Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels & Nonfiction

Original list ↗︎

• Ulysses — James Joyce · #1
• The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald · #2
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — James Joyce · #3
• Lolita — Vladimir Nabokov · #4
• Brave New World — Aldous Huxley · #5
• The Sound and the Fury — William Faulkner · #6
• Catch-22 — Joseph Heller · #7
• Darkness at Noon — Arthur Koestler · #8
• Sons and Lovers — D.H. Lawrence · #9
• The Grapes of Wrath — John Steinbeck · #10
• Under the Volcano — Malcolm Lowry · #11
• The Way of All Flesh — Samuel Butler · #12
• 1984 — George Orwell · #13
• I, Claudius — Robert Graves · #14
• To the Lighthouse — Virginia Woolf · #15
• An American Tragedy — Theodore Dreiser · #16
• The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter — Carson McCullers · #17
• Slaughterhouse-Five — Kurt Vonnegut · #18
• Invisible Man — Ralph Ellison · #19
• Native Son — Richard Wright · #20
• Henderson the Rain King — Saul Bellow · #21
• Appointment in Samarra — John O’Hara · #22
• U.S.A. Trilogy — John Dos Passos · #23
• Winesburg, Ohio — Sherwood Anderson · #24
• A Passage to India — E.M. Forster · #25
• The Wings of the Dove — Henry James · #26
• The Ambassadors — Henry James · #27
• Tender Is the Night — F. Scott Fitzgerald · #28
• Studs Lonigan Trilogy — James T. Farrell · #29
• The Good Soldier — Ford Madox Ford · #30
• Animal Farm — George Orwell · #31
• The Golden Bowl — Henry James · #32
• Sister Carrie — Theodore Dreiser · #33
• A Handful of Dust — Evelyn Waugh · #34
• As I Lay Dying — William Faulkner · #35
• All the King’s Men — Robert Penn Warren · #36
• The Bridge of San Luis Rey — Thornton Wilder · #37
• Howards End — E.M. Forster · #38
• Go Tell It on the Mountain — James Baldwin · #39
• The Heart of the Matter — Graham Greene · #40
• Lord of the Flies — William Golding · #41
• Deliverance — James Dickey · #42
• A Dance to the Music of Time — Anthony Powell · #43
• Point Counter Point — Aldous Huxley · #44
• The Sun Also Rises — Ernest Hemingway · #45
• The Secret Agent — Joseph Conrad · #46
• Nostromo — Joseph Conrad · #47
• The Rainbow — D.H. Lawrence · #48
• Women in Love — D.H. Lawrence · #49
• Tropic of Cancer — Henry Miller · #50
• The Naked and the Dead — Norman Mailer · #51
• Portnoy’s Complaint — Philip Roth · #52
• Pale Fire — Vladimir Nabokov · #53
• Light in August — William Faulkner · #54
• On the Road — Jack Kerouac · #55
• The Maltese Falcon — Dashiell Hammett · #56
• Parade’s End — Ford Madox Ford · #57
• The Age of Innocence — Edith Wharton · #58
• Zuleika Dobson — Max Beerbohm · #59
• The Moviegoer — Walker Percy · #60
• Death Comes for the Archbishop — Willa Cather · #61
• From Here to Eternity — James Jones · #62
• The Wapshot Chronicle — John Cheever · #63
• The Catcher in the Rye — J.D. Salinger · #64
• A Clockwork Orange — Anthony Burgess · #65
• Of Human Bondage — W. Somerset Maugham · #66
• Heart of Darkness — Joseph Conrad · #67
• Main Street — Sinclair Lewis · #68
• The House of Mirth — Edith Wharton · #69
• The Alexandria Quartet — Lawrence Durrell · #70
• A High Wind in Jamaica — Richard Hughes · #71
• A House for Mr Biswas — V.S. Naipaul · #72
• The Day of the Locust — Nathanael West · #73
• A Farewell to Arms — Ernest Hemingway · #74
• Scoop — Evelyn Waugh · #75
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie — Muriel Spark · #76
• Finnegans Wake — James Joyce · #77
• Kim — Rudyard Kipling · #78
• A Room with a View — E.M. Forster · #79
• Brideshead Revisited — Evelyn Waugh · #80
• The Adventures of Augie March — Saul Bellow · #81
• Angle of Repose — Wallace Stegner · #82
• A Bend in the River — V.S. Naipaul · #83
• The Death of the Heart — Elizabeth Bowen · #84
• Lord Jim — Joseph Conrad · #85
• Ragtime — E.L. Doctorow · #86
• The Old Wives’ Tale — Arnold Bennett · #87
• The Call of the Wild — Jack London · #88
• Loving — Henry Green · #89
• Midnight’s Children — Salman Rushdie · #90
• Tobacco Road — Erskine Caldwell · #91
• Ironweed — William Kennedy · #92
• The Magus — John Fowles · #93
• Wide Sargasso Sea — Jean Rhys · #94
• Under the Net — Iris Murdoch · #95
• Sophie’s Choice — William Styron · #96
• The Sheltering Sky — Paul Bowles · #97
• The Postman Always Rings Twice — James M. Cain · #98
• The Ginger Man — J.P. Donleavy · #99
• The Magnificent Ambersons — Booth Tarkington · #100

