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Books of the Century
To commemorate the New York Public Library's Centennial in May 1995, librarians identified books that played defining roles in history and culture from 1895 to 1995 — the Library's first one hundred years. The resulting list, which first appeared in an exhibition and later in a book, includes great books and landmarks; books that influenced the course of events; books that interpreted new worlds; and books that simply delighted millions of readers. The list is international; the only restriction was "one book per author." Below are the works of literary interest featured on the list, a full account of which can be found in The New York Public Library's Books of the Century, edited by Elizabeth Diefendorf (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
1895 H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
1896 Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs
1897 Bram Stoker, Dracula
1898 Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
1900 L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
1901 Anton Chekhov, The Three Sisters
Rudyard Kipling, Kim
Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Peter Rabbit
1902 Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
1903 Helen Keller, The Story of My Life
1906 J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
1907 Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
1911 G. K. Chesterton, The Innocence of FatherBrown
1912 Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes
Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage
1913-27 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
1914 Juan Ramón Jiménez, Platero and I: An Andalusian Elegy
George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion
Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons: Objects Food Rooms
1915 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
1917 Edna St. Vincent Millay, Renascence and Other Poems
William Butler Yeats, The Wild Swans at Coole
1919 Siegfried Sassoon, The War Poems
1920 Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
1920-23 Jaroslav Hasek, The Good Soldier Schweik
1921 Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author
1922 T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
James Joyce, Ulysses
1923 Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
P. G. Wodehouse, The Inimitable Jeeves
1924 E. M. Forster, A Passage to India
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
1925 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
1926 A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
1927 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
1928 Federico García Lorca, Gypsy Ballads
Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
1931 Willa Cather, Shadows on the Rock
1932 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
1933 James Hilton, Lost Horizon
1935-40 Anna Akhmatova, Requiem
1936 Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
1937 John Dos Passos, U.S.A.
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
1939 Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust
1940 Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
Richard Wright, Native Son
1941 Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon
1942 Albert Camus, The Stranger
Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road
1943 Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
1944 Jorge Luis Borges, Fictions
Lillian Smith, Strange Fruit
1946 William Faulkner, The Portable Faulkner
1947 W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue
Margaret Wise Brown, Goodnight Moon
1948 Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country
B. F. Skinner, Walden Two
1949 George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four
1950 C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
1951 J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
1952 Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
The Holy Bible. Revised Standard Version
E. B. White, Charlotte's Web
1953 Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
1955 Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
1956 Grace Metalious, Peyton Place
1957 Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat
1958 Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Elie Wiesel, Night
1960 Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
1961 Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Langston Hughes, The Best of Simple
1962 Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
Ezra Jack Keats, The Snowy Day
Ken Kesey, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
1963 Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are
1965 Truman Capote, In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences
1966 Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
1967 Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
1969 Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint
Tayeb el-Salih, Season of Migration to the North
1973-75 Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation
1974 Stephen King, Carrie
1975 V. S. Naipaul, Guerrillas
1976 Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment
Buchi Emecheta, The Bride Price
1977 Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
1982 Alice Walker, The Color Purple
1983 Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems, 1927-1979
1984 Marguerite Duras, The Lover
1985 Patricia MacLachlan, Sarah, Plain and Tall
1986 Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
1986-91 Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor's Tale (2 vols.)
1987 Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities
Copyright © 2001 by The Stonesong Press, Inc. and The New York Public Library
| Foreword | ||
| Editor's Note | ||
| I | Creators | |
| 1 | Authors | 3 |
| 2 | Other Influential Figures: Biographers, Critics, Editors, Publishers, Thinkers, Translators | 265 |
| 3 | Authors' Awards | 323 |
| 4 | Sources in Literary Biography | 329 |
| II | Works of Literature | |
| 1 | Works of Literature: Novels, Plays, Poems, Stories, Essays | 341 |
| 2 | Book Awards | 449 |
| 3 | Influential Literary Periodicals | 465 |
| 4 | Variations: Adaptations Into Other Media | 477 |
| 5 | Recommended Reading: Great Books Lists | 527 |
| 6 | Landmarks in Literary Censorship | 541 |
| 7 | General Literary Sources | 547 |
| III | Literary Facts and Resources | |
| 1 | Characters | 563 |
| 2 | Dictionary of Literature: Terms, Styles, Movements, Genres | 621 |
| 3 | Chronology of World Literature: From the Invention of Writing to the Year 2000 | 689 |
| 4 | Websites for Literature | 725 |
| 5 | Libraries with Significant Literary Holdings | 735 |
| 6 | Literary Factbooks and Handbooks | 739 |
| Index | 745 |
Overview