The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books
125 writers submitted top-ten lists of their favorite works. Editor J.
Peder Zane then utilized a point system and compiled a best-of list
based on all the lists.
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy 171 points
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert 160 points
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy 150 points
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov 131 points
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain 126 points
Hamlet by William Shakespeare 111 points
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald 110 points
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust 107 points
Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov 105 points
Middlemarch by George Eliot 100 points
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra 91 points
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville 88 points
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens 87 points
Ulysses by James Joyce 85 points
The Odyssey by Homer 81 points
Dubliners by James Joyce 79 points
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky 72 points
King Lear by William Shakespeare 72 points
Emma by Jane Austen 67 points
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez 66 points
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner 63 points
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf 62 points
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky 61 points
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri 56 points
The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor 55 points
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne 54 points
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen 52 points
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë 52 points
The Bible by Anonymous 50 points
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov 49 points
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner 47 points
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James 45 points
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee 44 points
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer 43 points
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad 42 points
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf 42 points
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison 41 points
Bleak House by Charles Dickens 40 points
The Trial by Franz Kafka 40 points
Beloved by Toni Morrison 40 points
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë 39 points
The Stranger by Albert Camus 38 points
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck 36 points
All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren 35 points
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford 32 points
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger 32 points
Persuasion by Jane Austen 31 points
Macbeth by William Shakespeare 31 points
The Oresteia: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides by Aeschylus 30 points
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne 30 points
The Red and the Black by Stendhal 28 points
Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetrology by John Updike 28 points
The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel by Isaac Babel 27 points
Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald 27 points
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce 27 points
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller 26 points
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut 26 points
The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever 24 points
Paradise Lost by John Milton 24 points
The Aeneid by Virgil 24 points
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy 23 points
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman 23 points
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol 22 points
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann 22 points
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty by Eudora Welty 22 points
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov 21 points
Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens 21 points
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner 21 points
The Hamlet by William Faulkner 21 points
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway 21 points
The Iliad by Homer 21 points
The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio 20 points
The Possessed by Fyodor Dostoevsky 20 points
The Man who Loved Children by Christina Stead 20 points
The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal 20 points
The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway by Ernest Hemingway 19 points
Independent People by Halldór Laxness 19 points
The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights by Richard Burton 18 points
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky 18 points
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston 18 points
The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition by Stephen King 18 points
The Tempest by William Shakespeare 18 points
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson 17 points
Don Juan by Lord George Gordon Byron 17 points
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe 17 points
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding 17 points
A Passage to India by E. M. Forster 17 points
Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady by Samuel Richardson 17 points
Candide by Voltaire 17 points
Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges 16 points
The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler 16 points
Mrs Bridge by Evan S. Connell 16 points
Mr. Bridge by Evan S. Connell 16 points
Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy 16 points
The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka 16 points
1984 by George Orwell 16 points
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift 16 points
The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West 16 points
A Death in the Family by James Agee 15 points
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino 15 points
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson 15 points
Howards End by E. M. Forster 15 points
The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene 15 points
Selected Stories by Alice Munro 15 points
A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell 15 points
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark 15 points
Stones for Ibarra by Harriet Doerr 14 points
The Tin Drum by Günter Grass 14 points
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare 14 points
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens 13 points
Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser 13 points
The Bear by William Faulkner 13 points
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway 13 points
Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson 13 points
The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa 13 points
Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter 13 points
The Three Theban Plays: Antigone ; Oedipus at Colonus ; Oedipus the King by Sophocles 13 points
East of Eden by John Steinbeck 13 points
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson 13 points
Daniel Deronda by George Eliot 12 points
Love in The Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez 12 points
The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard 12 points
So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell 12 points
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison 12 points
Germinal by Émile Zola 12 points
Ask the Dust (P.S.) by John Fante 11 points
Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford 11 points
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro 11 points
The Ambassadors by Henry James 11 points
Nine Stories (U.S.) by J. D. Salinger 11 points
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray 11 points
Native Son by Richard Wright 11 points
The Bhagavad Gita by Anonymous 10 points
The Woman in the Dunes by Kōbō Abe 10 points
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe 10 points
The Untouchable by John Banville 10 points
Ill Seen Ill Said by Samuel Beckett 10 points
The Book of Leviathan by Peter Blegvad 10 points
The Outward Room by Millen Brand 10 points
