The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time

The list below is from the book The Novel 100: A Ranking of Greatest Novels All Time (Checkmark Books/Facts On File, Inc.: New York, 2004), written by Daniel S. Burt.

Burt holds a Ph.D from New York University with a specialty in Victorian fiction and was for nine years a dean at Wesleyan University, where he has also taught literature courses since 1989. He is also the author of The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time.

Note that in compiling the list of novels that was the basis for this book, Burt had to impose a number of constraints about what should be considered a novel. Although some works recognized as classics of science fiction (or, more broadly, speculative fiction) are on the list (e.g., Frankenstein; Dracula; Nineteen Eighty-Four), Burt specifically excluded works that seemed to veer too much from primarily naturalistic and contemporary-oriented narratives, thus excluding from consideration most science fiction and fantasy. Books such as Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Card’s Ender’s Game, Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz and Frank Herbert’s Dune were excluded from consideration as “novels.” Burt’s functional definition of “novel” used here (i.e., books belonging to the “novel genre” or, in most cases, the “literary novel genre”) is thus narrower than how the word is used by the general public. From the book’s introduction, pages ix-x:

What makes a listing of the greatest novels even more problematic is the lack of any consensus about which works rightfully constitute the genre… the novel is such a hybrid and adaptive genre, assimilating other prose and verse forms… A standard definition of the novel–an extended prose narrative–is so broad that it fails to limit the field usefully… I have been influenced in this regard, like many, by literary critic Ian Watt’s groundbreaking 1957 study, The Rise of the Novel, which contends that the novel as a distinctive genre emerged in 18th-century England through the shifting of the emphasis of previous prose romances and their generalized and idealized characters, settings, and situations to a particularity of individual experience. In other words, the novel replaced the romance’s interest in the general and the ideal with a concern for the particular. The here and now substituted for the romance’s interest in the long ago and far away. As 18th-century novelist Clara Reece observed, “The Novel is a picture of real life and manners, and of the times in which it was written. The Romance, in lofty and elevated language, describes what has never happened nor is likely to.” Novelists began to represent the actual world accurately, governed by the laws of probability.
…It would be far too reductive and misleading, however, to define the novel only by its realism or accurate representation of ordinary life… It would be far more accurate to say that the novel as a distinct genre attempts a synthesis between romance and realism, between a poetic, imaginative alternative to actuality and a more authentic representation. For purposes of my listing, I have narrowed the field by categorizing as novels works that engage in that synthesis. Some narrative works judged too far in the direction of fantasy–Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland–have been excluded. I have also made judgment calls on the question of the required length of a novel and have ruled out of contention such important fictional works as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis as falling short of the amplitude expected when confronting a novel.

