40 Most Important Books, 1927-2001
This is one of the 759 lists we use to generate our main The Greatest Books list.
About this list
World Literature Today, 40 Books
Published in 2001 for World Literature Today’s 75th anniversary, the list was built by a panel of about three dozen experts—35 writers and professors from 22 countries were reported as submitting ballots—whom the editors had originally assembled as “40 scholars” for the project. The judges were asked to single out works they felt had proved most “important” to engaged general readers rather than merely to academics, and they could choose only titles issued during the magazine’s own lifespan (1 January 1927 – 31 December 2001). The resulting, unranked Top 40 covers four genres (fiction, poetry, drama, essays), draws on 29 different national literatures, and includes 23 books first written in languages other than English, underlining the list’s deliberately concise yet genuinely international scope.
This list was originally published in 2001 and was added to this site over 1 year ago.