Cultural Keys

The Greatest Books — Top 200 (aggregated)

From https://thegreatestbooks.org/

Aggregated top-200 books from major critics' lists, ranked by appearance frequency. From thegreatestbooks.org.

4 / 200 done · 2%

1

Ulysses

James Joyce

1922
2

In Search of Lost Time

Marcel Proust

1913
3

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

1925
4

The Catcher in the Rye

J. D. Salinger

1951
5

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel García Márquez

1967
6

Nineteen Eighty Four

George Orwell

1949
7

Moby-Dick

Herman Melville

1851
8

Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes

1605
9

The Sound and the Fury

William Faulkner

1929
10

Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy

1877
11

Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoevsky

1866
12

Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen

1813
13

Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov

1955
14

War and Peace

Leo Tolstoy

1869
15

Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë

1847
16

To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee

1960
17

The Lord Of The Rings

J. R. R. Tolkien

1959
18

The Bible

Unknown

-1400
19

The Brothers Karamazov

Fyodor Dostoevsky

1880
20

The Trial

Franz Kafka

1925
21

Madame Bovary

Gustave Flaubert

1857
22

The Stranger

Albert Camus

1942
23

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain

1884
24

The Odyssey

Homer

-740
25

The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck

1939
26

The Divine Comedy

Dante Alighieri

1308
27

The Magic Mountain

Thomas Mann

1924
28

To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf

1927
29

Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë

1847
30

Middlemarch

George Eliot

1871
31

Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad

1899
32

Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf

1925
33

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll

1865
34

Catch-22

Joseph Heller

1961
35

The Master and Margarita

Mikhail Bulgakov

1967
36

Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison

1952
37

The Iliad

Homer

-750
38

Les Misérables

Victor Hugo

1862
39

Great Expectations

Charles Dickens

1860
40

Frankenstein

Mary Shelley

1818
41

The Red and the Black

Stendhal

1830
42

On the Road

Jack Kerouac

1957
43

Absalom, Absalom!

