Canonization is a dicey business. Just ask the folks at Random House, whose Modern Library 100 last summer inflamed the passions of readers who disliked many of its choices and wondered at the temerity of even attempting to select a "best" book. Undeterred by the controversy, or perhaps emboldened by it, the Library Journal recently developed a list of its own by asking librarians across the country to weigh in with their selections. The result was a top 100 dramatically different from the Modern Library compilation.
Only 38 books appear on both lists. The highest-rated book from the combined lists is The Great Gatsby . Four of the top five and 11 of the top 20 in the Library Journal list do not appear on the Modern Library list. Six of the Modern Library's top 20 failed to make the LJ 100.
There was at least one book about which the list-makers agreed. Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises is number 45 on both lists.
The Modern Library Top 100 is printed below. Bold-faced titles are those that also appear in the Library Journal list. The corresponding ratings from the LJ list are in parentheses.
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1. Ulysses, James Joyce (44) 2. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (13) 3. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce (53) 4. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov (17) 5. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley (41) 6. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner (47) 7. Catch-22, Joseph Heller (10) 8. Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler 9. Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence 10. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck (20) 11.Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry 12. The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler 13. 1984, George Orwell (7) 14. I, Claudius, Robert Graves (70) 15. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf (60) 16. An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser 17. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers 18. Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut (14) 19. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison (28) 20. Native Son, Richard Wright (31) 21. Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow 22. Appointment in Samarra, John O'Hara 23. U.S.A. (trilogy), John Dos Passos (97) 24. Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson (59) 25. A Passage to India, E.M. Forster (75) 26. The Wings of the Dove, Henry James 27. The Ambassadors, Henry James 28. Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald 29. The Studs Lonigan Trilogy, James T. Farrell 30. The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford (77) 31. Animal Farm, George Orwell (8) 32. The Golden Bowl, Henry James 33. Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser (86) 34. A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh 35. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner 36. All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren (94) 37.The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder 38. Howard's End, E.M. Forster 39. Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin 40. The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene 41. Lord of the Flies, William Golding (9) 42. Deliverance, James Dickey 43. A Dance to the Music of Time (series), Anthony Powell 44. Point Counter Point, Aldous Huxley 45. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway (45) 46. The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad 47. Nostromo, Joseph Conrad 48. The Rainbow, D.H. Lawrence 49. Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence (95) 50. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller 51. The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer 52. Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth (80) 53. Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov 54. Light in August, William Faulkner 55. On the Road, Jack Kerouac (39) 56. The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett 57. Parade's End, Ford Madox Ford 58. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton (37) 59. Zuleika Dobson, Max Beerbohm 60. The Moviegoer, Walker Percy 61. Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather 62. From Here to Eternity, James Jones (71) 63. The Wapshot Chronicle, John Cheever 64. The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger (2) 65. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess (58) 66. Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham (91) 67. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad (92) 68. Main Street, Sinclair Lewis 69. The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton 70. The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell 71. A High Wind in Jamaica, Richard Hughes 72. A House for Mr. Biswas, V.S. Naipaul 73. The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West 74. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway (33) 75. Scoop, Evelyn Waugh 76. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark (24) 77. Finnegan's Wake, James Joyce 78. Kim, Rudyard Kipling 79. A Room With a View, E.M. Forster 80. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh 81. The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow 82. Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner (42) 83. A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul 84. The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen 85. Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad 86. Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow (86) 87. The Old Wives' Tale, Arnold Bennett 88. The Call of the Wild, Jack London (67) 89. Loving, Henry Green 90. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie 91. Tobacco Road, Erskine Caldwell 92. Ironweed, William Kennedy 93. The Magus, John Fowles 94. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys 95. Under the Net, Iris Murdoch 96. Sophie's Choice, William Styron (30) 97. The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles 98. The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain 99. The Ginger Man, J.P. Donleavy 100. The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington
10 top Library Journal books that didn't make Modern Library's list |
BASSETT'S TOP THIRTEEN My "canon" is limited to 20th-century American fiction, arranged alphabetically by author (satisfaction guaranteed).
Saul Bellow,
Ralph Ellison,
William Faulkner,
F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Ernest Hemingway,
Toni Morrison,
Flannery O'Connor,
John O'Hara,
J. D. Salinger,
John Steinbeck,
John Updike, |
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