Library Journal’s Most Influential Fiction of the 20th Century
December 28th, 2008 Tagged Challenges
| 1 | Harper Lee | To Kill a Mockingbird 1960 |
| 2 | J.D. Salinger | The Catcher in the Rye 1945 |
| 3 | J.R.R. Tolkien | Lord of the Rings 1956 |
| 4 | Margaret Mitchell | Gone with the Wind 1936 |
| 5 | Toni Morrison | Beloved 1987 |
| 6 | Alice Walker | The Color Purple 1982 |
| 7 | George Orwell | Nineteen Eighty Four 1949 |
| 8 | George Orwell | Animal Farm 1954 |
| 9 | William Golding | Lord of the Flies 1954 |
| 10 | Joseph Heller | Catch-22 1961 |
| 11 | Pearl Buck | The Good Earth 1931 |
| 12 | E.B. White | Charlotte’s Web 1952 |
| 13 | F. Scott Fitzgerald | The Great Gatsby 1925 |
| 14 | Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. | Slaughterhouse-Five 1969 |
| 15 | Gabriel Garcia Marquez | One Hundred Years of Solitude 1970 |
| 16 | Larry McMurty | Lonesome Dove 1986 |
| 17 | Vladimir Nabokov | Lolita 1955 |
| 18 | Ray Bradbury | Fahrenheit 451 1952 |
| 19 | Daphne Du Maurier | Rebecca 1938 |
| 20 | John Steinbeck | The Grapes of Wrath 1939 |
| 21 | Betty Smith | A Tree Grows in Brooklyn 1947 |
| 22 | J.R.R. Tolkien | The Hobbit 1937 |
| 23 | Ken Kesey | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest 1962 |
| 24 | Muriel Spark | The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie 1962 |
| 25 | Willa Cather | My Antonia 1918 |
| 26 | Ernest Hemingway | The Old Man and the Sea 1952 |
| 27 | D.H. Lawrence | Lady Chatterley’s Lover 1928 |
| 28 | Ralph Ellison | Invisible Man 1952 |
| 29 | Leon Uris | Exodus 1957 |
| 30 | William Styron | Sophie’s Choice 1979 |
| 31 | Richard Wright | Native Son 1940 |
| 32 | Laura Ingalls Wilder | Little House on the Prairie 1935 |
| 33 | Ernest Hemingway | A Farewell to Arms 1929 |
| 34 | A.A. Milne | Winnie the Pooh 1926 |
| 35 | Upton Sinclair | The Jungle 1906 |
| 36 | Margaret Atwood | The Handmaid’s Tale 1986 |
| 37 | Edith Wharton | The Age of Innocence 1920 |
| 38 | John Updike | Rabbit Run 1960 |
| 39 | Jack Kerouac | On the Road 1957 |
| 40 | Robert A. Heinlein | Stranger in a Strange Land1961 |
| 41 | Aldous Huxley | Brave New World 1932 |
| 42 | Wallace Stegner | Angle of Repose 1971 |
| 43 | Erich Maria Remarque | All Quiet on the Western Front 1929 |
| 44 | James Joyce | Ulysses 1922 |
| 45 | Ernest Hemingway | The Sun Also Rises 1926 |
| 46 | Albert Camus | The Stranger 1942 |
| 47 | William Faulkner | The Sound and the Fury 1929 |
| 48 | A,S, Byatt | Possession 1990 |
| 49 | Carol Shields | The Stone Diaries 1994 |
| 50 | Toni Morrison | Song of Solomon 1977 |
| 51 | Amy Tan | The Joy Luck Club 1989 |
| 52 | Alex Haley | Roots 1976 |
| 53 | James Joyce | A Portait of the Artist as a Young Man 1916 |
| 54 | Thomas Wolfe | Look Homeward Angel 1929 |
| 55 | Katherine Anne Porter | Pale Horse, Pale Rider 1939 |
| 56 | Edith Wharton | Ethan Frome 1911 |
| 57 | Marguerite Duras | The Lover 1972 |
| 58 | Anthony Burgess | A Clockwork Orange 1962 |
| 59 | Sherwood Anderson | Winesburg, Ohio 1919 |
| 60 | Virginia Woolf | To the Lighthouse 1927 |
| 61 | John Irving | The World According to Garp 1978 |
| 62 | L. Frank Baum | The Wonderful Wizard of Oz 1900 |
| 63 | C.S. Lewis | The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe 1950 |
| 64 | A. Conan Doyle | The Hound of the Baskervilles 1902 |
| 65 | Ayn Rand | The Fountainhead 1943 |
| 66 | Nadine Gordimer | The Burger’s Daughter 1979 |
| 67 | Jack London | The Call of the Wild 1903 |
| 68 | Alexander Solzhenitsyn | One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich 1963 |
| 69 | Marlon Zimmer Bradley | The Mists of Avalon 1983 |
| 70 | Robert Graves | I, Claudius 1934 |
| 71 | James Jones | From Here to Eternity 1951 |
| 72 | John Steinbeck | East of Eden 1952 |
| 73 | Alan Paton | Cry, the Beloved Country 1948 |
| 74 | Allen Drury | Advise and Consent 1959 |
| 75 | E.M. Forster | A Passage to India 1924 |
