The Radcliffe Publishing Course's 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century (1998)
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| Rank | Title | Author | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald | 1925 |
| 2 | The Catcher in the Rye | J.D. Salinger | 1951 |
| 3 | The Grapes of Wrath | John Steinbeck | 1939 |
| 4 | To Kill a Mockingbird | Harper Lee | 1960 |
| 5 | The Color Purple | Alice Walker | 1982 |
| 6 | Ulysses | James Joyce | 1922 |
| 7 | Beloved | Toni Morrison | 1987 |
| 8 | Lord of the Flies | William Golding | 1954 |
| 9 | Nineteen Eighty-Four | George Orwell | 1949 |
| 10 | The Sound and the Fury | William Faulkner | 1929 |
| 11 | Lolita | Vladimir Nabokov | 1955 |
| 12 | Of Mice and Men | John Steinbeck | 1937 |
| 13 | Charlotte's Web | E.B. White | 1952 |
| 14 | A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man | James Joyce | 1916 |
| 15 | Catch-22 | Joseph Heller | 1961 |
| 16 | Brave New World | Aldous Huxley | 1932 |
| 17 | Animal Farm | George Orwell | 1945 |
| 18 | The Sun Also Rises | Ernest Hemingway | 1926 |
| 19 | As I Lay Dying | William Faulkner | 1930 |
| 20 | A Farewell to Arms | Ernest Hemingway | 1929 |
| 21 | Heart of Darkness | Joseph Conrad | 1899 |
| 22 | Winnie-the-Pooh | A.A. Milne | 1926 |
| 23 | Their Eyes Were Watching God | Zora Neale Hurston | 1937 |
| 24 | Invisible Man | Ralph Ellison | 1952 |
| 25 | Song of Solomon | Toni Morrison | 1978 |
| 26 | Gone with the Wind | Margaret Mitchell | 1936 |
| 27 | Native Son | Richard Wright | 1940 |
| 28 | One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest | Ken Kesey | 1962 |
| 29 | Slaughterhouse-Five | Kurt Vonnegut | 1969 |
| 30 | For Whom the Bell Tolls | Ernest Hemingway | 1940 |
| 31 | On the Road | Jack Kerouac | 1957 |
| 32 | The Old Man and the Sea | Ernest Hemingway | 1952 |
| 33 | The Call of the Wild | Jack London | 1903 |
| 34 | To the Lighthouse | Virginia Woolf | 1927 |
| 35 | The Portrait of a Lady | Henry James | 1881 |
| 36 | Go Tell It on the Mountain | James Baldwin | 1953 |
| 37 | The World According to Garp | John Irving | 1978 |
| 38 | All the King's Men | Robert Penn Warren | 1946 |
| 39 | A Room with a View | E.M. Forster | 1908 |
| 40 | The Lord of the Rings | J.R.R. Tolkien | 1955 |
| 41 | Schindler's Ark | Thomas Keneally | 1982 |
| 42 | The Age of Innocence | Edith Wharton | 1920 |
| 43 | The Fountainhead | Ayn Rand | 1943 |
| 44 | Finnegans Wake | James Joyce | 1939 |
| 45 | The Jungle | Upton Sinclair | 1906 |
| 46 | Mrs. Dalloway | Virginia Woolf | 1925 |
| 47 | The Wonderful Wizard of Oz | L. Frank Baum | 1900 |
| 48 | Lady Chatterley's Lover | D. H. Lawrence | 1928 |
| 49 | A Clockwork Orange | Anthony Burgess | 1962 |
| 50 | The Awakening | Kate Chopin | 1899 |
| 51 | My Antonia | Willa Cather | 1918 |
| 52 | Howards End | E.M. Forster | 1910 |
| 53 | In Cold Blood | Truman Capote | 1966 |
| 54 | Franny and Zooey | J. D. Salinger | 1961 |
| 55 | The Satanic Verses | Salman Rushdie | 1988 |
| 56 | Jazz | Toni Morrison | 1992 |
| 57 | Sophie's Choice | William Styron | 1979 |
| 58 | Absalom, Absalom! | William Faulkner | 1936 |
| 59 | A Passage to India | E.M. Forster | 1924 |
| 60 | Ethan Frome | Edith Wharton | 1911 |
| 61 | A Good Man is Hard to Find | Flannery O'Connor | 1955 |
| 62 | Tender Is the Night | F. Scott Fitzgerald | 1934 |
| 63 | Orlando: A Biography | Virginia Woolf | 1928 |
| 64 | Sons and Lovers | D. H. Lawrence | 1913 |
| 65 | The Bonfire of the Vanities | Tom Wolfe | 1987 |
| 66 | Cat's Cradle | Kurt Vonnegut | 1963 |
| 67 | A Separate Peace | John Knowles | 1959 |
| 68 | Light in August | William Faulkner | 1932 |
| 69 | The Wings of the Dove | Henry James | 1902 |
| 70 | Things Fall Apart | Chinua Achebe | 1959 |
| 71 | Rebecca | Daphne du Maurier | 1938 |
| 72 | The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy | Douglas Adams | 1979 |
| 73 | Naked Lunch | William S. Burroughs | 1959 |
| 74 | Brideshead Revisited | Evelyn Waugh | 1945 |
| 75 | Women in Love | D. H. Lawrence | 1920 |
| 76 | Look Homeward, Angel | Thomas Wolfe | 1929 |
| 77 | In Our Time | Ernest Hemingway | 1925 |
| 78 | The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas | Gertrude Stein | 1933 |
| 79 | The Maltese Falcon | Dashiell Hammett | 1930 |
| 80 | The Naked and the Dead | Norman Mailer | 1948 |
| 81 | Wide Sargasso Sea | Jean Rhys | 1966 |
| 82 | White Noise | Don DeLillo | 1985 |
| 83 | O Pioneers! | Willa Cather | 1913 |
| 84 | Tropic of Cancer | Henry Miller | 1934 |
| 85 | The War of the Worlds | H. G. Wells | 1898 |
| 86 | Lord Jim | Joseph Conrad | 1900 |
| 87 | The Bostonians | Henry James | 1886 |
| 88 | An American Tragedy | Theodore Dreiser | 1925 |
| 89 | Death Comes for the Archbishop | Willa Cather | 1927 |
| 90 | The Wind in the Willows | Kenneth Grahame | 1908 |
| 91 | This Side of Paradise | F. Scott Fitzgerald | 1920 |
| 92 | Atlas Shrugged | Ayn Rand | 1957 |
| 93 | The French Lieutenant's Woman | John Fowles | 1969 |
| 94 | Babbitt | Sinclair Lewis | 1922 |
| 95 | Kim | Rudyard Kipling | 1901 |
| 96 | The Beautiful and Damned | F. Scott Fitzgerald | 1922 |
| 97 | Rabbit, Run | John Updike | 1960 |
| 98 | Where Angels Fear to Tread | E. M. Forster | 1905 |
| 99 | Main Street | Sinclair Lewis | 1920 |
| 100 | Midnight's Children | Salman Rushdie | 1981 |