlmon 1938 American English
8144 Jerusalem Commands Michael Moorcock 1992 British English
14 Lolita Vladimir Nabokov 1955 American English
72 Pale Fire Vladimir Nabokov 1962 American English
514 Speak, Memory Vladimir Nabokov 1951 American English
494 The Third Policeman Flann O'Brien 1967 Irish English
3637 The Endless Adventure F. S. Oliver 1930 British English
6 Nineteen Eighty Four George Orwell 1949 British English
55 Animal Farm George Orwell 1945 British English
448 Homage to Catalonia George Orwell 1938 British English
1139 The Unquiet Grave Cyril Connolly 1944 British English
6091 Good Company Frances Partridge 1977 British English
112 Doctor Zhivago Boris Pasternak 1957 Russian Russian
325 A Dance to the Music of Time Anthony Powell 1951 British English
768 A Glastonbury Romance John Cowper Powys 1932 British English
2 In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust 1913 French French
2298 The Getting Of Wisdom Henry Handel Richardson 1910 Australian English
64 Midnight's Children Salman Rushdie 1981 Indian English
1526 A History of Western Philosophy Bertrand Russell 1945 British English
1803 The Problems of Philosophy Bertrand Russell 1912 British English
4 The Catcher in the Rye J. D. Salinger 1951 American English
832 The Last Of The Just André Schwarz-Bart 1959 French French
2249 1066 And All That W. C. Sellar 1930 British English
735 A Suitable Boy Vikram Seth 1993 Indian English
571 And Quiet Flows The Don Mikhail Sholokhov 1928 Russian Russian
206 The Gulag Archipelago Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 1973 Russian Russian
2234 Last And First Men Olaf Stapledon 1930 British English
1100 Collected Poems Of Edward Thomas Edward Thomas 1920 British English
56 The Leopard Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa 1958 Italian Italian
1506 Selected Stories William Trevor 1992 Irish English
1874 The Proud Tower Barbara Wertheim Tuchman 1966 American English
4711 Pigeon Feathers And Other Stories John Updike 1962 American English
904 Breakfast of Champions Kurt Vonnegut 1973 American English
3637 Mr. Fortune's Maggot Sylvia Townsend Warner 1927 British English
800 The Loved One Evelyn Waugh 1948 British English
1169 The History of Mr. Polly H. G. Wells 1910 British English
4061 Down With Skool! Geoffrey Willans 1953 British English
599 A Streetcar Named Desire Tennessee Williams 1947 American English
1580 The Struggle for Europe Chester Wilmot 1952 British English
369 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Ludwig Wittgenstein 1921 Austrian German
1185 The Inimitable Jeeves P. G. Wodehouse 1923 British English
1189 A Writer's Diary Virginia Woolf 1953 British English
1508 The Tower William Butler Yeats 1928 Irish English
86 All Quiet on the Western Front Erich Maria Remarque 1928 German German