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20th Century's Greatest Hits: 100 EnglishLanguage Books of Fiction

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The 20th Centurys Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction is a popular "best of" list compiled by Larry McCaffery largely in response to Modern Library 100 Best Novels list (1999), which McCaffery saw as being out of touch with 20th-century fiction. McCaffery writes that he sees his list "as a means of sharing with readers my own views about what books are going to be read 100 or 1000 years from now".[1] His list includes many books not included in the Modern Library (http://www.modernlibrary.com /top-100/100-best-novels/) list, including five of his top ten, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Robert Coover's The Public Burning, Samuel Becketts Trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable), Gertrude Steins The Making of Americans, and William S. Burrough's The Nova Trilogy. Topping the list is Vladimir Nabokov's 1962 novel Pale Fire, which McCaffery calls "The most audaciously conceived novel of the century". Not counting the tetralogies of Rikki Ducornet (#35) and Gene Wolfe (#78), the most cited author is James Joyce, whose four works, Ulysses (#2), Finnegans Wake (#10), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (#21), and Dubliners (#63) all made the list. Robert Coover and William H. Gass each have three works on the list.[2]

Contents
1 The List 2 See also 3 References 4 External links

The List

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20th Century's Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction - ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_Century's_Greatest_Hits:_100_Engli...

# 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Year 1962 1922 1973 1977 1929 1953/56/57 1925 1962/64/67 1955 1941 1975 1986 1994 1949 1927 1968 1975 1952 1997 1926 1916 1925 1903 1921 1981 1993 1955 1902 1961 1949 1937 Pale Fire Ulysses Gravitys Rainbow The Public Burning The Sound and the Fury

Title

Author Vladimir Nabokov James Joyce Thomas Pynchon Robert Coover William Faulkner Samuel Beckett Gertrude Stein William S. Burroughs Vladimir Nabokov James Joyce Raymond Federman Toni Morrison Stephen Wright Malcolm Lowry Virginia Woolf William H. Gass William Gaddis Ralph Ellison Don DeLillo Ernest Hemingway James Joyce F. Scott Fitzgerald Henry James D.H. Lawrence Donald Barthelme William T. Vollmann William Gaddis Joseph Conrad Joseph Heller George Orwell Zora Neale Hurston

Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable The Making of Americans The Nova Trilogy: The Soft Machine, Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded Lolita Finnegans Wake Take It or Leave It Beloved Going Native Under the Volcano To the Lighthouse In the Heart of the Heart of the Country JR Invisible Man Underworld The Sun Also Rises A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man The Great Gatsby The Ambassadors Women in Love 60 Stories The Rifles The Recognitions Heart of Darkness Catch-22 Nineteen Eighty-Four Their Eyes Were Watching God

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# 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

Year 1936 1975 1939 1984/86 /92/93 1984/86/88 1934 1957 1974 1973 1981 1960 1965 1932 1924 1972 1951 1965 1949 1940 1939 1937 1980 1969 1986 1952 1985 1930/32/36 1962 1951 1929 1981 Absalom, Absalom! Dhalgren The Grapes of Wrath

Title

Author William Faulkner Samuel R. Delany John Steinbeck Rikki Ducornet William Gibson Henry Miller Jack Kerouac Joseph McElroy J.G. Ballard Salman Rushdie John Barth Paul Metcalf Aldous Huxley E.M. Forster Raymond Federman Flann O'Brien Cormac McCarthy John Hawkes Richard Wright Nathaniel West Djuna Barnes Marilynne Robinson Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Don DeLillo Flannery O'Connor Ursula K. Le Guin John Dos Passos Doris Lessing J.D. Salinger Dashiell Hammett Raymond Carver

The Four Elements Tetralogy: The Stain, Entering Fire, The Fountains of Neptune, The Jade Cabinet Cyberspace Trilogy: Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive Tropic of Cancer On The Road Lookout Cartridge Crash Midnight's Children The Sot-Weed Factor Genoa Brave New World A Passage to India Double or Nothing At Swim-Two-Birds Blood Meridian The Cannibal Native Son The Day of the Locust Nightwood Housekeeping Slaughterhouse Five Libra Wise Blood Always Coming Home U.S.A. Trilogy: The 42nd Parallel, 1919, The Big Money The Golden Notebook The Catcher in the Rye Red Harvest What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

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# 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94

Year 1915 1925 1905 1982 1955/58/62 1976 1985/86/86 1986 1995 1996 1966 1969 1962 1988 1969 1980/81 /82/82 1962 1976/78/83 1995 1966 1948 1981 1968 1969 1919 1987 1948 1968 1971 1980 1951 1979 Dubliners Cane The House of Mirth Riddley Walker

Title

Author James Joyce Jean Toomer Edith Wharton Russell Hoban

Checkerboard Trilogy: Go in Beauty, The Bronc People, Portrait of William Eastlake the Artist with 26 Horses The Franchiser The New York Trilogy: City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room Skinny Legs and All Infinite Jest The Age of Wire and String Tlooth Pricksongs and Descants The Man in the High Castle American Psycho The French Lieutenant's Woman The Book of the New Sun" Tetralogy A Clockwork Orange Albany Trilogy: Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, Ironweed, The Tunnel Omensetter's Luck The Sheltering Sky Darconville's Cat Up Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down Winesburg, Ohio You Bright and Risen Angels The Naked and the Dead The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. Creamy & Delicious Waiting for the Barbarians More Than Human Mulligan Stew Stanley Elkin Paul Auster Tom Robbins David Foster Wallace Ben Marcus Harry Mathews Robert Coover Phillip K. Dick Bret Easton Ellis John Fowles Gene Wolfe Anthony Burgess William Kennedy William H. Gass William H. Gass Paul Bowles Alexander Theroux Ronald Sukenick Ishmael Reed Sherwood Anderson William T. Vollmann Norman Mailer Robert Coover Steve Katz J. M. Coetzee Theodore Sturgeon Gilbert Sorrentino

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# 95 96 97 98 99

Year 1929 1925 1981 1989 1990 Look Homeward, Angel An American Tragedy Easy Travels to Other Planets Tours of the Black Clock In Memoriam to Identity Hogg

Title

Author Thomas Wolfe Theodore Dreiser Ted Mooney Steve Erickson Kathy Acker Samuel R. Delany

100 1996

See also
Modern Library 100 Best Novels Marcel Reich-Ranicki's anthology of exemplary German literature Der Kanon

References
1. ^ Top 100 List (http://www.spinelessbooks.com/mccaffery/100/index.html) with comments at Spineless Books' Larry McCaffery archive 2. ^ http://www.litline.org/ABR/Issues/Volume20/Issue6/abr100.html

External links
List published in American Book Review (Volume 20, Issue 6) [1] (http://www.litline.org/ABR/Issues /Volume20/Issue6/abr100.html) List featured on Spineless Books website [2] (http://www.spinelessbooks.com/mccaffery /100/index.html) List on librarything.com (http://www.librarything.com/) with images of contemporary covers [3] (http://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Larry+McCaffery's+20th+Century+Greatest+Hits) Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=20th_Century%27s_Greatest_Hits:_100_EnglishLanguage_Books_of_Fiction&oldid=552265978" Categories: 20th-century novels Lists of novels Top book lists This page was last modified on 26 April 2013 at 12:48. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.

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