Enterntainment Weekly's 100 All-Time Greatest Novels
Here’s how we assembled the books list: We sat in a conference room talking about books we loved and admired. Our books editor, Tina Jordan, then made a rough list based on the conversation, and we argued about it endlessly, moved things around endlessly, cut and added things endlessly. This went on for at least six months, during which time we read like fiends. Eventually, this guy named Lou Vogel, who’s in charge of making sure we actually get around to publishing a magazine every week, said, “OK, you absolutely must turn in the final list right this second or I will scream and never stop screaming.” We never expected our books lists to please everyone. How could you agree with every book on a list like this unless you wrote the list yourself? And even you, whoever you are, like things that not everybody loves. Admit it, you like some pretty weird stuff.
- 1
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy · 1876 · 24 lists
- 2
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1925 · 0 lists
- 3
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen · 1813 · 28 lists
- 4
Great Expectations
Charles Dickens · 1861 · 19 lists
- 5
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez · 1967 · 33 lists
- 6
My Ántonia
Willa Cather · 1918 · 0 lists
- 7
Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone
J.K. Rowling · 1997 · 0 lists
- 8
Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets
J.K. Rowling · 1998 · 0 lists
- 9
Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban
J.K. Rowling · 1999 · 0 lists
- 10
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
J.K. Rowling · 1993 · 0 lists
- 11
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
J.K. Rowling · 2003 · 0 lists
- 12
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
J.K. Rowling · 2005 · 0 lists
- 13
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
J.K. Rowling · 2007 · 0 lists
- 14
Rabbit, Run
John Updike · 1960 · 0 lists
- 15
Rabbit Redux
John Updike · 1961 · 6 lists
- 16
Rabbit is Rich
John Updike · 1981 · 8 lists
- 17
Rabbit At Rest
John Updike · 1990 · 0 lists
- 18
Beloved
Toni Morrison · 1987 · 31 lists
- 19
Charlotte’s Web
E. B. White · 1952 · 0 lists
- 20
Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf · 1925 · 20 lists
- 21
The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner · 1929 · 26 lists
- 22
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee · 1960 · 33 lists
- 23
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1866 · 22 lists
- 24
Ragtime
E.L. Doctorow · 1974 · 10 lists
- 25
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë · 1847 · 26 lists
- 26
The Road
Cormac McCarthy · 2006 · 0 lists
- 27
Moby-Dick
Herman Melville · 1851 · 0 lists
- 28
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov · 1955 · 38 lists
- 29
Lonesome Dove
Larry McMurtry · 1985 · 0 lists
- 30
An American Tragedy
Theodore Dreiser · 1900 · 0 lists
- 31
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë · 1847 · 29 lists
- 32
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1880 · 22 lists
- 33
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce · 1916 · 15 lists
- 34
Bleak House
Charles Dickens · 1850 · 11 lists
- 35
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison · 1952 · 29 lists
- 36
A Wrinkle in Time
Madeleine L'Engle · 1962 · 0 lists
- 37
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy · 1869 · 29 lists
- 38
The Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood · 1985 · 23 lists
- 39
Native Son
Richard Wright · 1940 · 18 lists
- 40
Blindness
Jose Saramago · 1999 · 0 lists
- 41
The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger · 1951 · 32 lists
- 42
Maus
Art Spiegelman · 1986 · 0 lists
- 43
The World According to Garp
John Irving · 1979 · 12 lists
- 44
A Personal Matter
Kenzaburo Oe · 1969 · 0 lists
- 45
Atlas Shrugged
Ayn Rand · 1936 · 0 lists
- 46
The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway · 1926 · 22 lists