Original list ↗︎

• The Education of Henry Adams — Henry Adams · #1
• The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James · #2
• Up from Slavery — Booker T. Washington · #3
• A Room of One's Own — Virginia Woolf · #4
• Silent Spring — Rachel Carson · #5
• Selected Essays, 1917-1932 — T. S. Eliot · #6
• The Double Helix — James D. Watson · #7
• Speak, Memory — Vladimir Nabokov · #8
• The American Language — H. L. Mencken · #9
• The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money — John Maynard Keynes · #10
• The Lives of a Cell — Lewis Thomas · #11
• The Frontier in American History — Frederick Jackson Turner · #12
• Black Boy — Richard Wright · #13
• Aspects of the Novel — E. M. Forster · #14
• The Civil War: A Narrative — Shelby Foote · #15
• The Guns of August — Barbara Tuchman · #16
• The Proper Study of Mankind — Isaiah Berlin · #17
• The Nature and Destiny of Man — Reinhold Niebuhr · #18
• Notes of a Native Son — James Baldwin · #19
• The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas — Gertrude Stein · #20
• The Elements of Style — William Strunk and E. B. White · #21
• An American Dilemma — Gunnar Myrdal · #22
• Principia Mathematica — Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell · #23
• The Mismeasure of Man — Stephen Jay Gould · #24
• The Mirror and the Lamp — Meyer Howard Abrams · #25
• The Art of the Soluble — Peter B. Medawar · #26
• The Ants — Bert Hoelldobler and Edward O. Wilson · #27
• A Theory of Justice — John Rawls · #28
• Art and Illusion — Ernest H. Gombrich · #29
• The Making of the English Working Class — E. P. Thompson · #30
• The Souls of Black Folk — W.E.B. Du Bois · #31
• Principia Ethica — G. E. Moore · #32
• Philosophy and Civilization — John Dewey · #33
• On Growth and Form — D'Arcy Thompson · #34
• Ideas and Opinions — Albert Einstein · #35
• The Age of Jackson — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. · #36
• The Making of the Atomic Bomb — Richard Rhodes · #37
• Black Lamb and Grey Falcon — Rebecca West · #38
• Autobiographies — W. B. Yeats · #39
• Science and Civilization in China — Joseph Needham · #40
• Goodbye to All That — Robert Graves · #41
• Homage to Catalonia — George Orwell · #42
• The Autobiography of Mark Twain — Mark Twain · #43
• Children of Crisis — Robert Coles · #44
• A Study of History — Arnold J. Toynbee · #45
• The Affluent Society — John Kenneth Galbraith · #46
• Present at the Creation — Dean Acheson · #47
• The Great Bridge — David McCullough · #48
• Patriotic Gore — Edmund Wilson · #49
• Samuel Johnson — Walter Jackson Bate · #50
• The Autobiography of Malcolm X — Alex Haley and Malcolm X · #51
• The Right Stuff — Tom Wolfe · #52
• Eminent Victorians — Lytton Strachey · #53
• Working — Studs Terkel · #54
• Darkness Visible — William Styron · #55
• The Liberal Imagination — Lionel Trilling · #56
• The Second World War — Winston Churchill · #57
• Out of Africa — Isak Dinesen · #58
• Jefferson and His Time — Dumas Malone · #59
• In the American Grain — William Carlos Williams · #60
• Cadillac Desert — Marc Reisner · #61
• The House of Morgan — Ron Chernow · #62
• The Sweet Science — A. J. Liebling · #63
• The Open Society and Its Enemies — Karl Popper · #64
• The Art of Memory — Frances A. Yates · #65
• Religion and the Rise of Capitalism — R. H. Tawney · #66
• A Preface to Morals — Walter Lippmann · #67
• The Gate of Heavenly Peace — Jonathan D. Spence · #68
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions — Thomas S. Kuhn · #69
• The Strange Career of Jim Crow — C. Vann Woodward · #70
• The Rise of the West — William H. McNeill · #71
• The Gnostic Gospels — Elaine Pagels · #72
• James Joyce — Richard Ellmann · #73
• Florence Nightingale — Cecil Woodham-Smith · #74
• The Great War and Modern Memory — Paul Fussell · #75
• The City in History — Lewis Mumford · #76
• Battle Cry of Freedom — James M. McPherson · #77
• Why We Can’t Wait — Martin Luther King Jr. · #78
• The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt — Edmund Morris · #79
• Studies in Iconology — Erwin Panofsky · #80
• The Face of Battle — John Keegan · #81
• The Strange Death of Liberal England — George Dangerfield · #82
• Vermeer — Lawrence Gowing · #83
• A Bright Shining Lie — Neil Sheehan · #84
• West with the Night — Beryl Markham · #85
• This Boy’s Life — Tobias Wolff · #86
• A Mathematician’s Apology — G. H. Hardy · #87
• Six Easy Pieces — Richard P. Feynman · #88
• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek — Annie Dillard · #89
• The Golden Bough — James George Frazer · #90
• Shadow and Act — Ralph Ellison · #91
• The Power Broker — Robert A. Caro · #92
• The American Political Tradition — Richard Hofstadter · #93
• The Contours of American History — William Appleman Williams · #94
• The Promise of American Life — Herbert Croly · #95
• In Cold Blood — Truman Capote · #96
• The Journalist and the Murderer — Janet Malcolm · #97
• The Taming of Chance — Ian Hacking · #98
• Operating Instructions — Anne Lamott · #99
• Melbourne — Lord David Cecil · #100