| 76 | Arthur C. Clarke | 2001: A Space Odyssey 1968 |
| 77 | Ford Maddox Ford | The Good Soldier 1927 |
| 78 | Zora Neale Hurston | Their Eyes Were Watching God 1937 |
| 79 | Kenneth Graham | The Wind in the Willows 1908 |
| 80 | Philip Roth | Portnoy’s Complaint 1969 |
| 81 | Albert camus | The Plague 1947 |
| 82 | Antine de Exupery | The Little Prince 1943 |
| 83 | Toni Morrison | The Bluest Eye 1969 |
| 84 | Barbara Kingsolver | The Bean Trees 1988 |
| 85 | Edgar Rice Burroughs | Tarzan of the Apes 1914 |
| 86 | Theodore Dreiser | Sister Carrie 1900 |
| 87 | Flannery O’Connor | A Good Man is Hard to Find 1955 |
| 88 | Marcel Proust | Remembrance of Things Past 1960 |
| 89 | E.L. Doctorow | Ragtime 1975 |
| 90 | Judith Guest | Ordinary People 1976 |
| 91 | W. Somerset Maugham | Of Human Bondage 1915 |
| 92 | Joseph Conrad | Heart of Darkness 1902 |
| 93 | Sinclair Lewis | Babbit 1922 |
| 94 | Robert Penn Warren | All the King’s Men 1946 |
| 95 | D.H. Lawrence | Women in Love 1920 |
| 96 | Samuel Beckett | Waiting for Godot 1953 |
| 97 | John Dos Passos | USA 1919, 1936, 1938 |
| 98 | Milan Kundera | The Unbearable Lightness of Being 1984 |
| 99 | James Agee | A Death in the Family 1957 |
| 100 | T.H. White | The Once and Future King 1953 |
| 101 | Dashiell Hammett | The Maltese Falcon 1930 |
| 102 | Henry James | The Golden Bowl 1904 |
| 103 | Doris Lessing | The Golden Notebook 1962 |
| 104 | John Galsworthy | The Forsyth Saga 1922 |
| 105 | Raymond Chandler | The Big Sleep 1939 |
| 106 | Sylvia Plath | The Bell Jar 1963 |
| 107 | Henry James | The Ambassadors 1903 |
| 108 | Isabel Allende | The House of the Spirits 1985 |
| 109 | John Steinbeck | Of Mice and Men 1937 |
| 110 | Norman Mailer | The Naked and the Dead 1948 |
| 111 | Thomas Mann | The Magic Mountain 1924 |
| 112 | Dalton Trumbo | Johnny Got His Gun 1959 |
| 113 | William Kennedy | Ironweed 1983 |
| 114 | Ernest Hemingway | A Farewell to Arms 1929 |
| 115 | Frank Herbert | Dune 1965 |
| 116 | Boris Pasternak | Doctor Zhivago 1958 |
| 117 | Willa Cather | Death Comes to the Archbishop 1927 |
| 118 | Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. | Cat’s Cradle 1963 |
| 119 | Evelyn Waugh | Brideshead Revisited 1945 |
| 120 | Anne Tyler | Breathing Lessons 1988 |
| 121 | Judy Blume | Are You There God, It’s me, Margaret 1970 |
| 122 | Anne Tyler | The Accidental Tourist 1985 |
| 123 | Jane Smiley | A Thousand Acres 1991 |
| 124 | E.M. Forster | A Room with a View 1908 |
| 125 | Flannery O’Connor | Wise Blood 1952 |
| 126 | Gunter Grass | The Tin Drum 1959 |
| 127 | Jean Rhys | Wide Sargasso Sea 1966 |
| 128 | Don De Lillo | White Noise 1985 |
| 129 | Maurice Sendak | Where the Wild Things Are 1963 |
| 130 | John Cheever | The Wapshot Chronicle 1979 |
| 131 | Malcolm Lowry | Under the Volcano 1947 |
| 132 | Henry Miller | Tropic of Cancer 1934 |
| 133 | Chinua Achebe | Things Fall Apart 1959 |
| 134 | Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings | The Yearling 1948 |
| 135 | Herman Wouk | The Winds of War 1971 |
| 136 | Walker Percy | The Moviegower 1961 |
| 137 | Somerset Maugham | The Razor’s Edge 1944 |
| 138 | Albert Camus | The Rebel 1954 |
| 139 | John Steinbeck | The Pearl 1947 |
| 140 | Colin Wilson | The Outsider 1956 (Not a work of fiction.) |
| 141 | Henry Roth | Call It Sleep 1934 |
| 142 | Carson McCullers | The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter 1940 |
| 143 | Mario Puzo | The Godfather 1969 |
| 144 | Eudora Welty | A Curtain of Green 1941 |
| 145 | Graham Greene | The End of the Affair 1951 |
| 146 | James McBride | The Color of Water 1996 |
| 147 | Herman Wouk | The Caine Mutiny 1951 |
| 148 | Thornton Wilder | The Bridge of San Luis Rey 1927 |
| 149 | Irving Stone | The Agony and the Ecstacy 1961 |
| 150 | James T. Farrell | Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy 1935 |
Leave a Reply