Casa Guidi Windows by Elizabeth Barrett Browning 10 points
Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel by Truman Capote 10 points
The Golden Argosy: A Collection of the Most Celebrated Short Stories in the English Language by and Cartmell Charles Grayson, Van Henry 10 points
The Professor's House by Willa Cather 10 points
The Awakening by Kate Chopin 10 points
Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee 10 points
Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee 10 points
Geek Love by Katherine Dunn 10 points
Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich 10 points
JR by William Gaddis 10 points
I, Claudius by Robert Graves 10 points
The Golden Bowl by Henry James 10 points
Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence 10 points
The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis 10 points
Embers by Sandor Marai 10 points
The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade by Herman Melville 10 points
The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter 10 points
The Homecoming by Harold Pinter 10 points
The Time of the Doves by Merce Rodoreda 10 points
Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare 10 points
The Makioka Sisters by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki 10 points
L'Assommoir by Émile Zola 10 points
Nana by Émile Zola 10 points
Aesop's Fables by Aesop 9 points
Mahābhārata (John D. Smith ed.) by Vyasa 9 points
The Zoo Story by Edward Albee 9 points
The American Dream by Edward Albee 9 points
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee 9 points
Cousin Bette by Honoré de Balzac 9 points
The Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos 9 points
The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler 9 points
The Fall by Albert Camus 9 points
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather 9 points
The Ten Thousand Things by Maria Dermoût 9 points
Selected Stories by Andre Dubus 9 points
The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot 9 points
Medea by Euripides 9 points
Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon 9 points
Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg 9 points
1982, Janine (Canongate Classics) by Alasdair Gray 9 points
The Mayor of Casterbridge: A Story of a Man of Character by Thomas Hardy 9 points
The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst 9 points
A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen 9 points
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann 9 points
Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann 9 points
The Misanthrope and Other Plays: A New Selection by Jean-Baptiste Moliere 9 points
Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec 9 points
Wheat That Springeth Green by J. F. Powers 9 points
Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym 9 points
The Life of Henry the Fifth by William Shakespeare 9 points
Othello by William Shakespeare 9 points
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson 9 points
The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson 9 points
The Master by Colm Tóibín 9 points
Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset 9 points
The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West 9 points
A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams 9 points
Old Goriot by Honoré de Balzac 8 points
Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges 8 points
Bullet Park by John Cheever 8 points
Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov 8 points
Life & Times of Michael K by J. M. Coetzee 8 points
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad 8 points
The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad 8 points
The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies 8 points
Hard Times by Charles Dickens 8 points
The Ice Age by Margaret Drabble 8 points
Bacchae by Euripides 8 points
Light in August by William Faulkner 8 points
Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding 8 points
The gate of angels by Penelope Fitzgerald 8 points
The Sheltered Life by Ellen Glasgow 8 points
Red Dragon by Thomas Harris 8 points
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway 8 points
Almost Paradise by Susan Isaacs 8 points
Shining Through by Susan Isaacs 8 points
Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson 8 points
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera 8 points
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C. S. Lewis 8 points
Man's Fate by Andre Malraux 8 points
Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant 8 points
The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien 8 points
Norwood by Charles Portis 8 points
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie 8 points
Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini 8 points
The Raj Quartet by Paul Scott 8 points
Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald 8 points
The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein 8 points
Sophie's Choice by William Styron 8 points
Golpo Guccho by Rabindranath Tagore 8 points
Sketches from a Hunter's Album by Ivan Turgenev 8 points
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain 8 points
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde 8 points
Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory 7 points
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott 7 points
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen 7 points
Nightwood by Djuna Barnes 7 points
Herzog by Saul Bellow 7 points
My Ántonia by Willa Cather 7 points
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler 7 points
The Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov 7 points
The Beans of Egypt, Maine by Carolyn Chute 7 points
Letourneau's Used Auto Parts by Carolyn Chute 7 points
Merry Men by Carolyn Chute 7points
The Hours by Michael Cunningham 7 points
U.S.A. by John Dos Passos 7 points
The Radiant Way by Margaret Drabble 7 points
Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant, The by Mavis Gallant 7 points
The Comedians by Graham Greene 7 points
The Evening of the Holiday by Shirley Hazzard 7 points
Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen 7 points
The Thin Red Line by James Jones 7 points
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey 7 points
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré 7 points
Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry 7 points
The Heart is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers 7 points
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller 7 points
The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu 7 points
Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited by Vladimir Nabokov 7 points
McTeague by Frank Norris 7 points
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien 7 points
Metamorphoses by Ovid 7 points
The Messiah of Stockholm by Cynthia Ozick 7 points
Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais 7 points
The Burning Plain, and Other Stories by Juan Rulfo 7 points
The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald 7 points
The Lorax by Dr. Seuss 7 points
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith 7 points
Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson 7 points
The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien 7 points
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole 7 points
Phineas Finn by Anthony Trollope 7 points
The Color Purple by Alice Walker 7 points
Charlotte's Web by E. B. White 7 points
The Golden Days by Cao Xueqin 7 points
Disturbing the Peace by Richard Yates 7 points
The Regeneration Trilogy by Pat Barker 6 points
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett 6 points
Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard 6 points
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles 6 points
Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown 6 points
Raymond Carver: Collected Stories (Library of America) by Raymond Carver 6 points
The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Cary 6 points
Troilus and Criseyde by Geoffrey Chaucer 6 points
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge 6 points
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky 6 points
A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley 6 points
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