What Harvard Professors Think Greatest Books Ever: Top 20 List (1977)

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

About this list

Harvard Professors in in the 1970s list their favorite books of all time. Reprinted in the Boston Globe

This list was originally published in 1977 and was added to this site about 2 years ago.

Rank	Book	Authors	Year	Country	Language
13	War and Peace	Leo Tolstoy	1869	Russian	Russian
63	The Sun Also Rises	Ernest Hemingway	1926	American	English
323	Communist Manifesto	Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels	1848	German	German
126	Paradise Lost	John Milton	1667	British	English
9	The Sound and the Fury	William Faulkner	1929	American	English
38	Great Expectations	Charles Dickens	1860	British	English
307	Herzog	Saul Bellow	1964	American	English
317	The Poems of Robert Frost	Robert Frost	1913	American	English
72	Hamlet	William Shakespeare	1600	British	English
220	The Republic	Plato	-379	Greek	Ancient greek
19	The Bible	Unknown	-1400	Jewish	Hebrew, aramaic, greek
110	Walden	Henry David Thoreau	1854	American	English
18	The Brothers Karamazov	Fyodor Dostoevsky	1880	Russian	Russian
1	Ulysses	James Joyce	1922	Irish	English
29	The Divine Comedy	Dante Alighieri	1308	Italian	Italian
268	Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats	William Butler Yeats	1933	Irish	English
23	The Stranger	Albert Camus	1942	French	French
21	Madame Bovary	Gustave Flaubert	1857	French	French
37	The Iliad	Homer	-750	Greek	Ancient greek
24	The Odyssey	Homer	-740	Greek	Ancient greek
7	Moby-Dick	Herman Melville	1851	American	English