200 Books That Shaped 200 Years of Literature

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

About this list

The Center for Fiction, 206 Books

Description from the site:

As an organization whose mission is to both reflect and advance the art of fiction, we’re honoring our 200th anniversary by looking back on how storytelling has evolved since then. We set forth to create a list of the 200 works of fiction that had the most impact on American readers, writers, and culture over these past two centuries... the help of a panel of writers associated with The Center: Mahogany L. Browne, Amina Cain, Alexander Chee, Kia Corthron, Michael Cunningham, Alvaro Enrigue, Neil Gaiman, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Stephen King, Maaza Mengiste, Claire Messud, Jason Reynolds, Salman Rushdie, Esmeralda Santiago, Jonathan Santlofer, V. E. Schwab, Gary Shteyngart, Jane Smiley, Monique Truong, and De'Shawn Charles Winslow. Each author contributed five titles they wanted to be included... and The Center’s staff set to work on completing the list... after much anguish and debate, we present the 200 Books That Shaped 200 Years of Literature

This list was originally published in 2021 and was added to this site about 2 years ago.

View: List Grid Table
Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
49 Beloved Toni Morrison 1987 American English
260 Song of Solomon Toni Morrison 1977 American English
560 Sula Toni Morrison 1973 American English
10 Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy 1877 Russian Russian
20 Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert 1857 French French
167 Giovanni's Room James Baldwin 1956 American English
36 Invisible Man Ralph Ellison 1952 American English
27 To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf 1927 British English
68 Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston 1937 American English
157 The Color Purple Alice Walker 1982 American English
5 One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez 1967 Colombian Spanish
1368 Salvage the Bones Jesmyn Ward 2011 American English
13 Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen 1813 British English
98 The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe 1902 American English
87 The Count of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas 1844 French French
29 Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë 1847 British English
15 Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë 1847 British English
7 Moby-Dick Herman Melville 1851 American English
184 Uncle Tom's Cabin Harriet Beecher Stowe 1852 American English
3951 Clotel William Wells Brown 1853 American English
121 Bleak House Charles Dickens 1852 British English
2362 Our Nig Harriet E. Wilson 1859 American English
414 The Mill on the Floss George Eliot 1860 British English
38 Great Expectations Charles Dickens 1860 British English
40 Les Misérables Victor Hugo 1862 French French
11 Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoevsky 1866 Russian Russian
5590 Felix Holt, The Radical George Eliot 1866 French English
93 Little Women Louisa May Alcott 1868 American English
28 Middlemarch George Eliot 1871 British English
508 Black Beauty Anna Sewell 1877 British English
22 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain 1884 American English
89 The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde 1890 Irish English
5590 L'argent Émile Zola 1891 French French
117 Tess of the d'Urbervilles Thomas Hardy 1891 British English
53 Dracula Bram Stoker 1897 British English
271 The Awakening Kate Chopin 1899 American English
605 Claudine Colette 1900 French French
217 The House of Mirth Edith Wharton 1905 American English
183 The Jungle Upton Sinclair 1906 American English
5590 Love Among The Chickens P. G. Wodehouse 1906 British English
444 The Man Who Was Thursday G. K. Chesterton 1908 British English
303 Peter And Wendy J. M. Barrie 1911 Scottish English
2 In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust 1913 French French
311 Winesburg, Ohio Sherwood Anderson 1919 American English
92 The Age of Innocence Edith Wharton 1920 American English
1 Ulysses James Joyce 1922 Irish English
163 Siddhartha Hermann Hesse 1922 German German
854 Cane Jean Toomer 1923 American English
32 Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf 1925 British English
