by TIME Magazine · 50 items
The Adventures of Augie March — Saul Bellow (1953)
All the King's Men — Robert Penn Warren (1946)
American Pastoral — Philip Roth (1997)
An American Tragedy — Theodore Dreiser (1925)
Animal Farm — George Orwell (1945)
Appointment in Samarra — John O'Hara (1934)
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret — Judy Blume (1970)
The Assistant — Bernard Malamud (1957)
At Swim-Two-Birds — Flann O'Brien (1938)
Atonement — Ian McEwan (2001)
Beloved — Toni Morrison (1987)
The Berlin Stories — Christopher Isherwood (1945)
The Big Sleep — Raymond Chandler (1939)
Blood Meridian — Cormac McCarthy (1985)
Brideshead Revisited — Evelyn Waugh (1945)
The Bridge of San Luis Rey — Thornton Wilder (1927)
Call It Sleep — Henry Roth (1934)
Catch-22 — Joseph Heller (1961)
The Catcher in the Rye — J.D. Salinger (1951)
A Clockwork Orange — Anthony Burgess (1962)
The Confessions of Nat Turner — William Styron (1967)
The Corrections — Jonathan Franzen (2001)
The Crying of Lot 49 — Thomas Pynchon (1966)
A Dance to the Music of Time — Anthony Powell (1975)
The Day of the Locust — Nathanael West (1939)
Death Comes for the Archbishop — Willa Cather (1927)
A Death in the Family — James Agee (1957)
The Death of the Heart — Elizabeth Bowen (1938)
Deliverance — James Dickey (1970)
Dog Soldiers — Robert Stone (1974)
Falconer — John Cheever (1977)
The French Lieutenant's Woman — John Fowles (1969)
The Golden Notebook — Doris Lessing (1962)
Go Tell It on the Mountain — James Baldwin (1953)
Gone with the Wind — Margaret Mitchell (1936)
The Grapes of Wrath — John Steinbeck (1939)
Gravity's Rainbow — Thomas Pynchon (1973)
The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
A Handful of Dust — Evelyn Waugh (1934)
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter — Carson McCullers (1940)
The Heart of the Matter — Graham Greene (1948)
Herzog — Saul Bellow (1964)
Housekeeping — Marilynne Robinson (1980)
A House for Mr. Biswas — V.S. Naipaul (1961)
I, Claudius — Robert Graves (1934)
Infinite Jest — David Foster Wallace (1996)
Invisible Man — Ralph Ellison (1952)
Light in August — William Faulkner (1932)
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe — C.S. Lewis (1950)
Lolita — Vladimir Nabokov (1955)