
The 50 Greatest Novels Ever
A critic and literary historian for nearly a quarter of a century at Texas A&M and Ohio State universities, I am the author of The Elephants Teach and ex-fiction critic for Commentary. I have also written for Jewish Ideas Daily, the New York Times Book Review, the Weekly Standard, Philosophy and Literature, the Sewanee Review, First Things, the Daily Beast, the Barnes & Noble Review, the Journal of the History of Ideas, American Literary History, and other journals.
- 1

Ulysses
James Joyce · 1920 · 39 lists
- 2

The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1925 · 43 lists
- 3

In Search of Lost Time
Marcel Proust · 1913 · 29 lists
- 4

Midnight’s Children
Salman Rushdie · 1981 · 25 lists
- 5

One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez · 1967 · 33 lists
- 6

The Trial
Franz Kafka · 1925 · 21 lists
- 7

A Suitable Boy
Vikram Seth · 1993 · 5 lists
- 8

A Handful of Dust
Evelyn Waugh · 1934 · 5 lists
- 9

To The Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf · 1927 · 25 lists
- 10

The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger · 1951 · 32 lists
- 11

Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis · 1953 · 6 lists
- 12

Money
Martin Amis · 1880 · 9 lists
- 13

Earthly Powers
Anthony Burgess · 1980 · 3 lists
- 14

Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad · 1899 · 29 lists
- 15

The Van
Roddy Doyle · 1991 · 1 list
- 16

The End of the Affair
Graham Greene · 1951 · 6 lists
- 17

Catch-22
Joseph Heller · 1961 · 29 lists
- 18

The Portrait of a Lady
Henry James · 1881 · 13 lists
- 19

Sons and Lovers
D.H. Lawrence · 1913 · 11 lists
- 20

Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov · 1955 · 38 lists
- 21

A House for Mr Biswas
V.S. Naipaul · 1961 · 10 lists
- 22

Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell · 1948 · 36 lists
- 23

A Dance to the Music of Time
Anthony Powell · 1951 · 5 lists
