Time's List of the 100 Best Novels
Time
The list includes only novels published between 1923 and 2010. As a result, some notable 20th-century novels, such as Ulysses by James Joyce, were ineligible for inclusion.
A list of the ten best graphic novels of the period was subsequently published as a supplement to the list. Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons appears on both the 100 Best Novels and 10 Best Graphic Novels lists, giving the combined lists a total of 109 entries.
List
Title | Author | Year |
The Adventures of Augie March | Saul Bellow | 1953 |
All the King’s Men | Robert Penn Warren | 1946 |
American Pastoral | Philip Roth | 1997 |
An American Tragedy | Theodore Dreiser | 1925 |
Animal Farm | George Orwell | 1946 |
Appointment in Samarra | John O'Hara | 1934 |
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. | Judy Blume | 1970 |
The Assistant | Bernard Malamud | 1957 |
At Swim-Two-Birds | Flann O'Brien | 1938 |
Atonement | Ian McEwan | 2002 |
Beloved | Toni Morrison | 1987 |
The Berlin Stories | Christopher Isherwood | 1946 |
The Big Sleep | Raymond Chandler | 1939 |
The Blind Assassin | Margaret Atwood | 2000 |
Blood Meridian | Cormac McCarthy | 1986 |
Brideshead Revisited | Evelyn Waugh | 1946 |
The Bridge of San Luis Rey | Thornton Wilder | 1927 |
Call It Sleep | Henry Roth | 1935 |
Catch-22 | Joseph Heller | 1961 |
The Catcher in the Rye | J.D. Salinger | 1951 |
A Clockwork Orange | Anthony Burgess | 1963 |
The Confessions of Nat Turner | William Styron | 1967 |
The Corrections | Jonathan Franzen | 2001 |
The Crying of Lot 49 | Thomas Pynchon | 1966 |
A Dance to the Music of Time | Anthony Powell | 1951 |
The Day of the Locust | Nathanael West | 1939 |
Death Comes for the Archbishop | Willa Cather | 1927 |
A Death in the Family | James Agee | 1958 |
The Death of the Heart | Elizabeth Bowen | 1958 |
Deliverance | James Dickey | 1970 |
Dog Soldiers | Robert Stone | 1974 |
Falconer | John Cheever | 1977 |
The French Lieutenant's Woman | John Fowles | 1969 |
The Golden Notebook | Doris Lessing | 1962 |
Go Tell It on the Mountain | James Baldwin | 1953 |
Gone with the Wind | Margaret Mitchell | 1936 |
The Grapes of Wrath | John Steinbeck | 1939 |
Gravity's Rainbow | Thomas Pynchon | 1973 |
The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald | 1925 |
A Handful of Dust | Evelyn Waugh | 1934 |
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter | Carson McCullers | 1940 |
The Heart of the Matter | Graham Greene | 1948 |
Herzog | Saul Bellow | 1964 |
Housekeeping | Marilynne Robinson | 1981 |
A House for Mr. Biswas | V.S. Naipaul | 1962 |
I, Claudius | Robert Graves | 1934 |
Infinite Jest | David Foster Wallace | 1996 |
Invisible Man | Ralph Ellison | 1952 |
Light in August | William Faulkner | 1932 |
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe | C.S. Lewis | 1950 |
Lolita | Vladimir Nabokov | 1955 |
Lord of the Flies | William Golding | 1954 |
The Lord of the Rings | J.R.R. Tolkien | 1954 |
Loving | Henry Green | 1945 |
Lucky Jim | Kingsley Amis | 1954 |
The Man Who Loved Children | Christina Stead | 1940 |
Midnight's Children | Salman Rushdie | 1981 |
Money | Martin Amis | 1984 |
The Moviegoer | Walker Percy | 1961 |
Mrs. Dalloway | Virginia Woolf | 1925 |
Naked Lunch | William Burroughs | 1959 |
Native Son | Richard Wright | 1940 |
Neuromancer | William Gibson | 1984 |
Never Let Me Go | Kazuo Ishiguro | 2005 |
1984 | George Orwell | 1948 |
On the Road | Jack Kerouac | 1957 |
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest | Ken Kesey | 1962 |
The Painted Bird | Jerzy Kosinski | 1965 |
Pale Fire | Vladimir Nabokov | 1962 |
A Passage to India | E.M. Forster | 1924 |
Play It as It Lays | Joan Didion | 1970 |
Portnoy's Complaint | Philip Roth | 1969 |
Possession | A.S. Byatt | 1990 |
The Power and the Glory | Graham Greene | 1939 |
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie | Muriel Spark | 1961 |
Rabbit, Run | John Updike | 1960 |
Ragtime | E.L. Doctorow | 1975 |
The Recognitions | William Gaddis | 1955 |
Red Harvest | Dashiell Hammett | 1929 |
Revolutionary Road | Richard Yates | 1961 |
The Sheltering Sky | Paul Bowles | 1949 |
Slaughterhouse-Five | Kurt Vonnegut | 1969 |
Snow Crash | Neal Stephenson | 1992 |
The Sot-Weed Factor | John Barth | 1960 |
The Sound and the Fury | William Faulkner | 1929 |
The Sportswriter | Richard Ford | 1986 |
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold | John le Carré | 1964 |
The Sun Also Rises | Ernest Hemingway | 1926 |
Their Eyes Were Watching God | Zora Neale Hurston | 1937 |
Things Fall Apart | Chinua Achebe | 1959 |
To Kill a Mockingbird | Harper Lee | 1960 |
To the Lighthouse | Virginia Woolf | 1929 |
Tropic of Cancer | Henry Miller | 1934 |
Ubik | Philip K. Dick | 1969 |
Under the Net | Iris Murdoch | 1954 |
Under the Volcano | Malcolm Lowry | 1947 |
Watchmen | Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons | 1986 |
White Noise | Don DeLillo | 1985 |
White Teeth | Zadie Smith | 2000 |
Wide Sargasso Sea | Jean Rhys | 1966 |