3 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925 American English
21 The Trial Franz Kafka 1925 Czech German
677 Lud-in-the-Mist Hope Mirrlees 1926 British English
62 The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway 1926 American English
437 Passing Nella Larsen 1929 American English
79 As I Lay Dying William Faulkner 1930 American English
1804 Cartucho And My Mother's Hands Nellie Campobello 1931 Mexican Spanish
50 Brave New World Aldous Huxley 1932 British English
423 Murder on the Orient Express Agatha Christie 1934 British English
239 Tropic of Cancer Henry Miller 1934 American English
269 Nightwood Djuna Barnes 1936 American English
1878 East Goes West Younghill Kang 1937 American English
59 Rebecca Daphne du Maurier 1938 British English
26 The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck 1939 American English
579 The Outsider And Others H. P. Lovecraft 1939 American English
118 The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter Carson McCullers 1940 American English
107 Native Son Richard Wright 1940 American English
23 The Stranger Albert Camus 1942 French French
1119 The Street Ann Petry 1946 American English
6 Nineteen Eighty Four George Orwell 1949 British English
4 The Catcher in the Rye J. D. Salinger 1951 American English
1128 The Price Of Salt Patricia Highsmith 1952 American English
150 Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury 1953 American English
1262 Maud Martha Gwendolyn Brooks 1953 American English
17 The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien 1959 English English
14 Lolita Vladimir Nabokov 1955 American English
124 Pedro Páramo Juan Rulfo 1955 Mexican Spanish
41 On the Road Jack Kerouac 1957 American English
286 The Once and Future King T. H. White 1958 British English
60 Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe 1958 Nigerian English
215 The Haunting of Hill House Shirley Jackson 1959 American English
3118 The Nine Guardians Rosario Castellanos 1957 Mexican Spanish
16 To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee 1960 American English
33 Catch-22 Joseph Heller 1961 American English
327 Solaris Stanislaw Lem 1961 Polish Polish
312 Labyrinths Jorge Luis Borges 1962 Argentinian Spanish
103 The Bell Jar Sylvia Plath 1963 American English
233 The Spy Who Came in From the Cold John le Carré 1963 British English
532 The Passion According to G.H. Clarice Lispector 1964 Brazilian Portuguese
109 In Cold Blood Truman Capote 1966 American English
34 The Master and Margarita Mikhail Bulgakov 1967 Russian Russian
158 Wide Sargasso Sea Jean Rhys 1966 British English
1541 The Confessions of Nat Turner William Styron 1967 American English
528 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick 1968 American English
84 Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut 1969 American English
567 The French Lieutenant's Woman John Fowles 1969 British English
363 The Left Hand Of Darkness Ursula K. Le Guin 1969 American English
573 Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret Judy Blume 1970 American English
433 Play It As It Lays Joan Didion 1970 American English
308 The Bluest Eye Toni Morrison 1970 American English
838 The Book of Daniel E. L. Doctorow 1971 American English
1056 Maurice E. M. Forster 1971 British English
350 The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor Flannery O'Connor 1971 American English
202 Invisible Cities Italo Calvino 1972 Italian Italian
1263 The Summer Book Tove Jansson 1972 Finnish Swedish
1281 Mumbo Jumbo Ishmael Reed 1972 American English
5955 Collected Stories Gabriel García Márquez 1996 Colombian Spanish
3145 Dhalgren Samuel R. Delany 1975 American English
1234 Woman at Point Zero Nawal El Saadawi 1975 Egyptian Arabic
1002 Ceremony Leslie Marmon Silko 1977 American English
882 The Hour of the Star Clarice Lispector 1977 Brazilian Portuguese
400 The Shining Stephen King 1977 American English
454 The Sea, The Sea Iris Murdoch 1978 British English
680 The Stories of John Cheever John Cheever 1978 American English
407 The World According to Garp John Irving 1978 American English
513 Kindred Octavia E. Butler 1979 American English
331 Housekeeping Marilynne Robinson 1980 American English
114 The Name of the Rose Umberto Eco 1980 Italian Italian
64 Midnight's Children Salman Rushdie 1981 Indian English
1890 Obasan Joy Kogawa 1981 Canadian English
1411 Concrete Thomas Bernhard 1982 Austrian German