The Top 99 Greatest Works of Literature
We get it. The nine hundred and ninety-nine entries on the Greatest Literature of All Time list can be daunting. So much to read. So little time. So here's a stripped down and ranked version that's easier to handle.
At least here's the latest version of the Top 99 list. At least once a year we update it, based on the voluminous research for all our Greatest lists and continual refinements to our ranking algorithms.
How has this latest Top 99 list changed? Not much at the very top frankly. Works by Tolstoy, Flaubert, Homer, Cervantes and others have consistently been in the top ten over the years, though they switch places in almost every update.
Further down the list though, a small change may be noticeable. What was once disregarded as genre writing—mysteries, romances, science fiction, fantasies and so one—is increasingly represented here. This may reflect the growing acceptance of genre works by the literary mainstream.
Latest update: December 24, 2024
1. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert, novel, 1857
2. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy, novel, 1874
3. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy, novel, 1865–1869
4. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez, novel, 1967
5. Ulysses, James Joyce, novel, 1922
6. In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust, novel, 1913–1927
8. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, novel, 1955
9. Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, novel, 1605–1615
10. The Odyssey, Homer, epic poem, c. 750 BCE
11. The Divine Comedy, Alighieri Dante, epic poem, 1307
12. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell, novel, 1949
13. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky, novel, 1866
14. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, novel, 1925
15. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, novel, 1880
16. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, novel, 1818
17. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen, novel, 1813
18. Moby Dick, Herman Melville, novel, 1851
19. The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood, novel, 1985
20. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, novel, 1884
21. Beloved, Toni Morrison, novel, 1987
22. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë, novel, 1847
23. Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien, novel, 1954–1955
24. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe, novel, 1958
25. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie, novel, 1981
26. Hamlet, William Shakespeare, play, 1601
27. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë, novel, 1847
28. Dracula, Bram Stoker, novel, 1897
29. Middlemarch, George Eliot, novel, 1872
30. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, novel, 1865
31. Oedipus Rex, Sophocles, play, 430 BCE
32. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck, novel, 1939
33. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee, novel, 1960
34. The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger, novel, 1951
35. The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco, novel, 1980
36. The Trial, Franz Kafka, novel, 1925
37. Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne, novel, 1759–1767
38. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner, novel, 1929
39. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, novella, 1902
40. Aeneid, Virgil, poem, c.29–19 BCE
41. Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift, novel, 1726
42. The Count of Monte-Cristo, Alexandre Dumas, novel, 1844–1846
43. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison, novel, 1952
44. The Oresteia, Aeschylus, play series, 458 BCE
45. Antigone, Sophocles, play, 442–441 BCE
46. The Red and the Black, Stendhal, novel, 1831
47. The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James, novel, 1881
48. The Outsider, Albert Camus, novella, 1942
49. The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann, novel, 1924
50. The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka, novella, 1916
51. Les Misérables, Victor-Marie Hugo, novel, 1862
52. The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu, novel, c.1020
53. Harry Potter, R.K. Rowling, novel series, 1997–2007
54. Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges, story collection, 1941–1956
55. Animal Farm, George Orwell, novella, 1945
56. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde, novel, 1891
57. Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf, novel, 1925
58. The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle, novel, 1902
59. The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis, novel series, 1950–1956
60. The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells, novel, 1898
61. The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer, prose and poetry collection, 1387–1400
62. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, novel, 1932
63. Life of Pi, Yann Martel, novel, 2002
64. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez, novel, 1985
66. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys, novel, 1966
67. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce, novel, 1916
68. One Thousand and One Nights, Anonymous, story collection, c.800–1400
69. The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, novella, 1943
70. Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett, play, 1952
71. The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio, story collection, 1348
72. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens, novel, 1861
73. King Lear, William Shakespeare, play, c.1606
74. The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Francois Rabelais, novel series, 1532–1564
75. A Sentimental Education, Gustave Flaubert, novel, 1869
76. Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell, novel, 1936
77. Blindness, José Saramago, novel, 1995
78. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier, novel, 1938
79. The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett, novel, 1930
80. The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing, novel, 1959
81. Emma, Jane Austen, novel, 1815
82. The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith, novel, 1967
83. The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov, novel, 1967
84. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway, novel, 1940
85. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess, novel, 1962
86. Absalom! Absalom!, William Faulkner, novel, 1936
87. Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry, novel, 1947
88. Perfume, Patrick Suskind, novel, 1985
89. All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque, novel
90. The Sorrows of Young Werther, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, novel, 1774
91. Candide, Voltaire, novella, 1759
92. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton, novel, 1920
93. On the Road, Jack Kerouac, novel, 1957
94. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf, novel, 1927
95. The Bible, Anonymous, prose and poetry collection, c.1000 BCE–100 CE
96. The Leopard, Giusseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, novel, 1958
97. Lord of the Flies, William Golding, novel, 1954
98. And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie, novel, 1927
99. The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler, novel, 1939
Dropped
Here are ten works previously featured on the Top 99 list but superseded this year. They all still rank very highly and may make comebacks in future Top lists.
Medea, Euripides, play, 431 BCE
Independent People, Halldór Laxness, novel, 1934–1935
Paradise Lost, John Milton, poem, 1667
Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut, novel, 1969
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway, novel, 1926
The Stories of Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov, story collection
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy, novella, 1886
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami, novel, 1994–1995
Dream of the Red Chamber, Cao Xueqin, novel, 1791–1792
Metamorphoses, Ovid, poem, c.8 BCE
Coming up
For your additional reading pleasure, here are a few additional choices that hover just below the top 99 and may make the list in future years :
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner, novel, 1930
The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot, poem, 1922
Dune, Frank Herbert, novel, 1965
The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil, novel, 1930–1943
Hunger, Knut Hamsun, novel, 1899
Bleak House, Charles Dickens, novel, 1853
Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar, novel, 1951
Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee, novel, 1999
Neuromancer, William Gibson, novel, 1984
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark, novel, 1961
See also:
Creating the Greatest Literature of All Time list
Does it matter which translation you read?
On Twitter:
