An Expert's 200-Book List

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

About this list

The Detroit Free Press, 196 Books

Digby Diehl, chief book editor of the Los Angeles Times, chose 200 of his favorite books for prospective readers. The New York Times described Diehl as a prolific literary critic and writer (source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/01/obituaries/digby-diehl-collaborator-on-memoirs-of-the-famous-dies-at-76.html).

**"The Last Whole Earth Catalog" was not included here because it is a magazine.**

This list was originally published in 1973 and was added to this site about 1 year ago.

View: List Grid Table
Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
14212 Trouble Is My Business Raymond Chandler 1950 American English
1584 A Severed Head Iris Murdoch 1961 British English
14730 The Secret Of Santa Vittoria Robert Crichton 1966 American English
14451 The Word Irving Wallace 1972 American English
2358 August 1914 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 1971 Russian Russian
894 Rosemary's Baby Ira Levin 1967 American English
13587 Spring Snow Yukio Mishima 1969 Japanese Japanese
14410 Auntie Mame Patrick Dennis 1955 American English
17 The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien 1959 English English
163 Siddhartha Hermann Hesse 1922 German German
15609 The New Centurions Joseph Wambaugh 1970 American English
14 Lolita Vladimir Nabokov 1955 American English
10178 B Utterfield 8 John O'Hara 1935 American English
4592 Ten North Frederick John O'Hara 1955 American English
14023 Generation Of Vipers Philip Wylie 1942 American English
726 The Caine Mutiny Herman Wouk 1951 American English
286 The Once and Future King T. H. White 1958 British English
73 The Portrait of a Lady Henry James 1881 American English
4293 The Castle franz kafka 1926 German German
1329 Exodus Leon Uris 1958 American English
2810 The Agony and the Ecstasy Irving Stone 1961 American English
48 Journey to the End of The Night Louis-Ferdinand Céline 1932 French French
27 To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf 1927 British English
3072 The Armies of the Night Norman Mailer 1968 American English
1352 The Andromeda Strain Michael Crichton 1969 American English
562 Aesop's Fables Aesop -560 Greek Ancient greek
322 Household Tales Brothers Grimm 1812 German German
15679 Mexico Nicolas Cheetham Unknown English
188 A Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens 1859 British English
631 The Bridge of San Luis Rey Thornton Wilder 1927 American English
540 The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Tom Wolfe 1968 American English
76 The Plague Albert Camus 1947 French French
1690 Goldfinger Ian Fleming 1959 British English
205 The Complete Sherlock Holmes Arthur Conan Doyle 1927 British English
925 Deliverance James Dickey 1970 American English
51 The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne 1759 British English
15609 Qb Vii Leon Uris 1970 American English
20 Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert 1857 French French
15 Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë 1847 British English
14113 The Woman of Rome Alberto Moravia 1947 Italian Italian
98 The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe 1902 American English
212 Darkness at Noon Arthur Koestler 1940 British German
541 The Seven Pillars of Wisdom T. E. Lawrence 1926 British English
2627 Selected Plays of George Bernard Shaw George Bernard Shaw 1976 Irish English
1013 Green Mansions W. H. Hudson 1904 British English
311 Winesburg, Ohio Sherwood Anderson 1919 American English
117 Tess of the d'Urbervilles Thomas Hardy 1891 British English
13359 Democratic Vistas And Other Papers Walt Whitman 1871 American English
2 In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust 1913 French French
31 Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad 1899 British English
228 Father Goriot Honoré de Balzac 1835 French French
30 The Divine Comedy Dante Alighieri 1308 Italian Italian
2643 The Complete Poems And Plays T. S. Eliot 1952 British English
300 The Life of Samuel Johnson James Boswell 1791 British English
14434 The World Of Mathematics James R. Newman 1956 American English
13532 Gardner's Art Through The Ages Helen Gardner 1926 American English
13711 The Greek Way Edith Hamilton 1930 American English
15587 The Season William Goldman 1969 American English
395 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Gertrude Stein 1933 American English
13918 Life Against Death Norman O. Brown 1959 American English
1075 The Kon-Tiki Expedition Thor Heyerdahl 1948 Norwegian Norwegian
7704 You Can't Go Home Again Thomas Wolfe 1940 American English
10824 The Ox Bow Incident Walter Van Tilburg Clark 1940 American English
14410 Greek Tragedies 1 David Grene 1955 Unknown English
3544 I, The Jury Mickey Spillane 1947 American English
18 The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky 1880 Russian Russian
15679 Fireside Book Of Folk Songs Norman Lloyd Unknown English
230 The Call of the Wild Jack London 1903 American English
8 Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes 1605 Spanish Spanish
462 The Prophet Kahlil Gibran 1923 Lebanese English
1728 The Voyage of the Beagle Charles Darwin 1839 British English
434 The Fountainhead Ayn Rand 1943 American English
13359 Rain And Other South Sea Stories W. Somerset Maugham 1921 British English
14598 The Carpetbaggers Harold Robbins 1961 American English
14174 Autobiography Bertrand Russell 1967 British English
3942 A Fire on the Moon Norman Mailer 1970 American English