	Title of Great Novel	Year	Author
1	Don Quixote	1605, 1630	Miguel de Cervantes
2	War and Peace	1869	Leo Tolstoy
3	Ulysses	1922	James Joyce
4	In Search of Lost Time	1913-27	Marcel Proust
5	The Brothers Karamazov	1880	Feodor Dostoevsky
6	Moby-Dick	1851	Herman Melville
7	Madame Bovary	1857	Gustave Flaubert
8	Middlemarch	1871-72	George Eliot
9	The Magic Mountain	1924	Thomas Mann
10	The Tale of Genji	11th Century	Murasaki Shikibu
11	Emma	1816	Jane Austen
12	Bleak House	1852-53	Charles Dickens
13	Anna Karenina	1877	Leo Tolstoy
14	Adventures of Huckleberry Finn	1884	Mark Twain
15	Tom Jones	1749	Henry Fielding
16	Great Expectations	1860-61	Charles Dickens
17	Absalom, Absalom!	1936	William Faulkner
18	The Ambassadors	1903	Henry James
19	One Hundred Years of Solitude	1967	Gabriel Garcia Marquez
20	The Great Gatsby	1925	F. Scott Fitzgerald
21	To The Lighthouse	1927	Virginia Woolf
22	Crime and Punishment	1866	Feodor Dostoevsky
23	The Sound and the Fury	1929	William Faulkner
24	Vanity Fair	1847-48	William Makepeace Thackeray
25	Invisible Man	1952	Ralph Ellison
26	Finnegans Wake	1939	James Joyce
27	The Man Without Qualities	1930-43	Robert Musil
28	Gravity’s Rainbow	1973	Thomas Pynchon
29	The Portrait of a Lady	1881	Henry James
30	Women in Love	1920	D. H. Lawrence
31	The Red and the Black	1830	Stendhal
32	Tristram Shandy	1760-67	Laurence Sterne
33	Dead Souls	1842	Nikolai Gogol
34	Tess of the D’Urbervilles	1891	Thomas Hardy
35	Buddenbrooks	1901	Thomas Mann
36	Le Pere Goriot	1835	Honore de Balzac
37	A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man	1916	James Joyce
38	Wuthering Heights	1847	Emily Bronte
39	The Tin Drum	1959	Gunter Grass
40	Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable	1951-53	Samuel Beckett
41	Pride and Prejudice	1813	Jane Austen
42	The Scarlet Letter	1850	Nathaniel Hawthorne
43	Fathers and Sons	1862	Ivan Turgenev
44	Nostromo	1904	Joseph Conrad
45	Beloved	1987	Toni Morrison
46	An American Tragedy	1925	Theodore Dreiser
47	Lolita	1955	Vladimir Nabokov
48	The Golden Notebook	1962	Doris Lessing
49	Clarissa	1747-48	Samuel Richardson
50	Dream of the Red Chamber	1791	Cao Xueqin
51	The Trial	1925	Franz Kafka
52	Jane Eyre	1847	Charlotte Bronte
53	The Red Badge of Courage	1895	Stephen Crane
54	The Grapes of Wrath	1939	John Steinbeck
55	Petersburg	1916/1922	Andrey Bely
56	Things Fall Apart	1958	Chinue Achebe
57	The Princess of Cleves	1678	Madame de Lafayette
58	The Stranger	1942	Albert Camus
59	My Antonia	1918	Willa Cather
60	The Counterfeiters	1926	Andre Gide
61	The Age of Innocence	1920	Edith Wharton
62	The Good Soldier	1915	Ford Madox Ford
63	The Awakening	1899	Kate Chopin
64	A Passage to India	1924	E. M. Forster
65	Herzog	1964	Saul Bellow
66	Germinal	1855	Emile Zola
67	Call It Sleep	1934	Henry Roth
68	U.S.A. Trilogy	1930-38	John Dos Passos
69	Hunger	1890	Knut Hamsun
70	Berlin Alexanderplatz	1929	Alfred Doblin
71	Cities of Salt	1984-89	‘Abd al-Rahman Munif
72	The Death of Artemio Cruz	1962	Carlos Fuentes
73	A Farewell to Arms	1929	Ernest Hemingway
74	Brideshead Revisited	1945	Evelyn Waugh
75	The Last Chronicle of Barset	1866-67	Anthony Trollope
76	The Pickwick Papers	1836-67	Charles Dickens
77	Robinson Crusoe	1719	Daniel Defoe
78	The Sorrows of Young Werther	1774	Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
79	Candide	1759	Voltaire
80	Native Son	1940	Richard Wright
81	Under the Volcano	1947	Malcolm Lowry
82	Oblomov	1859	Ivan Goncharov
83	Their Eyes Were Watching God	1937	Zora Neale Hurston
84	Waverley	1814	Sir Walter Scott
85	Snow Country	1937, 1948	Kawabata Yasunari
86	Nineteen Eighty-Four	1949	George Orwell
87	The Betrothed	1827, 1840	Alessandro Manzoni
88	The Last of the Mohicans	1826	James Fenimore Cooper
89	Uncle Tom’s Cabin	1852	Harriet Beecher Stowe
90	Les Miserables	1862	Victor Hugo
91	On the Road	1957	Jack Kerouac
92	Frankenstein	1818	Mary Shelley
93	The Leopard	1958	Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
94	The Catcher in the Rye	1951	J.D. Salinger
95	The Woman in White	1860	Wilkie Collins
96	The Good Soldier Svejk	1921-23	Jaroslav Hasek
97	Dracula	1897	Bram Stoker
98	The Three Musketeers	1844	Alexandre Dumas
99	The Hound of Baskervilles	1902	Arthur Conan Doyle
100	Gone with the Wind	1936	Margaret Mitchell