The Modern Library's 100 Best Novels: The Board's List

Given by Modern Library

100 Works 1,174,958 Books 18,877 Reviews ½ 3.9

The goal of the "100 Best" project was to get people talking about great books. We succeeded beyond our wildest imaginings — more than 400,000 avid readers rushed online to cast votes for their

show more favorite books.

The readers' poll for the best novels published in the English language since 1900 opened on July 20, 1998 and closed on October 20, 1998, with 217,520 votes cast.

This list of 100 novels was drawn up by the editorial board of Modern Library. See also The Readers' List. show less

Year Awarded:
1998
WorkOrder Label
Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce
1
The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) by James Joyce
3
Lolita (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov
4
Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley
5
The Sound and the Fury (1929) by William Faulkner
6
Catch-22 (1961) by Joseph Heller
7
Darkness at Noon (1940) by Arthur Koestler
8
Sons And Lovers (1913) by D. H. Lawrence
9
The Grapes of Wrath (1939) by John Steinbeck
10
Under the Volcano (1947) by Malcolm Lowry
11
The Way of All Flesh (1903) by Samuel Butler
12
1984 (1949) by George Orwell
13
I, Claudius (1934) by Robert Graves
14
To the Lighthouse (1927) by Virginia Woolf
15
An American Tragedy (1925) by Theodore Dreiser
16
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) by Carson McCullers
17
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut
18
Invisible Man (1952) by Ralph Ellison
19
Native Son (1940) by Richard Wright
20
Henderson the Rain King (1958) by Saul Bellow
21
Appointment in Samarra (1934) by John O'Hara
22
U.S.A. (1938) by John Dos Passos
23
Winesburg, Ohio (1919) by Sherwood Anderson
24
A Passage to India (1924) by E. M. Forster
25
The Wings of the Dove (1902) by Henry James
26
The Ambassadors (1903) by Henry James
27
Tender is the Night (1934) by F. Scott Fitzgerald
28
Studs Lonigan (1935) by James T. Farrell
29
The Good Soldier (1915) by Ford Madox Ford
30
Animal Farm (1945) by George Orwell
31
The Golden Bowl (1904) by Henry James
32
Sister Carrie (1900) by Theodore Dreiser
33
A Handful of Dust (1934) by Evelyn Waugh
34
As I Lay Dying (1930) by William Faulkner
35
All the King's Men (1946) by Robert Penn Warren
36
The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) by Thornton Wilder
37
Howards End (1910) by E. M. Forster
38
Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) by James Baldwin
39
The Heart of the Matter (1948) by Graham Greene
40
Lord of the Flies (1954) by William Golding
41
Deliverance (1970) by James Dickey
42
A Dance to the Music of Time (1955) by Anthony Powell
43
Point Counter Point (1928) by Aldous Huxley
44
The Sun Also Rises (1926) by Ernest Hemingway
45
The Secret Agent (1907) by Joseph Conrad
46
Nostromo (1904) by Joseph Conrad
47
The Rainbow (1915) by D. H. Lawrence
48
Women in Love (1920) by D. H. Lawrence
49
Tropic of Cancer (1934) by Henry Miller
50
The Naked and the Dead (1948) by Norman Mailer
51
Portnoy's Complaint (1967) by Philip Roth
52
Pale Fire (2011) by Vladimir Nabokov
53
Light in August (1932) by William Faulkner
54
On the Road (1957) by Jack Kerouac
55
The Maltese Falcon (1930) by Dashiell Hammett
56
Parade's End (1925) by Ford Madox Ford
57
The Age of Innocence (1920) by Edith Wharton
58
Zuleika Dobson (1911) by Max Beerbohm
59
The Moviegoer (1961) by Walker Percy
60
Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) by Willa Cather
61
From Here to Eternity (1951) by James Jones
62
The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) by John Cheever
63
The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J. D. Salinger
64
A Clockwork Orange (1962) by Anthony Burgess
65
Of Human Bondage (1915) by W. Somerset Maugham
66
Heart of Darkness (1899) by Joseph Conrad
67
Main Street (1920) by Sinclair Lewis
68
The House of Mirth (1905) by Edith Wharton
69
The Alexandria Quartet (1957) by Lawrence Durrell
70
A High Wind in Jamaica (1929) by Richard Hughes
71
A House for Mr Biswas (1961) by V. S. Naipaul
72
The Day of the Locust (1939) by Nathanael West
73
A Farewell to Arms (1929) by Ernest Hemingway
74
Scoop (1938) by Evelyn Waugh
75
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) by Muriel Spark
76
Finnegans Wake (1939) by James Joyce
77
Kim (1901) by Rudyard Kipling
78
A Room with a View (1908) by E. M. Forster
79
Brideshead Revisited (1945) by Evelyn Waugh
80
The Adventures of Augie March (1953) by Saul Bellow
81
Angle of Repose (1971) by Wallace Stegner
82
A Bend in the River (1979) by V. S. Naipaul
83
The Death of the Heart (1938) by Elizabeth Bowen
84
Lord Jim (1900) by Joseph Conrad
85
Ragtime (1975) by E. L. Doctorow
86
The Old Wives' Tale (1908) by Arnold Bennett
87
The Call of the Wild (1903) by Jack London
88
Loving (1945) by Henry Green
89
Midnight's Children (1981) by Salman Rushdie
90
Tobacco Road (1932) by Erskine Caldwell
91
Ironweed (1983) by William J. Kennedy
92
The Magus (1965) by John Fowles
93
Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys
94
Under the Net (1954) by Iris Murdoch
95
Sophie's Choice (1979) by William Styron
96
The Sheltering Sky (1949) by Paul Bowles
97
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) by James M. Cain
98
The Ginger Man (1955) by J. P. Donleavy
99
The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) by Booth Tarkington
100

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