1 - Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
2 - A Death in the Family, James Agee
3 - Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis
4 - Money, Martin Amis
5 - The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood
6 - Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin
7 - The Sot-Weed Factor,John Barth.
8 - The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
9 - Herzog, Saul Bellow
10 - The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles
11 - The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen
12 - Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret Judy Blume
13 - A Clockwork
14 - Naked Lunch, William Burroughs
15 - Possession, A
16 - Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather
17 - The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
18 - Falconer, John Cheever
19 - White Noise, Don DeLillo
20 - Ubik, Philip K Dick
21 - Deliverance, James Dickey
22 - Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion
23 - Ragtime, E L Doctorow
24 - An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
25 - Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
26 - Light in August, William Faulkner
27 - The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
28 - The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
29 - The Sportswriter, Richard Ford
30 - A Passage to
31 - The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles
32 - The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
33 - The Recognitions, William Gaddis
34 - Neuromancer, William Gibson
35 - Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
36 - I, Claudius, Robert Graves
37 - Loving, Henry Green
38 - The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene
39 - The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene
40 - Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett
41 - Catch-22, Joseph Heller
42 - The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
43 - Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
44 - The
45 - Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
46 - On The Road, Jack Kerouac
47 - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
48 - The Painted Bird, Jerzy Kosinski
49 - The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, John le Carre
50 - To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
51 - The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
52 - The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, C S Lewis
53 - Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry
54 - The Assistant, Bernard Malamud
55 - Blood
56 - The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
57 - Atonement, Ian McEwan
58 - Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
59 - Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
60 - Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
61 - Beloved, Toni Morrison
62 - Under the Net, Iris Murdoch
63 - Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
64 - Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
65 - A House for Mr Biswas, V S Naipaul
66 - At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O'Brien
67 - Appointment in
68 - Animal Farm, George Orwell
69 - 1984, George Orwell
70 - The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
71 - A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell
72 - Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
73 - The Crying of
74 - Wide
75 - Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson
76 - Call It Sleep, Henry Roth
77 - American Pastoral, Philip Roth
78 - Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth
79 - Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
80 - The Catcher In The
81 - White Teeth, Zadie Smith
82 - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
83 - The Man Who Loved Children, Christina Stead
84 - The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
85 - Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
86 - Dog Soldiers, Robert Stone
87 - The Confessions of Nat Turner, William Styron
88 - The Lord of the Rings, J R R Tolkien
89 - Rabbit, Run, John Updike
90 - Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
91 - Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
92 - All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren
93 - Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
94 - A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
95 - The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West
96 - The
97 - Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf.
98 - To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
99 - Native Son, Richard Wright
Edit - found the link. They're in alphabetical order of title here.
3 comments:
Granted that it's in alphabetical rather than ranking order, that's still a bizarre list. Almost two thirds of the entries are American (heading towards seventy of the hundred if you include repatriated writers like Nabokov and Christina Stead).
And for even such a conservative list, it seems odd that formerly feted non-American writers like Grass, Marquez, Calvino etc. are nowhere to be found.
Bizarre, isn't it? My sister didn't give a source, but I guess they have to all be in English originally.
Adding children's books - but only two - makes it even weirder, I think. I mean, Are you there God, it's me Margaret? Seriously?
Ah, it didn't occur to me that they were all originally English-language books. That explains the absence of, say, Beckett.
But it still doesn't explain the poverty of the list. A single Irish writer? A single Canadian? (And even then it's Margaret Atwood, and even then it's The Blind Assassin.) No Australians (barring Christina Stead, who was born there, but didn't write anything while an Australian citizen). Only two novels from Africa, and only one from India.
Taking. The. Piss.
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