A Century of Best Adult Fiction Books

A Century of Best Adult Fiction Books
1900-1909
Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad (1900)
Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser (1900)
Kim, Rudyard Kipling (1901)
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad (1902)
The Wings of the Dove, Henry James (1902)
The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler (1903)
The Ambassadors, Henry James (1903)
The Golden Bowl, Henry James (1904)
Nostromo, Joseph Conrad (1904)
The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton (1905)
The Jungle, Upton Sinclair (1906)
A Room with a View, E. M. Forster (1908)
1910-1919
Howards End, E.M. Forester (1910)
Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton (1911)
Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence (1913)
The Rainbow, D. H. Lawrence (1915)
Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham (1915)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce (1916)
Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson (1919)
1920-1929
A Century of Best Adult Fiction Books - 1
Prepared by Monterey County Free Libraries
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton (1920)
Main Street, Sinclair Lewis (1920)
This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1920)
Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence (1921)
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton (1921)
Alice Adams, Booth Tarkington (1922)
Ulysses, James Joyce (1922)
The Lost Lady, Willa Cather (1923)
A Passage to India, E. M. Forster (1924)
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser (1925)
Arrowsmith, Sinclair Lewis (1926)
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway (1926)
The Louis Broomfield Trilogy: The Greenbay Tree Possession, Louis Bromfield (1927)
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf (1927)
The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder (1927)
Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather (1927)
Elmer Gantry, Sinclair Lewis (1927)
The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder (1928)
Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett (1929)
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner (1929)
A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway (1929)
1930-1939
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner (1930)
A Century of Best Adult Fiction Books - 2
Prepared by Monterey County Free Libraries
The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett (1930)
Laughing Boy, Oliver Lafarge (1930)
The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett (1932)
The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck (1932)
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley (1932)
Light in August, William Faulkner (1932)
Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy, James T. Farrell (1932)
Sons, Pearl S. Buck (1932)
The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian (or any other Conan books), Robert E. Howard (1932-33)
Tobacco Road, Erskine Caldwell (1933)
I, Claudius, Robert Graves (1934)
Appointment in Samarra, John O'Hara (1934)
Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1934)
Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller (1934)
A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh (1934)
The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain (1934)
Now in November, Josephine Winslow Johnson (1935)
Honey in the Horn, Harold L. Davis (1936)
Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell (1936)
The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen (1938)
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck (1939)
Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo (1939)
The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West (1939)
The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (1939)
A Century of Best Adult Fiction Books - 3
Prepared by Monterey County Free Libraries
Finnegan’s Wake, James Joyce (1939)
1940-1949
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers (1940)
Native Son, Richard Wright (1940)
Farewell, My Lovely, Raymond Chandler (1940)
The High Window, Raymond Chandler (1942)
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith (1943)
The Lady in the Lake, Raymond Chandler (1943)
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh (1945)
A Bell for Adano, John Hersey (1945)
Loving, Henry Green (1945)
Animal Farm, George Orwell (1946)
All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren (1946)
The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene (1948)
The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer (1948)
The Pearl, John Steinbeck (1948)
Raintree County, Ross Lockridge Jr. (1948)
Tales of the South Pacific, James A. Michener (1948)
Guard of Honor, James Gould Cozzens (1949)
Earth Abides, George R. Stewart (1949)
The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles (1949)
1984, George Orwell (1949)
1950-1959
Parade's End, Ford Madox Ford (1950)
A Century of Best Adult Fiction Books - 4
Prepared by Monterey County Free Libraries
From Here to Eternity, James Jones (1951)
The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger (1951)
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison (1952)
The Killer Inside Me, Jim Thompson (1952)
The Caine Mutiny, Herman Wouk (1952)
The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway (1953)
The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow (1953)
Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin (1953)
The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler (1954)
Katherine, Philippa Gregory (1954)
The Myth of Sisyphus, and Other Essays, Albert Camus (1955)
A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories, Flannery O’Connor (1955)
A Fable, William Faulkner (1955)
Andersonville, MacKinlay Kantor (1956)
On the Road, Jack Kerouac (1957)
The Wapshot Chronicles, John Cheever (1957)
A Death in the Family, James Agee (1957)
