Time Journal’s Prime 100 All-Time Novels (1923-2005)
In 2005, Time® journal’s literary critics, Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo chosen what they thought of to be the highest 100 English-language novels printed from 1923 to 2005 (1923 being the yr Time® started publishing). As traditional, with any “prime 100” listing, these have been their subjective decisions, and clearly don’t mirror the views of every other reader. Nonetheless, their listing inarguably consists of quite a few works of influential English-languge literature. To see their authentic on-line listing, together with detailed plot descriptions, go to Time’s Critics Decide the 100 Greatest Novels on the Time® web site.
[Note: At the time this list was assembled, the Lincoln City Libraries owned 99 of these 100 titles — listed in alphabetical order below. Click on the titles or book covers to connect directly to our catalog and check on the availability of each of these books.]
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow 1953
All of the King’s Males by Robert Penn Warren 1946
American Pastoral by Philip Roth 1997
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser 1925
Animal Farm by George Orwell 1946
Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara 1934
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume 1970
The Assistant by Bernard Malamud 1957
At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien 1938
Atonement by Ian McEwan 2002
Beloved by Toni Morrison 1987
The Berlin Tales by Christopher Isherwood 1946
The Huge Sleep by Raymond Chandler 1939
The Blind Murderer by Margaret Atwood 2000
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy 1986
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh 1946
The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder 1927
Name It Sleep by Henry Roth 1935
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller 1961
The Catcher within the Rye by J.D. Salinger 1951
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess 1963
The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron 1967
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen 2001
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon 1966
A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell 1951
The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West 1939
Loss of life Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather 1927
A Loss of life within the Household by James Agee 1958
The Loss of life of the Coronary heart by Elizabeth Bowen 1938
Deliverance by James Dickey 1970
Canine Troopers by Robert Stone 1974
Falconer by John Cheever 1977
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The French Lieutenant’s Girl by John Fowles 1969
The Golden Pocket book by Doris Lessing 1962
Go Inform It on the Mountain by James Baldwin 1953
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell 1936
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck 1939
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon 1973
The Nice Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925
A Handful of Mud by Evelyn Waugh 1934
The Coronary heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers 1940
The Coronary heart of the Matter by Graham Greene 1948
Herzog by Saul Bellow 1964
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson 1981
A Home for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul 1962
I, Claudius by Robert Graves 1934
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace 1996
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison 1952
Gentle in August by William Faulkner 1932
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis 1950
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov 1955
Lord of the Flies by William Golding 1955
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien 1954
Loving by Henry Inexperienced 1945
Fortunate Jim by Kingsley Amis 1954
The Man Who Beloved Youngsters by Christina Stead 1940
Midnight’s Youngsters by Salman Rushdie 1981
Cash: A Suicide Word by Martin Amis 1984
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy 1961
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf 1925
Bare Lunch by William Burroughs 1959
Native Son by Richard Wright 1940
Neuromancer by William Gibson 1984
By no means Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro 2005
1984 by George Orwell 1948
On the Highway by Jack Kerouac 1957
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One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey 1962
The Painted Chicken by Jerzy Kosinski 1965
Pale Fireplace by Vladimir Nabokov 1962
A Passage to India by E.M. Forster 1924
Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion 1970
Portnoy’s Criticism by Philip Roth 1969
Possession by A.S. Byatt 1990
The Energy and the Glory by Graham Greene 1939
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark 1961
Rabbit, Run by John Updike 1960
Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow 1975
The Recognitions by William Gaddis 1955
Pink Harvest by Dashiell Hammett 1929
Revolutionary Highway by Richard Yates 1961
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles 1949
Slaughterhouse-5 by Kurt Vonnegut 1969
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson 1992
The Sot-Weed Issue by John Barth 1960
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner 1929
The Sportswriter by Richard Ford 1986
The Spy Who Got here In From the Chilly by John le Carre 1964
The Solar Additionally Rises by Ernest Hemingway 1926
Their Eyes Had been Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston 1937
Issues Fall Aside by Chinua Achebe 1959
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee 1960
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf 1927
Tropic of Most cancers by Henry Miller 1934
Ubik by Philip Ok. Dick 1969
Underneath the Web by Iris Murdoch 1954
Underneath the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry 1947
Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons 1986
White Noise by Don DeLillo 1985
White Enamel by Zadie Smith 2000
Broad Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys 1966
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