Top 100 Books

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

About this list

Lincoln Journal Star, 100 Books

This list is partly a metalist (using sources that thegreatestbooks.org has already used), but the article also says that Journal Star staff members were polled and used as sources for the below list as well. All of the books are from the 20th century and are listed in chronological order.

This list was originally published in 1999 and was added to this site about 1 year ago.

View: List Grid Table
Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
177 The Interpretation of Dreams Sigmund Freud 1899 Austrian German
340 The Wonderful Wizard of Oz L. Frank Baum 1900 American English
31 Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad 1899 British English
261 Wings of the Dove Henry James 1902 American English
164 The Hound of the Baskervilles Arthur Conan Doyle 1902 British English
2203 The Story of My Life Helen Keller 1903 American English
557 The Souls of Black Folk W. E. B. Du Bois 1903 American English
877 The Cherry Orchard Anton Chekhov 1904 Russian Russian
911 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Max Weber 1905 German German
183 The Jungle Upton Sinclair 1906 American English
377 The Education of Henry Adams Henry Adams 1907 American English
15910 The Elementary Forms Of The Religious Life Emile Durkheim 1912 French French
1654 O Pioneers! Willa Cather 1913 American English
15910 An Economic Interpretation Of The Constitution Of The United States Charles A. Beard 1913 American English
2 In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust 1913 French French
85 The Good Soldier Ford Madox Ford 1915 British English
292 Of Human Bondage W. Somerset Maugham 1915 British English
92 The Age of Innocence Edith Wharton 1920 American English
1929 The Frontier in American History Frederick J. Turner 1920 American English
15910 Michael Robartes And The Dancer W.B. Yeats 1921 Irish English
1 Ulysses James Joyce 1922 Irish English
111 The Waste Land T. S. Eliot 1922 British English
315 Relativity Albert Einstein 1916 German German
256 Babbitt Sinclair Lewis 1922 American English
78 A Passage to India E. M. Forster 1924 British English
25 The Magic Mountain Thomas Mann 1924 German German
3 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925 American English
62 The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway 1926 American English
27 To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf 1927 British English
196 Lady Chatterley's Lover D. H. Lawrence 1928 British English
905 Coming of Age in Samoa Margaret Mead 1928 American English
86 All Quiet on the Western Front Erich Maria Remarque 1928 German German
142 The Maltese Falcon Dashiell Hammett 1930 American English
9 The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner 1929 American English
82 The Man Without Qualities Robert Musil 1930 Austrian German
50 Brave New World Aldous Huxley 1932 British English
469 The Postman Always Rings Twice James M. Cain 1934 American English
239 Tropic of Cancer Henry Miller 1934 American English
58 Gone With the Wind Margaret Mitchell 1936 American English
319 The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money John Maynard Keynes 1936 British English
185 U.S.A. Trilogy John Dos Passos 1930 American English
26 The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck 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
1409 No Exit Jean Paul Sartre 1944 French French
451 Hiroshima John Hersey 1946 American English
113 The Diary of a Young Girl Anne Frank 1947 Dutch Dutch
265 Cry, the Beloved Country Alan Paton 1948 South African English
15910 The Gathering Storm Winston Churchill 1948 British English
6 Nineteen Eighty Four George Orwell 1949 British English
4 The Catcher in the Rye J. D. Salinger 1951 American English
101 Waiting for Godot Samuel Beckett 1953 Irish French
102 Charlotte's Web E. B. White 1952 American English
36 Invisible Man Ralph Ellison 1952 American English
150 Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury 1953 American English
52 Lord of the Flies William Golding 1954 British English
17 The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien 1959 English English
14 Lolita Vladimir Nabokov 1955 American English
461 Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand 1957 American English
41 On the Road Jack Kerouac 1957 American English
778 The Cat in the Hat Dr. Seuss 1957 American English
226 The Alexandria Quartet Lawrence Durrell 1957 British English
506 The Affluent Society John Kenneth Galbraith 1958 American English
598 Night Elie Wiesel 1958 French French
60 Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe 1958 Nigerian English
16 To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee 1960 American English
368 Stranger in a Strange Land Robert A. Heinlein 1961 American English
33 Catch-22 Joseph Heller 1961 American English
153 A Clockwork Orange Anthony Burgess 1962 British English
154 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Ken Kesey 1962 American English
162 Silent Spring Rachel Carson 1962 American English
1588 The Guns of August Barbara Wertheim Tuchman 1962 American English
103 The Bell Jar Sylvia Plath 1963 American English
749 The Fire Next Time James Baldwin 1963 American English
109 In Cold Blood Truman Capote 1966 American English
306 The Autobiography of Malcolm X Alex Haley 1965 American English
14947 Adrift On The Nile Naguib Mahfouz 1966 Egyptian Arabic
13739 The Late Bourgeois World Nadine Gordimer 1966 South African English
158 Wide Sargasso Sea Jean Rhys 1966 British English
5 One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez 1967 Colombian Spanish
304 The Double Helix James D. Watson 1968 American English
84 Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut 1969 American English
521 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Maya Angelou 1969 American English
3091 On Death and Dying Elisabeth Kübler-Ross 1969 Swiss English
558 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee Dee Alexander Brown 1970 American English
254 Gravity's Rainbow Thomas Pynchon 1973 American English
1894 Winter In The Blood James Welch 1974 American English
406 Ragtime E. L. Doctorow 1975 American English
652 Dispatches Michael Herr 1977 American English
260 Song of Solomon Toni Morrison 1977 American English
407 The World According to Garp John Irving 1978 American English
3617 The Right Stuff Tom Wolfe 1979 American English
157 The Color Purple Alice Walker 1982 American English
132 The Handmaid's Tale Margaret Atwood 1985 Canadian English
3069 An Artist of the Floating World Kazuo Ishiguro 1986 British English
1750 The Making of the Atomic Bomb Richard Rhodes 1986 American English
1873 And the Band Played On Randy Shilts 1987 American English
1028 Schindler's List Thomas Keneally 1982 Australian English
1643 Angela's Ashes Frank McCourt 1996 American English