William Faulkner

1936
44

The Little Prince

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

1943
45

Fictions

Jorge Luis Borges

1944
46

One Thousand and One Nights

Unknown

800
47

Journey to the End of The Night

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

1932
48

Brave New World

Aldous Huxley

1932
49

Lord of the Flies

William Golding

1954
50

David Copperfield

Charles Dickens

1849
51

The Old Man and the Sea

Ernest Hemingway

1952
52

Beloved

Toni Morrison

1987
53

Animal Farm

George Orwell

1945
54

Gone With the Wind

Margaret Mitchell

1936
55

The Idiot

Fyodor Dostoevsky

1869
56

The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy

Laurence Sterne

1759
57

Dracula

Bram Stoker

1897
58

The Leopard

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

1958
59

Under the Volcano

Malcolm Lowry

1947
60

The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway

1926
61

Rebecca

Daphne du Maurier

1938
62

Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe

1958
63

The Golden Notebook

Doris May Lessing

1962
64

The Aeneid

Virgil

-19
65

Gulliver's Travels

Jonathan Swift

1726
66

Robinson Crusoe

Daniel Defoe

1719
67

Essays

Michel de Montaigne

1580
68

Hamlet

William Shakespeare

1600
69

Midnight's Children

Salman Rushdie

1981
70

A Farewell to Arms

Ernest Hemingway

1929
71

The Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka

1915
72

The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne

1850
73

Leaves of Grass

Walt Whitman

1855
74

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston

1937
75

The Plague

Albert Camus

1947
76

Candide

Voltaire

1759
77

The Castle

Franz Kafka

1926
78

Pale Fire

Vladimir Nabokov

1962
79

A Passage to India

E. M. Forster

1924
80

The Portrait of a Lady

Henry James

1881
81

As I Lay Dying

William Faulkner

1930
82

Slaughterhouse-Five

Kurt Vonnegut

1969
83

All Quiet on the Western Front

Erich Maria Remarque

1928
84

The Count of Monte Cristo

Alexandre Dumas

1844
85

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce

1916
86

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde

1890
87

Little Women

Louisa May Alcott

1868
88

The Man Without Qualities

Robert Musil

1930
89

The Good Soldier

Ford Madox Ford

1915
90

The Tin Drum

Günter Grass

1959
91

Emma

Jane Austen

1815
92

Faust

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

1808
93

Buddenbrooks

Thomas Mann

1901
94

Waiting for Godot

Samuel Beckett

1953
95

Demons

Fyodor Dostoevsky

1872
96

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Ernest Hemingway

1940
97

The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe

1902
98

Dune

Frank Herbert

1965
99

The Age of Innocence

Edith Wharton

1920
100

Orlando

Virginia Woolf

1928
101

Dead Souls

Nikolai Gogol

1842
102

Oedipus the King

Sophocles

-429
103

Native Son

Richard Wright

1940
104

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Milan Kundera

1984
105

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath

1963
106

The Canterbury Tales

Geoffrey Chaucer

1400
107

The Waste Land

T. S. Eliot

1922
108

Doctor Zhivago

Boris Pasternak

1957
109

The Diary of a Young Girl

Anne Frank

1947
110

Charlotte's Web

E. B. White

1952
111

In Cold Blood

Truman Capote

1966
112

Treasure Island

Robert Louis Stevenson

1883
113

Walden

Henry David Thoreau

1854
114

The Name of the Rose

Umberto Eco

1980
115

Vanity Fair

William Makepeace Thackeray

1847
116

The Three Musketeers

Alexandre Dumas

1844
117

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter

Carson McCullers

1940
118

The Big Sleep

Raymond Chandler

1939
119

Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Thomas Hardy

1891
120

Antigone

Sophocles

-441
121

Paradise Lost

John Milton

1667
122

The Stories of Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov

1900
123

First Folio

William Shakespeare

1623
124

Confessions

Augustine

397
125

King Lear

William Shakespeare

1608
126

Decameron

Giovanni Boccaccio

1353
127

Doctor Faustus

Thomas Mann

1947
128

A Sentimental Education

Gustave Flaubert

1869
129

Tom Jones

Henry Fielding

1749
130

If This Is a Man

Primo Levi

1947
131

Memoirs of Hadrian

Marguerite Yourcenar

1951
132

Lord Jim

Joseph Conrad

1900
133

The Charterhouse of Parma

Stendhal

1839
134

The Woman in White

Wilkie Collins

1860
135

The Wind in the Willows

Kenneth Grahame

1908
136

The Tale of Genji

Murasaki Shikibu

1001
137

The Second Sex

Simone de Beauvoir

1949
138

The Maltese Falcon

Dashiell Hammett

1930
139

Gargantua and Pantagruel

Francois Rabelais

1532
140

Brideshead Revisited

Evelyn Waugh

1945
141

Pedro Páramo

Juan Rulfo

1955
142

All the King's Men

Robert Penn Warren

1946
143

The Prince

Niccolo Machiavelli

1532
144

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

1962
145

Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury

1953
146

A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess

1962
147

Sons and Lovers

D. H. Lawrence

1913
148

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Ken Kesey

1962
149

Poems of Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson

1890
150

Bleak House

Charles Dickens

1852
151

Macbeth

William Shakespeare

1606
152

The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood

1985
153

Confessions of Zeno

Italo Svevo

1923
154

The Hobbit

J. R. R. Tolkien

1937
155

The Good Soldier Švejk

Jaroslav Hašek

1921
156

Molloy

Samuel Beckett

1951
157

The Long Goodbye

Raymond Chandler

1953
158

Silent Spring

Rachel Carson

1962
159

The Talented Mr. Ripley

Patricia Highsmith

1955
160

The Hound of the Baskervilles

Arthur Conan Doyle

1902
161

Winnie the Pooh

A. A. Milne

1926
162

Tender Is the Night

F. Scott Fitzgerald

1934
163

Love in the Time of Cholera

Gabriel García Márquez

1985
164

Steppenwolf

Hermann Hesse

1927
165

Of Mice and Men

John Steinbeck

1937
166

Siddhartha

Hermann Hesse

1922
167

The Color Purple

Alice Walker

1982
168

Man's Fate

Andre Malraux

1933
169

Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys

1966
170

Metamorphoses

Ovid

8
171

Fathers and Sons

Ivan Turgenev

1862
172

The Interpretation of Dreams

Sigmund Freud

1899
173

On the Origin of Species

Charles Darwin

1859
174

The Flowers of Evil

Charles Baudelaire

1857
175

My Antonia

Willa Cather

1918
176

The Jungle

Upton Sinclair

1906
177

Giovanni's Room

James Baldwin

1956
178

Uncle Tom's Cabin

Harriet Beecher Stowe

1852
179

Rabbit, Run

John Updike

1960
180

A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf

1929
181

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Muriel Spark

1961
182

Bonjour Tristesse

Francoise Sagan

1954
183

Light in August

William Faulkner

1932
184

An American Tragedy

Theodore Dreiser

1925
185

A Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickens

1859
186

The Moviegoer

Walker Percy

1961
187

Lady Chatterley's Lover

D. H. Lawrence

1928
188

U.S.A. Trilogy

John Dos Passos

1930
189

The Power and the Glory

Graham Greene

1940
190

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Douglas Adams

1979
191

The Book of Disquiet

Fernando Pessoa

1982
192

And Then There Were None

Agatha Christie

1939
193

Oblomov

Ivan Goncharov

1859
194

The End of the Affair

Graham Greene

1951
195

A Confederacy of Dunces

John Kennedy Toole

1980
196

East of Eden

John Steinbeck

1952
197

The Complete Sherlock Holmes

Arthur Conan Doyle

1927
198

The Gulag Archipelago

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

1973
199

Zorba the Greek

Nikos Kazantzakis

1946
200

The Radetzky March

Joseph Roth

1932