Some Great Books of the 20th century

With the release of Naomi Kanakia’s long awaited What’s so Great about the Great Books last month the corner of this website which I inhabit has seen a proliferation of great book lists, the most relevant for our purposes being メアリー・ジェーン・エア’s expansion/amendation of Le Monde’s impressive if eccentric and very French top 100 of the 20th century, and John Pistelli’s thoughtful evaluation of that century on a year-to-year basis. Being on the whole not great at ranking things I initially didn’t think I’d try my hand, but over the last few days the idea has come to be increasingly appealing. Like MJE I’ve opted to use the Le Monde list as the starting point, and to substitute and re-order as I saw fit. outside of perhaps the top 50 there isn’t much of an order to these rankings. Finding somewhat more that a beat century the list was expanded out to 150 and there it has stayed, though one imagines 200 could fairly easily be done.

Inevitably if it is to be at all interesting a project such as this will wind up being “my” or “your” great books of the 20th century, and the following represents something of a compromise between consensus and personal judgement. One never escapes from one’s own subjectivity doing this sort of thing, and to say that this list reflects my western, anglophone, history-of-ideas sensibility should be taken for granted by the reader.1 I have not read in full every entry included, as there are some very long novels in this canon. That being said there’s nothing here that I don’t have some sort of experience with.

1. Clarice Lispector: The Passion According to G.H. (1964) or Agua Viva (1973)

2. James Joyce: Ulysses (1922)

3. Toni Morrison: Paradise (1997) or Song of Solomon (1977)

4. Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions (1998)

5. Djuna Barnes: Nightwood (1936)

6. Alexandre Kojève: Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit (1947)

7. William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury (1929) or As I Lay Dying (1931)

8. Marcel Proust: À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27)

9. Herman Melville: Billy Budd (19202

10. Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse (1927)

11. W.B. Yeats: Collected Poems (19

12. Juan Rulfo: Pedro Páramo (1955)

13. Sigmund Freud: Civilization and its Discontents (1930) or Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)

14. T. S. Eliot: Collected Poems (1963)

15. Albert Murray: The Omni-Americans (1970) or The Hero and the Blues (1974)

16. Don DeLillo: Underworld (1997)

17. Rainer Maria Rilke: The Duino Elegies (1923)

18. Yukio Mishima: The Sea of Fertility (1969-713 or Confessions of a Mask (1949)

19. Edmund Husserl: Ideas I (1913) or Cartesian Meditations (1950) or The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936)

20. Henry James: The Ambassadors (1902)

21. W.E. B. Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk (1903) or Black Reconstruction in America (1935)

22. Simone De Bouvier: The Second Sex (1949) & The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)

23. Thomas Mann: Joseph and His Brothers (1933-45) or The Magic Mountain (1924)

24. Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Phenomenology of Perception (1945)

25. D.H. Lawrence: The Rainbow (1915) or Lady Chattersley’s Lover (1928)

26. Hannah Arendt: The Human Condition (1958)

27. Robert Frost: Collected Poems (1949)

28. Thomas Pynchon: Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) or V. (1963)

29. Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man (1952)

30. Leo Strauss: Natural Right and History (1953) or Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952) or The City and Man (1964)

31. Jean Toomer: Cane (1923)

32. Ezra Pound: Personae (1926) or The Pisan Cantos (1946)

33. Martin Heidegger: Sein Und Zeit (1927)

34. Samuel Beckett: The Trilogy (1951-53)

35. Gabriel Garcia Marquez: 100 Years of Solitude (1967)

36. James Baldwin: Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953)

37. Martin Buber: Ich und Du (1923)

38. Jacques Lacan: Ecrits (1966)

39. Derek Walcott: Omeros (1990)

40. Saul Bellow: Herzog (1964)

41. Karl Barth: Epistle to the Romans (1918)

42. Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories

43. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Crack-Up 19454) or The Great Gatsby (1927)

44. René Girard: Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (1961)

45. J. M. Coetzee: The Life and Times of Michael K (1983) and/or Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)

46. Fernando Pessoa: The Book of Disquiet (1982)

47. Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises (1926)

48. Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949)

49. Emmanuel Levinas: Totality and Infinity (1961)

50. Nishida Kitaro: An Inquiry into the Good (1911)

51. C. P. Cavafy: The complete Poems of Cavafy (1961)

52. Lu Hsun: Selected Stories of Lu Hsun (1961, published 1918-26)

53. Joan Didion: Play it as it Lays (1972)

54. Francis Fukuyama: The End of History and the Last Man (1993)

55. Hart Crane: The Collected Poems (1946)

56. Marcel Gauchet: Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion (1985)

57. Wallace Stevens: Collected Poems (

58. Northrop Frye: Fearful Symmetry: a Study of William Blake (1947) & Anatomy of Criticism: four essays (1957)

59. Osamu Dazai: No Longer Human (1949) or Setting Sun (1947)

60. John Dos Passos: U.S.A.(1930-36)

61. Adorno and Horkheimer: Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947)

62. Mircea Eliade: Patterns in Comparative Religion (1949)

63. Lionel Trilling: The Liberal Imagination (1950) and Sincerity and Authenticity (1970)

64. Phillip Rieff: The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966)

65. Ishmael Reed: Mumbo Jumbo (1972)

66. Robert Musil: The Man Without Qualities (1930-43)

67. Susan Sontag: Against Interpretation (1966)

68. Mikhail Bahktin: The Dialogic Imagination (1941, published 1975)

69. Philip Roth: American Pastoral (1997)

70. Eric Hobsbawm: The Age of Revolution (1962) The Age of Capital (1975) The Age of Empire (1987) and The Age of Extremes (19945)