- 47
Regeneration
Pat Barker · 1991 · 5 lists
- 48
The Eye in the Door
Pat Barker · 1993 · 0 lists
- 49
The Ghost Road
Pat Barker · 1995 · 0 lists
- 50
Middlesex
Jeffrey Eugenides · 2002 · 12 lists
- 51
A Suitable Boy
Vikram Seth · 1993 · 5 lists
- 52
Go Tell It on the Mountain
James Baldwin · 1952 · 9 lists
- 53
The Stand
Stephen King · 1978 · 0 lists
- 54
A Confederacy of Dunces
John Kennedy Toole · 1980 · 0 lists
- 55
His Dark Materials
Philip Pullman · 2000 · 0 lists
- 56
The Color Purple
Alice Walker · 1982 · 20 lists
- 57
The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton · 1920 · 17 lists
- 59
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Patricia Highsmith · 1955 · 13 lists
- 60
Ender’s Game
Orson Scott Card · 1985 · 0 lists
- 61
Snow
Orhan Pamuk · 1994 · 3 lists
- 62
The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen · 2001 · 16 lists
- 63
Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison · 1977 · 14 lists
- 64
Gone With the Wind
Margaret Mitchell · 1936 · 22 lists
- 65
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
Ben Fountain · 2012 · 0 lists
- 66
A Fine Balance
Rohinton Mistry · 1995 · 7 lists
- 67
Sophie’s Choice
William Styron · 1979 · 0 lists
- 68
The Children of Men
P. D. James · 1992 · 0 lists
- 69
Midnight’s Children
Salman Rushdie · 1981 · 25 lists
- 70
Dracula
Bram Stoker · 1897 · 16 lists
- 71
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston · 1937 · 22 lists
- 72
Love in the Time of Cholera
Gabriel García Márquez · 1985 · 7 lists
- 73
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain · 1885 · 14 lists
- 74
Portnoy’s Complaint
Philip Roth · 1967 · 7 lists
- 75
Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace · 1996 · 11 lists
- 76
Herzog
Saul Bellow · 1961 · 10 lists
- 77
Howards End
E. M. Forster · 1910 · 11 lists
- 79
Middlemarch
George Eliot · 1871 · 26 lists
- 80
Money
Martin Amis · 1880 · 0 lists
- 81
Neuromancer
William Gibson · 1984 · 10 lists
- 82
The Hobbit
Chuck Dixon · 0 lists
- 83
The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro · 1989 · 0 lists
- 84
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
John Le Carré · 1963 · 13 lists
- 85
Cold Mountain
Charles Frazier · 1997 · 0 lists
- 86
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert · 1856 · 26 lists
- 87
The Golden Notebook
Doris May Lessing · 1962 · 0 lists
- 88
Tom Jones
Henry Fielding · 1749 · 11 lists
- 89
A House for Mr Biswas
V.S. Naipaul · 1961 · 0 lists
- 90
Bring Up the Bodies
Hilary Mantel · 2012 · 0 lists
- 91
In Search of Lost Time
Marcel Proust · 1913 · 0 lists
- 92
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley · 1818 · 20 lists
- 93
Disgrace
J.M. Coetzee · 1999 · 0 lists
- 94
The Stone Diaries
Carol Shields · 1993 · 5 lists
- 95
Clockers
Richard Price · 1992 · 0 lists
- 96
Catch-22
Joseph Heller · 1961 · 0 lists
- 97
A Home at the End of the World
Michael Cunningham · 1990 · 2 lists
- 98
White Teeth
Zadie Smith · 2000 · 17 lists
- 99
The Bonfire of the Vanities
Tom Wolfe · 1987 · 7 lists
- 100
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Laurence Sterne · 1759 · 0 lists
- 101
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers · 1940 · 0 lists
- 102
The Leopard
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa · 2000 · 0 lists
- 103
The Glass Bead Game
Hermann Hesse · 2001 · 3 lists
- 104
Bastard Out of Carolina
Dorothy Allison · 1992 · 0 lists
- 105
The Moonstone
Wilkie Collins · 1868 · 7 lists
- 106
The Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver · 1998 · 8 lists
- 107
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller
Italo Calvino · 1982 · 0 lists
- 108
The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler · 1939 · 13 lists
- 109
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
Judy Blume · 1970 · 0 lists
- 110
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams · 1979 · 0 lists
- 111
The Joy Luck Club
Amy Tan · 1989 · 0 lists