50 Memorable Books from 50 Years of Books to Remember

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

About this list

The New York Public Library, 49 Books

A representative selection from over 1500 titles on annual lists of Books to Remember from 1956 to 2005.

Chosen by a group of librarians who are specialists in their genres, these outstanding works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry provide an informative or transformative reading experience, and are chosen for their literary excellence, uniqueness of concept and command of subject matter.

This list was originally published in 2005 and was added to this site over 12 years ago.

View: List Grid Table
Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
8869 African Stories Doris May Lessing 1964 British English
9093 The Cunning Man Robertson Davies 1994 Canadian English
796 The Fall Albert Camus 1956 French French
223 A House for Mr. Biswas V. S. Naipaul 1961 Trinidadian English
291 The House of the Spirits Isabel Allende 1982 Chilean Spanish
4369 The Moor's Last Sigh Salman Rushdie 1995 British English
5 One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez 1967 Colombian Spanish
204 The Remains of the Day Kazuo Ishiguro 1989 British English
91 The Tin Drum Günter Grass 1959 German German
99 The Unbearable Lightness of Being Milan Kundera 1984 Czech Czech
2520 The American Way of Death Jessica Mitford 1963 American English
1873 And the Band Played On Randy Shilts 1987 American English
3073 The Armies of the Night Norman Mailer 1968 American English
2844 Children of Crisis Robert Coles 1967 American English
10023 Race Matters Cornel West 1993 American English
4159 We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families Philip Gourevitch 1998 American English
3099 Why We Can't Wait Martin Luther King 1964 American English
502 Another Country James Baldwin 1962 American English
49 Beloved Toni Morrison 1987 American English
466 A Death in the Family James Agee 1957 American English
14 Lolita Vladimir Nabokov 1955 American English
918 The Plot Against America Philip Roth 2004 American English
878 The Poisonwood Bible Barbara Kingsolver 1998 American English
84 Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut 1969 American English
680 The Stories of John Cheever John Cheever 1978 American English
3426 The Violent Bear It Away Flannery O'Connor 1960 American English
1473 What We Talk About When We Talk About Love Raymond Carver 1981 American English
669 Beowulf Unknown 1000 Unknown Old english
11868 The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde Audre Lorde 1997 American English
3916 The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore Marianne Moore 1967 American English
8869 For the Union Dead Robert Lowell 1964 American English
12164 On the Bus with Rosa Parks Rita Dove 1999 American English
7153 Poems Adrienne Rich 1975 American English
506 The Affluent Society John Kenneth Galbraith 1958 American English
2699 Cod Mark Kurlansky 1997 American English
6484 Coming of Age in the Milky Way Timothy Ferris 1988 American English
304 The Double Helix James D. Watson 1968 American English
1384 Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond 1997 American English
1058 Memories, Dreams, Reflections Carl Jung 1963 Swiss German
2666 The Mismeasure of Man Stephen Jay Gould 1981 American English
1557 Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Annie Dillard 1974 American English
6278 Citizens Simon Schama 1989 British English
3249 A Distant Mirror Barbara Wertheim Tuchman 1978 American English
206 The Gulag Archipelago Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 1973 Russian Russian
1750 The Making of the Atomic Bomb Richard Rhodes 1986 American English
1901 The Power Broker Robert Caro 1974 American English
2481 The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich William L. Shirer 1960 American English
4621 Rising Tide John Barry 1997 American English
8415 This Hallowed Ground Bruce Catton 1956 American English