The 100 Greatest American Novels, 1893 – 1993
A couple of years ago, one of my brightest, most driven students asked me a simple question for which I had no ready answer: “Do you know where I could find a list of the 100 or so most important works of American fiction from the 20th Century?” I didn’t. List created by Jeff O'Neal of Book Riot.
- 1
Maggie
Stephen Crane · 1893 · 1 list
- 2
The Country of the Pointed Firs
Sarah Orne Jewett · 1896 · 2 lists
- 3
The Awakening
Kate Chopin · 1899 · 6 lists
- 4
The Call of the Wild
Jack London · 1903 · 13 lists
- 5
The Golden Bowl
Henry James · 1904 · 6 lists
- 6
The House of Mirth
Edith Wharton · 1905 · 8 lists
- 7
The Jungle
Kristina Gehrmann, Upton Sinclair · 1905 · 3 lists
- 8
Three Lives
Gertrude Stein · 1909 · 3 lists
- 9
My Ántonia
Willa Cather · 1918 · 13 lists
- 10
The Magnificent Ambersons
Booth Tarkington · 1918 · 3 lists
- 11
Winesburg, Ohio
Sherwood Anderson · 1919 · 5 lists
- 12
Main Street
Sinclair Lewis · 1920 · 7 lists
- 13
Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
James Weldon Johnson · 1900 · 1 list
- 14
Cane
Jean Toomer · 1923 · 5 lists
- 15
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1925 · 43 lists
- 16
An American Tragedy
Theodore Dreiser · 1900 · 9 lists
- 17
The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway · 1926 · 22 lists
- 18
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Thornton Wilder · 1927 · 5 lists
- 19
Home to Harlem
Claude McKay · 1928 · 1 list
- 20
The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner · 1929 · 26 lists
- 21
Look Homeward, Angel
Thomas Wolfe · 1929 · 8 lists
- 22
The Maltese Falcon
Dashiell Hammett · 1929 · 15 lists
- 23
Flowering Judas and Other Stories
Katherine Anne Porter · 1935 · 1 list
- 24
The Good Earth
Pearl S. Buck · 1548 · 5 lists
- 25
Call it Sleep
Henry Roth · 1934 · 6 lists
- 26
Tropic of Cancer
Henry Miller · 1934 · 12 lists
- 27
Appointment in Samarra
John O'Hara · 1934 · 3 lists
- 28
Gone With the Wind
Margaret Mitchell · 1936 · 22 lists
- 29
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston · 1937 · 22 lists
- 30
The Day of the Locust
Nathanael West · 1939 · 6 lists
- 31
The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler · 1939 · 13 lists
- 32
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck · 1939 · 32 lists
- 33
Native Son
Richard Wright · 1940 · 18 lists
- 34
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers · 1940 · 11 lists
- 35
The Fountainhead
Ayn Rand · 1943 · 6 lists
- 36
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Betty Smith · 1943 · 8 lists
- 37
All the King's Men
Robert Penn Warren · 1946 · 10 lists
- 38
Tales of the South Pacific
James A. Michener · 1947 · 2 lists
- 39
The Naked and the Dead
Norman Mailer · 1948 · 8 lists
- 40
The Sheltering Sky
Paul Bowles · 1948 · 6 lists
- 41
The Lottery and Other Stories
Shirley Jackson · 1949 · 1 list
- 42
The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger · 1951 · 32 lists
- 43
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison · 1952 · 29 lists
- 44
Go Tell It on the Mountain
James Baldwin · 1952 · 9 lists
- 45
The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow · 1953 · 11 lists
- 46
Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury · 1953 · 9 lists
- 47
Andersonville
MacKinlay Kantor · 1879 · 3 lists
- 48
On the Road
Jack Kerouac · 1957 · 24 lists
- 49
Gimpel the Fool
Isaac Bashevis Singer · 1957 · 2 lists
- 50
The Wapshot Chronicle
John Cheever · 1957 · 3 lists
- 51
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov · 1955 · 38 lists
- 52
The Magic Barrel
Bernard Malamud · 1953 · 3 lists
- 53
Goodbye, Columbus
Philip Roth · 1959 · 3 lists
- 54
Naked Lunch
William Burroughs · 1959 · 8 lists
- 55
Little Disturbances
Grace Paley · 1959 · 3 lists
- 56
Brown Girl, Brownstones
Paule Marshall · 1959 · 1 list
- 57
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee · 1960 · 33 lists
- 58
Rabbit, Run
John Updike · 1960 · 12 lists
- 59
The Sot-Weed Factor
John Barth · 1960 · 4 lists
- 60
The Moviegoer
Walker Percy · 1961 · 8 lists
- 61
Catch-22
Joseph Heller · 1961 · 29 lists
- 62
Revolutionary Road
Richard Yates · 1961 · 3 lists
- 63
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Ken Kesey · 1962 · 13 lists
- 64
The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath · 1963 · 12 lists
- 65
A Sport and a Pastime
James Salter · 1967 · 2 lists
- 66
The Confessions of Nat Turner
William Styron · 1920 · 4 lists
- 67
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Philip K. Dick · 1968 · 4 lists
- 68
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut · 1969 · 19 lists
- 69
House Made of Dawn
N. Scott Momaday · 1968 · 2 lists
- 70
Them
Joyce Carol Oates · 2001 · 3 lists
- 71
The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford
Jean Stafford · 1969 · 1 list
- 72
Play It As It Lays
Joan Didion · 1970 · 5 lists
- 73
- 74
Mumbo Jumbo
Ishmael Reed · 1972 · 3 lists
- 75
Angle of Repose
Wallace Stegner · 1971 · 5 lists
- 76
Gravity's Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon · 1973 · 12 lists
- 77
Ragtime
E.L. Doctorow · 1974 · 10 lists
- 78
JR
William Gaddis · 1975 · 5 lists
- 79
Roots
Alex Haley · 1861 · 7 lists
- 80
Ceremony
Leslie Marmon Silko · 1977 · 2 lists
- 81
The World According to Garp
John Irving · 1979 · 12 lists
- 82
Airships
Barry Hannah · 1978 · 1 list
- 83
Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson · 1980 · 10 lists
- 84
A Confederacy of Dunces
John Kennedy Toole · 1980 · 13 lists
- 85
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
Eudora Welty · 1980 · 4 lists
- 86
The Color Purple
Alice Walker · 1982 · 20 lists
- 87
Cathedral
Raymond Carver · 1983 · 2 lists
- 88
Love Medicine
Louise Erdrich · 1986 · 4 lists
- 89
Neuromancer
William Gibson · 1984 · 10 lists
- 90
White Noise
Don DeLillo · 1984 · 13 lists
- 91
Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy · 1985 · 14 lists
- 92
Lonesome Dove
Larry McMurtry · 1985 · 7 lists
- 93
City of Glass
Paul Auster · 1985 · 1 list
- 94
Beloved
Toni Morrison · 1987 · 31 lists
- 95
The Joy Luck Club
Amy Tan · 1989 · 7 lists
- 96
The Shawl
Cynthia Ozick · 1989 · 1 list
- 97
The Things They Carried
Tim O'Brien · 1990 · 10 lists
- 98
How the García Girls Lost Their Accents
Julia Alvarez · 1992 · 2 lists
- 99
Bastard Out of Carolina
Dorothy Allison · 1992 · 6 lists
- 100
U.S.A. Trilogy
John Dos Passos · 1960 · 6 lists