The Most Influential Novels and Books Lists on this Page: - The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time - Time Magazine's "All-Time 100 Best Novels" - greatest English-language novels from 1923 to 2005 - 100 Books That Shaped World History Related pages: - The Literary 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Novelists, Playwrights, and Poets of All Time - The Fictional 100 and 100 Best Characters in Fiction Since 1900 (including info about authors who created the characters) Related websites: - The Modern Library Board's 100 Best Novels - The Modern Library Board's 100 Best Non-Fiction Books The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time The list below is from the book The Novel 100: A Ranking of Greatest Novels All Time (Checkmark Books/Facts On File, Inc.: New York, 2004), written by Daniel S. Burt. Burt holds a Ph.D from New York University with a specialty in Victorian fiction and was for nine years a dean at Wesleyan University, whe he has also taught literature courses since 1989. He is also the author of The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time. Note that in compiling the list of novels that was the basis for this book, Burt had to impose a number of constraints about what should be considered a novel. Although some works recognized as classics of science fiction (or, more broadly, speculative fiction) are on the list (e.g., Frankenstein; Dracula; Nineteen Eighty-Four), Burt specifically excluded works that seemed to veer too much from primarily naturalis and contemporary-oriented narratives, thus excluding from consideration most science fiction and fantasy. Books such as Tolkien's The Lord the Rings, Card'sEnder's Game, Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz and Frank Herbert's Dune were excluded from consideration as "novels." Burt's functional definition of "novel" used here (i.e., books belonging to the "novel genre" or, in most cases, the "literary novel genre") is thu narrower than how the word is used by the general public. From the book's introduction, pages ix-x: What makes a listing of the greatest novels even more problematic is the lack of any consensus about which works rightfully constitute the genre... th novel is such a hybrid and adaptive genre, assimilating other prose and verse forms... A standard definition of the novel--an extended prose narrativ is so broad that it fails to limit the field usefully... I have been influenced in this regard, like many, by literary critic Ian Watt's groundbreaking 1957 study, The Rise of the Novel, which contends that the novel as a distinctive genre emerged in 18th-century England through the shifting of the empha of previous prose romances and their generalized and idealized characters, settings, and situations to a particularity of individual experience. In oth words, the novel replaced the romance's interest in the general and the ideal with a concern for the particular. The here and now substituted for the romance's interest in the long ago and far away. As 18th-century novelist Clara Reece observed, "The Novel is a picture of real life and manners, an of the times in which it was written. The Romance, in lofty and elevated language, describes what has never happened nor is likely to." Novelists beg to represent the actual world accurately, governed by the laws of probability. ...It would be far too reductive and misleading, however, to define the novel only by its realism or accurate representation of ordinary life... It would far more accurate to say that the novel as a distinct genre attempts a synthesis between romance and realism, between a poetic, imaginative alternat to actuality and a more authentic representation. For purposes of my listing, I have narrowed the field by categorizing as novels works that engage i that synthesis. Some narrative works judged too far in the direction of fantasy--Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Carroll's Alice in Wonderland--have been excluded. I have also made judgment calls on the question of the required length of a novel and have ruled out of contention such important fictional works as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis as falling short of the amplitude expected when confronting a novel. Rank Title of Great Novel 1 Don Quixote 2 War and Peace 3 Ulysses 4 In Search of Lost Time 5 The Brothers Karamazov 6 Moby-Dick 7 Madame Bovary 8 Middlemarch 9 The Magic Mountain 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 The Tale of Genji Emma Bleak House Anna Karenina Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Tom Jones Great Expectations Absalom, Absalom! The Ambassadors One Hundred Years of Solitude The Great Gatsby To The Lighthouse Crime and Punishment The Sound and the Fury 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 Vanity Fair Invisible Man Finnegans Wake The Man Without Qualities Gravity's Rainbow The Portrait of a