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov (1958)
A Death in the Family, James Agee (1958)
The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, Robert Lewis Taylor (1959)
Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow (1959)
Celia Garth, Gwen Bristow (1959)
1960-1969
Advise and Consent, Allen Drury (1960)
A Century of Best Adult Fiction Books - 5
Prepared by Monterey County Free Libraries
The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell (1960—series completed)
A House for Mr. Biswas, V.S. Naipaul (1961)
Catch-22, Joseph Heller (1961)
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark (1961)
The Moviegoer, Walker Percy (1961)
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee (1961)
Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov (1962)
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess (1962)
Big Sur, Jack Kerouac (1962)
The Reivers, William Faulkner (1963)
Mountain Man: A Novel of Male and Female in the Early American West, Vardis Fisher (1965)
Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes (1966)
The Magus, John Fowles (1966)
Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys (1966)
The Fixer, Bernard Malamud (1967)
The Confessions of Nat Turner, William Styron (1968)
House Made of Dawn, N. Scott Momaday (1969)
Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth (1969)
1970-1979
Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion (1970)
Collected Stories, Jean Stafford (1970)
Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner (1971)
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Ernest J. Gaines (1971)
A Century of Best Adult Fiction Books - 6
Prepared by Monterey County Free Libraries
Watership Down, Richard Adams (1972)
A Dance to the Music of Time (series), Anthony Powell (1975-series completed)
Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow (1975)
The Killer Angels, Michael Shaara (1975)
Humboldt’s Gift, Saul Bellow (1976)
The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)
Sophie’s Choice, William Styron (1979)
A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul (1979)
1980-1989
Birdy, William Wharton (1980)
The Ghost Writer, Philip Roth (1980)
The Executioner’s Song, Norman Mailer (1980)
Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie (1981)
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole (1981)
Rabbit Is Rich, John Updike (1982)
Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson (1982)
The Color Purple, Alice Walker (1983)
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Anne Tyler (1983)
Ironweed, William Kennedy (1983)
Cold Sassy Tree, Olive Ann Burns (1984)
The Moonflower Vine, Jetta Carleton (1984)
Foreign Affairs, Alison Lurie (1985)
Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry (1986)
The Accidental Tourist, Anne Tyler (1986)
A Century of Best Adult Fiction Books - 7
Prepared by Monterey County Free Libraries
Continental Drift, Russell Banks (1986)
A Summons to Memphis, Peter Taylor (1987)
Beloved, Toni Morrison (1988)
That Night, Alice McDermott (1988)
Persian Nights, Diane Johnson (1988)
Fair and Tender Ladies, Lee Smith (1988)
Where I’m Calling From, Raymond Carver (1989)
Breathing Lessons, Anne Tyler (1989)
1990-1999
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos (1990)
Billy Bathgate, E. L. Doctorow (1990)
Rabbit at Rest, John Updike (1991)
The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien (1991)
Lila: An Inquiry into Morals, Robert M. Pirsig (1992)
A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley (1992)
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Robert Olen Butler (1993)
Black Water, Joyce Carol Oates (1993)
At Weddings and Wakes, Alice McDermott (1993)
Operation Shylock: A Confession, Philip Roth (1994)
The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx (1994)
The Collected Stories, Grace Paley (1995)
What I Live For, Joyce Carol Oates (1995)
The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields (1995)
Independence Day, Richard Ford (1996)
A Century of Best Adult Fiction Books - 8
Prepared by Monterey County Free Libraries
Mr. Ives’ Christmas, Oscar Hijuelos (1996)
Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, Steven Milhauser (1997)
American Pastoral, Philip Roth (1998)
Underworld, Don DeLillo (1998)
The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver (1999)
The Hours, Michael Cunningham (1999)
Cloudsplitter, Russell Banks (1999)
2000-Present
Waiting, Ha Jin (2000)
Close Range: Wyoming Stories, Annie Proulx (2000)
Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri (2000)
The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen (2001)
John Henry Days, Colson Whitehead (2001)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon (2001)
Empire Falls, Richard Russo (2002)
Sunshine, Robin McKinley (2003)
The Fortress of Solitude, Jonathan Lethem (2003)
Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides (2003)
Snow, Orhan Pamuk (2004)
Case Histories, Kate Atkinson (2004)
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susanne Clarke (2004)
The Known World, Edward P. Jones (2004)
Magic for Beginners, Kelly Link (2005)
Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)
A Century of Best Adult Fiction Books - 9
Prepared by Monterey County Free Libraries
On Beauty, Zadie Smith (2005)
Veronica: A Novel, Mary Gaitskill (2005)
Gilead, Marilynne Robinson (2005)
March, Geraldine Brooks (2006)
The Road, Cormac McCarthy (2006)
Darkfever: The Fever, Karen Marie Moning (2006)
Persons of Interest, Theresa Schwegel (2007)
Say You’re One of Them, Uwem Akpan (2008)
The Art of Racing in the Rain, Garth Stein (2008)
Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout (2009)
Tinkers, Paul Harding (2010)
A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan (2011)
A Century of Best Adult Fiction Books - 10
Prepared by Monterey County Free Libraries

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