71. Michel Foucault: Discipline and Punish (1972) and The History of Sexuality (1976)

72. Nella Larsen: Quicksand (1928)

73. Cormac McCarthy: Suttree (1979)

74. György Lukács: History and Class Consciousness (1923) & Theory of the Novel (1916)

75. Alfred Döblin: Berlin, Alexanderplatz (1929)

76. Alan Moore: Watchmen (1985)

77. Leo Tolstoy: Hadji Murat (1912)

78. Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)

79. Andre Malraux: Man’s Fate (1935)

80. Hans Georg Gadamer: Truth and Method (1960)

81. Howard Thurman: Jesus and the Disinherited (1949)

82. Alsdair MacIntyre: After Virtue (1981)

83. Ludwig Wittgenstein: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) and Philosophical Investigations (1953)

84. Walter Benjamin: Illuminations (

85. W.H. Auden: Collected Poems (1976)

86. Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart (1958)

87. Tanizaki Jun'ichirō: In Praise of Shadows (1933)

88. Booker T. Washington: Up from Slavery (1901)

89. Gillian Rose: Love’s Work: a Reckoning with Life (1995)

90. Deleuze & Guatarri: Anti-Oedipus (1972)

91. Salman Rushdie: Midnight’s Children (1981)

92. Rudyard Kipling: Kim (1901)

93. Roland Barthes: Mythologies (1957) or S/Z (1970)

94. John Barth: The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)

95. Philip K. Dick: Valis (1977) a The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (19816)

96. Julio Cortazar: Hopscotch (1963)

97. Kazuo Ishiguro: An Artist of the Floating World (1986)

98. Willa Cather: O Pioneers! (1913)

99. Mario Vargas Llosa: Conversation in the Cathedral (1969)

100. Colette: The Tendrils of the Vine (1908)

101. Edith Wharton: The House of Mirth (1905)

102. Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

103. Thomas Merton: The Seven Storey Mountain (1948)

104. Sherwood Anderson: Winesburg, Ohio (1918)

105. Alfred North Whitehead: Process and Reality (1929)

106. Louis-Ferdinand Céline: Journey to the End of the Night (1932)

107. Jean Paul Sartre: Being and Nothingness (1943)

108. Karl Löwith: Meaning In History (1949)

109. Anthony Powell: A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-75)

110. William Gaddis: The Recognitions (1955)

111. Ferdinand de Saussure: Course in General Linguistics (1916)

112. Andre Gide: The Immoralist (1902)

113. Hergé: The Blue Lotus (1936) or The Castafiore Emerald (19637)

114. Julia Kristeva: Powers of Horror: an essay on Abjection (1980) & Revolution in Poetic Language (1974)

115. László Krasznahorkai: Satantango (1985)

116. John Kenneth Galbraith: The Great Crash, 1929 (1955)

117. Henry Adams: The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

118. Vladimir Nabokov Pale Fire (1961)

119. Haruki Murakami: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995) or Norwegian Wood (1987)

120. Herman Hesse: Siddhartha (1922) or Demian (1919)

121. Judith Butler: Gender Trouble (1990)

122. Douglas Hofstadter: Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (1979)

123. C.G. Jung: Man and his Symbols (196

124. Erich Fromm: Escape from Freedom (1941)

125. Doris Lessing: The Golden Notebook (1962)

126. Friedrich Nietzsche: The Will to Power (1901, revised 19068)

127. Erich Auerbach: Mimesis (1946)

128. Herbert Marcuse: Eros and Civilization (1955) or One-Dimensional Man (1964)

129. Georges Bataille: The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy (1946)

130. Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)

131. William Carlos Williams: Patterson (1946-48)

132. Uwe Johnson: Speculations About Jakob (1959)

133. David Foster Wallace: Infinite Jest (1996) or A Supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again (1997)

134. Edmund Wilson: To the Finland Station (1941)

135. Karl Jaspers: The Origin and Goal of History (1949)

136. Mark Twain: The Mysterious Stranger (1916)

137. William James: Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

138. Luigi Pirandello: Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921)

139. Edgar P. Jacobs: La Marque Jaune (1954)

140. Dorothy Richardson: Pilgrimage (1916-67)

141. Paul Tillich: The Courage to Be (1952)

142. Wassily Kandinsky: Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911)

143. Henry Miller: The Rosy Crucifixion (1949-59)

144. Camille Paglia: Sexual Personae (1993)

145. Patrick O’Brien: H.M.S. Surprise (1973)

146. Robert Graves: The White Goddess (1948) or Good-Bye to All That (1929)

147. Aleister Crowley: The Book of the Law (1909)

148. Edward Said: Culture and Imperialism (1993)

149. Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie (1900)

150. Gertrude Stein: Three Lives (1915)

Perhaps, as Naomi quipped the other day, someone can compile all the substack lists and return to the methodology of the Guardian’s list!