Inteliquest's World's 100 Greatest Books of All-Time

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

About this list

InteliQuest, 100 Books

InteliQuest contacted the literature departments of some of America's top universities and asked for their rankings of what they considered to be the greatest works of literature. We then compiled and analyzed these lists and chose the 100 books mentioned most often. The books in this collection are not presented in order of greatness. They are presented in chronological order

InteliQuest then sold the books on cassette tape

This list was originally published in 1993 and was added to this site about 2 years ago.

View: List Grid Table
Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
37 The Iliad Homer -750 Greek Ancient greek
24 The Odyssey Homer -740 Greek Ancient greek
70 The Aeneid Virgil -19 Roman Latin
667 Beowulf Unknown 1000 Unknown Old english
29 The Divine Comedy Dante Alighieri 1308 Italian Italian
1242 The Travels of Marco Polo Marco Polo 1300 Italian Old french
109 The Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer 1400 British Middle english
8 Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes 1605 Spanish Spanish
126 Paradise Lost John Milton 1667 British English
549 Pilgrim's Progress John Bunyan 1678 British English
69 Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe 1719 British English
350 Moll Flanders Daniel Defoe 1722 British English
65 Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift 1726 British English
135 Tom Jones Henry Fielding 1749 British English
80 Candide Voltaire 1759 French French
1651 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1798 British English
96 Faust Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1808 German German
15786 The Lady Of The Lake Sir Walter Scott 1810 Scottish English
300 Ivanhoe Sir Walter Scott 1819 British English
12 Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen 1813 British English
39 Frankenstein Mary Shelley 1818 British English
41 The Red and the Black Stendhal 1830 French French
507 The Last of the Mohicans James Fenimore Cooper 1826 American English
119 The Three Musketeers Alexandre Dumas 1844 French French
1175 Carmen Prosper Mérimée 1845 French French
28 Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë 1847 British English
15 Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë 1847 British English
104 Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray 1847 British English
47 David Copperfield Charles Dickens 1849 British English
192 A Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens 1859 British English
38 Great Expectations Charles Dickens 1860 British English
73 The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne 1850 American English
1916 The Lady Of The Camellias Alexandre Dumas 1848 French French
7 Moby-Dick Herman Melville 1851 American English
21 Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert 1857 French French
11520 Idyls Of The King Alfred Tennyson 1859 British English
640 Silas Marner George Eliot 1861 British English
30 Middlemarch George Eliot 1871 British English
40 Les Misérables Victor Hugo 1862 French French
179 Fathers and Sons Ivan Turgenev 1862 Russian Russian
11 Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoevsky 1866 Russian Russian
18 The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky 1880 Russian Russian
93 Little Women Louisa May Alcott 1868 American English
672 Far from the Madding Crowd Thomas Hardy 1874 British English
241 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Mark Twain 1876 American English
2618 The Prince and the Pauper Mark Twain 1881 American English
22 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain 1884 American English
712 A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court Mark Twain 1889 American English
10 Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy 1877 Russian Russian
13 War and Peace Leo Tolstoy 1869 Russian Russian
738 The Return of the Native Thomas Hardy 1878 British English
118 Tess of the d'Urbervilles Thomas Hardy 1891 British English
75 The Portrait of a Lady Henry James 1881 American English
188 The Turn of the Screw Henry James 1898 American English
115 Treasure Island Robert Louis Stevenson 1883 British English
88 The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde 1890 Irish English
293 The Time Machine H. G. Wells 1895 British English
53 Dracula Bram Stoker 1897 British English
449 Way of All Flesh Samuel Butler 1903 British English
231 The Call of the Wild Jack London 1903 American English
254 Babbitt Sinclair Lewis 1922 American English
195 An American Tragedy Theodore Dreiser 1925 American English
3 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925 American English
67 A Farewell to Arms Ernest Hemingway 1929 American English
97 For Whom the Bell Tolls Ernest Hemingway 1940 American English
54 The Old Man and the Sea Ernest Hemingway 1952 American English
143 The Maltese Falcon Dashiell Hammett 1930 American English
170 Of Mice and Men John Steinbeck 1937 American English
26 The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck 1939 American English
16 To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee 1960 American English
220 The Republic Plato -379 Greek Ancient greek
152 The Prince Niccolo Machiavelli 1532 Italian Italian
526 The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1762 French French
531 The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith 1776 Scottish English
180 On the Origin of Species Charles Darwin 1859 British English
326 Das Kapital Karl Marx 1867 German German
1538 Decline of the West Oswald Spengler 1918 German German
1255 Prometheus Bound Aeschylus -455 Greek Ancient greek
105 Oedipus the King Sophocles -429 Greek Ancient greek
10575 The Taming of the Shrew William Shakespeare 1590 British English
72 Hamlet William Shakespeare 1600 British English
1107 Othello William Shakespeare 1603 British English
155 Macbeth William Shakespeare 1606 British English
211 The Tempest William Shakespeare 1623 British English
983 Tartuffe Molière 1664 French French
4171 Peer Gynt Henrik Ibsen 1867 Norwegian Norwegian
422 A Doll's House Henrik Ibsen 1879 Norwegian Norwegian
1381 The Importance of Being Earnest Oscar Wilde 1895 Irish English
1308 Cyrano de Bergerac Edmond Rostand 1897 French French
877 The Cherry Orchard Anton Chekhov 1904 Russian Russian
3044 Our Town Thornton Wilder 1938 American English
426 Death Of A Salesman Arthur Miller 1949 American English
400 The Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle -334 Greek Ancient greek
1027 Meditations on First Philosophy Rene Descartes 1641 French Latin
457 Critique of Pure Reason Immanuel Kant 1781 German German
1514 The World as Will and Idea Arthur Schopenhauer 1818 German German
4791 Nature Ralph Waldo Emerson 1836 American English
1930 On Self Reliance Ralph Waldo Emerson 1841 American English
110 Walden Henry David Thoreau 1854 American English
12042 How We Think John Dewey 1910 American English