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Time Magazine’s Top 100 All-Time Novels (1923-2005)
In 2005, Time® magazine’s literary critics, Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo selected what they considered to be the top 100 English-language novels published from 1923 to 2005 (1923 being the year Time® began publishing). As usual, with any “top 100” list, these were their subjective choices, and obviously do not reflect the views of any other reader. However, their list inarguably includes numerous works of influential English-languge literature. To see their original online list, including detailed plot descriptions, visit Time’s Critics Pick the 100 Best Novels on the Time® website.
[Note: At the time this list was assembled, the Lincoln City Libraries owned 99 of these 100 titles — listed in alphabetical order below. Click on the titles or book covers to connect directly to our catalog and check on the availability of each of these books.]The Adventures of Augie March
by Saul Bellow
1953
All the King’s Men
by Robert Penn Warren
1946
American Pastoral
by Philip Roth
1997
An American Tragedy
by Theodore Dreiser
1925
Animal Farm
by George Orwell
1946
Appointment in Samarra
by John O’Hara
1934
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
by Judy Blume
1970
The Assistant
by Bernard Malamud
1957
At Swim-Two-Birds
by Flann O’Brien
1938
Atonement
by Ian McEwan
2002
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
1987
The Berlin Stories
by Christopher Isherwood
1946
The Big Sleep
by Raymond Chandler
1939
The Blind Assassin
by Margaret Atwood
2000
Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
1986
Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh
1946
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
by Thornton Wilder
1927
Call It Sleep
by Henry Roth
1935
Catch-22
by Joseph Heller
1961
The Catcher in the Rye
by J.D. Salinger
1951
A Clockwork Orange
by Anthony Burgess
1963
The Confessions of Nat Turner
by William Styron
1967
The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
2001
The Crying of Lot 49
by Thomas Pynchon
1966
A Dance to the Music of Time
by Anthony Powell
1951
The Day of the Locust
by Nathaniel West
1939
Death Comes for the Archbishop
by Willa Cather
1927
A Death in the Family
by James Agee
1958
The Death of the Heart
by Elizabeth Bowen
1938
Deliverance
by James Dickey
1970
Dog Soldiers
by Robert Stone
1974
Falconer
by John Cheever
1977
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
by John Fowles
1969
The Golden Notebook
by Doris Lessing
1962
Go Tell It on the Mountain
by James Baldwin
1953
Gone With the Wind
by Margaret Mitchell
1936
The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck
1939
Gravity’s Rainbow
by Thomas Pynchon
1973
The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
1925
A Handful of Dust
by Evelyn Waugh
1934
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
by Carson McCullers
1940
The Heart of the Matter
by Graham Greene
1948
Herzog
by Saul Bellow
1964
Housekeeping
by Marilynne Robinson
1981
A House for Mr. Biswas
by V.S. Naipaul
1962
I, Claudius
by Robert Graves
1934
Infinite Jest
by David Foster Wallace
1996
Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
1952
Light in August
by William Faulkner
1932
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
by C.S. Lewis
1950
Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
1955
Lord of the Flies
by William Golding
1955
The Lord of the Rings
by J.R.R. Tolkien
1954
Loving
by Henry Green
1945
Lucky Jim
by Kingsley Amis
1954
The Man Who Loved Children
by Christina Stead
1940
Midnight’s Children
by Salman Rushdie
1981
Money: A Suicide Note
by Martin Amis
1984
The Moviegoer
by Walker Percy
1961
Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf
1925
Naked Lunch
by William Burroughs
1959
Native Son
by Richard Wright
1940
Neuromancer
by William Gibson
1984
Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
2005
1984
by George Orwell
1948
On the Road
by Jack Kerouac
1957
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
by Ken Kesey
1962
The Painted Bird
by Jerzy Kosinski
1965
Pale Fire
by Vladimir Nabokov
1962
A Passage to India
by E.M. Forster
1924
Play It As It Lays
by Joan Didion
1970
Portnoy’s Complaint
by Philip Roth
1969
Possession
by A.S. Byatt
1990
The Power and the Glory
by Graham Greene
1939
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
by Muriel Spark
1961
Rabbit, Run
by John Updike
1960
Ragtime
by E.L. Doctorow
1975
The Recognitions
by William Gaddis
1955
Red Harvest
by Dashiell Hammett
1929
Revolutionary Road
by Richard Yates
1961
The Sheltering Sky
by Paul Bowles
1949
Slaughterhouse-Five
by Kurt Vonnegut
1969
Snow Crash
by Neal Stephenson
1992
The Sot-Weed Factor
by John Barth
1960
The Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner
1929
The Sportswriter
by Richard Ford
1986
The Spy Who Came In From the Cold
by John le Carre
1964
The Sun Also Rises
by Ernest Hemingway
1926
Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
1937
Things Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe
1959
To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee
1960
To the Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf
1927
Tropic of Cancer
by Henry Miller
1934
Ubik
by Philip K. Dick
1969
Under the Net
by Iris Murdoch
1954
Under the Volcano
by Malcolm Lowry
1947
Watchmen
by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
1986
White Noise
by Don DeLillo
1985
White Teeth
by Zadie Smith
2000
Wide Sargasso Sea
by Jean Rhys
1966