Lady Women in Love The Red and the Black Tristram Shandy Year Author 1605, 1630 Miguel de Cervantes 1869 Leo Tolstoy 1922 James Joyce 1913-27 Marcel Proust 1880 Feodor Dostoevsky 1851 Herman Melville 1857 Gustave Flaubert 1871-72 George Eliot 1924 Thomas Mann 11th Century Murasaki Shikibu 1816 Jane Austen 1852-53 Charles Dickens 1877 Leo Tolstoy 1884 Mark Twain 1749 Henry Fielding 1860-61 Charles Dickens 1936 William Faulkner 1903 Henry James 1967 Gabriel Garcia Marquez 1925 F. Scott Fitzgerald 1927 Virginia Woolf 1866 Feodor Dostoevsky 1929 William Faulkner William Makepeace 1847-48 Thackeray 1952 Ralph Ellison 1939 James Joyce 1930-43 Robert Musil 1973 Thomas Pynchon 1881 Henry James 1920 D. H. Lawrence 1830 Stendhal 1760-67 Laurence Sterne Religious Affiliation of Author Catholic Russian Orthodox Catholic (lapsed) Jewish Catholic Russian Orthodox Transcendentalist Catholic Anglican; agnostic Lutheran Buddhist/Shinto culture Anglican Anglican Russian Orthodox Presbyterian Anglican Presbyterian Anglican Catholic Catholic Neo-pagan Russian Orthodox Presbyterian Catholic (lapsed) Catholic Catholic; agnostic Anglican Catholic Anglican (Church of Ireland clergyman 33 34 35 36 1842 1891 1901 1835 Nikolai Gogol Thomas Hardy Thomas Mann Honore de Balzac Russian Orthodox 1916 1847 1959 James Joyce Emily Bronte Gunter Grass Catholic (lapsed) Anglican Catholic 40 41 42 43 44 45 Dead Souls Tess of the D'Urbervilles Buddenbrooks Le Pere Goriot A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Wuthering Heights The Tin Drum Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable Pride and Prejudice The Scarlet Letter Fathers and Sons Nostromo Beloved 1951-53 1813 1850 1862 1904 1987 Samuel Beckett Jane Austen Nathaniel Hawthorne Ivan Turgenev Joseph Conrad Toni Morrison Church of Ireland (Anglican) Anglican Transcendentalist Russian Orthodox; agnostic Catholic; atheist 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 An American Tragedy Lolita The Golden Notebook Clarissa Dream of the Red Chamber The Trial Jane Eyre The Red Badge of Courage The Grapes of Wrath 1925 1955 1962 1747-48 1791 1925 1847 1895 1939 Theodore Dreiser Vladimir Nabokov Doris Lessing Samuel Richardson Cao Xueqin Franz Kafka Charlotte Bronte Stephen Crane John Steinbeck 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 Petersburg Things Fall Apart The Princess of Cleves The Stranger My Antonia The Counterfeiters The Age of Innocence The Good Soldier The Awakening A Passage to India Herzog Germinal Call It Sleep U.S.A. Trilogy Hunger Berlin Alexanderplatz Cities of Salt The Death of Artemio Cruz A Farewell to Arms Brideshead Revisited 1916/1922 1958 1678 1942 1918 1926 1920 1915 1899 1924 1964 1855 1934 1930-38 1890 1929 1984-89 1962 1929 1945 Andrey Bely Chinue Achebe Madame de Lafayette Albert Camus Willa Cather Andre Gide Edith Wharton Ford Madox Ford Kate Chopin E. M. Forster Saul Bellow Emile Zola Henry Roth John Dos Passos Knut Hamsun Alfred Doblin 'Abd al-Rahman Munif Carlos Fuentes Ernest Hemingway Evelyn Waugh 37 38 39 Lutheran Catholic Catholic; Congregationalist; Chrisitan Science Russian Orthodox Jewish Anglican Methodist Episcopalian Russian Orthodox; Theosophy; Spiritualism Catholic; Existentialism Episcopalian Catholic; agnostic Catholic Orthodox Jew (lapsed); Anthroposophis Catholic Jewish Catholic Catholic Catholic Catholic Catholic 75 76 77 The Last Chronicle of Barset The Pickwick Papers Robinson Crusoe 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 The Sorrows of Young Werther Candide Native Son Under the Volcano Oblomov Their Eyes Were Watching God Waverley Snow Country Nineteen Eighty-Four The Betrothed The Last of the Mohicans Uncle Tom's Cabin Les Miserables On the Road Frankenstein 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 The Leopard The Catcher in the Rye The Woman in White The Good Soldier Svejk Dracula The Three Musketeers The Hound of Baskervilles Gone with the Wind 1866-67 1836-67 1719 Anthony Trollope Charles Dickens Daniel Defoe Johann Wolfgang von 1774 Goethe 1759 Voltaire 1940 Richard Wright 1947 Malcolm Lowry 1859 Ivan Goncharov 1937 Zora Neale Hurston 1814 Sir Walter Scott 1937, 1948 Kawabata Yasunari 1949 George Orwell 1827, 1840 Alessandro Manzoni 1826 James Fenimore Cooper 1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe 1862 Victor Hugo 1957 Jack Kerouac 1818 Mary Shelley Giuseppe Tomasi di 1958 Lampedusa 1951 J.D. Salinger 1860 Wilkie Collins 1921-23 Jaroslav Hasek 1897 Bram Stoker 1844 Alexandre Dumas 1902 Arthur Conan Doyle 1936 Margaret Mitchell Anglican Anglican Protestant Dissenter (Presbyterian) Deist raised in Jansenism; later Deist Seventh-day Adventist; Communist Methodist; Anglican; agnostic Anglican Anglican Catholic Episcopalian Episcopalian; Congregationalist Catholic Catholic; Buddhism Catholic Jewish Catholic; Scientologist Catholic Church of Ireland (Anglican) agnostic; Catholic Catholic; Spiritualist Catholic
