User:KF/Sanctuary XI

The 425 Greatest Books of All Time was a list finalized in 1994 on Usenet. As assembled by the expert participants in Usenet's rec.arts.books newsgroup, it incorporated at least eight highly regarded previous lists, including Anthony Burgess' 1984 list of Ninety-nine Novels.

During the mid-1990s, this list was easily accessible on Usenet. Despite its obvious value, it eventually fell between the cracks and would have vanished entirely were it not for Robert Grumbine, who rescued the list and made it available on RadixNet. The list is not in evidence elsewhere on the Internet, although it is cited in the Internet Movie Database. The lists were assembled as a group effort during the years 1989-94. The earliest, collated by Alexander H. McIntire, Jr. of the University of Miami's Graduate School of International Studies, gave recommendations of works found in the following sources:
 * The Lifetime Reading Plan by Clifton Fadiman. (l)
 * Great Books of the Western World, Mortimer J. Adler, Editor. (g)
 * Great Books of the Twentieth Century, as proposed by Adler. (t)
 * "Books for the College-Bound Student," in Books and the Teen-aged Reader. (c)
 * The College and Adult Reading List of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). (e)
 * Books for You, the secondary-level reading list of the NCTE. (b)
 * "List for the College-Preparatory Student" in Reading in the Secondary School. (s)
 * "One Hundred Significant Books" from Good Reading (Committee on College Reading). (r)

McIntire prefaced his list with these observations:


 * Some considerations:


 * Many of the books followed by c, s, b, or e are what I call "teacherly" books--those seen as suitable for secondary English curricula because of literary merit or perceived wholesomeness. They represent, in some case, the biases, professional and personal, of generations of English teachers.


 * The books followed by l, g, t, or r might be more legitimately considered "important," either for literary merit or historical importance. They include most of the core "classics" of the Western literary canon and important works of the social and natural sciences.


 * Obviously, the same problems of canonicity and ethnic bias that pertain in scholastic debate today can be seen in this list. The major reason for including the "teacherly" works is to offer some alternatives--there are more works by female writers and at least some by non-white writers there. By that same token, the orientation is weighted toward American titles in 19th and 20th Century works, and toward Western works generally.


 * Any serious reader will have quarrels with this list. That is as it should be. I have not fudged here. I stress this point to avoid conflict. I did not choose the books included here. To take the smallest example, I don't know why King Lear is not included in the Shakespeare list. I would, however, challenge any serious reader to look through here without finding at least something that sparks your attention and sends you off to the library.


 * Finally, realize that these lists are timebound. Many of the original compilations were made in the 1950s and 1960s [when people still read, says my anti-television bias]. There are works here that seemed to be important at the time, but which have wavered in their reputation in the last two or three decades. I would welcome any helpful comments or reasonable sources to add to the database that underlies this project.

Andrew Duchowski of Texas A&M and Mike Morris were responsible for the final 1994 list, and Robert Grumbine collected it in 1999-2000 in his site of book lists. It is posted here in an author/title format as it originally appeared on Usenet.

425 Greatest Books of All Time

 * The Bible
 * The New Testament
 * The Great Conversation (Three volumes of introduction and reference to the set)
 * Syntopicon 1
 * Syntopicon 2
 * Qu'ran
 * Unknown : The Epic of Gilgamesh
 * Unknown : The Greek Anthology
 * Unknown : Medieval Latin Lyrics
 * Unknown : Beowulf
 * Homer : The Iliad, The Odyssey
 * Sappho : Poems
 * Aeschylus : Tragedies, The Oresteia
 * Sophocles : Tragedies, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Electra, The Theban Plays
 * Euripides : Tragedies, Alcestis, Medea, Hipploytus, Trojan Women, Electra, Bacchae
 * Lucretius : On the Nature of Things
 * Thucydides : History of the Peloponnesian War
 * Plato : Collected dialogues, The Trial and Death of Socrates, The Republic
 * Aristotle : Ethics, Politics, Collected works, volume I and II
 * Epicurus : ``Letter to Herodotus, ``Letter to Menoecus
 * Hippocrates : Collected works, Medical Writings
 * Galen : On the Natural Faculties
 * Euclid : The Elements
 * Archimedes : Collected works
 * Apollonius of Perga : Conic Sections
 * Nicomachus of Gerasa : Introduction to Arithmetic
 * Marcus Aurelius : The Meditations
 * Apuleius : The Golden Ass
 * Cicero : Works
 * Horace : Works
 * Pindar : Olympians, etc.
 * Theocritus : Idylls
 * Julius Caesar : The War in Gaul
 * Petronius : The Satyricon
 * Livy : History of Rome
 * Ovid : Works
 * Plutarch : Parallel Lives, Moralia
 * Tacitus : The Annals, The Histories, Agricola, Germania
 * Epictetus : The Discourses, Encheiridion
 * Sun Tsu : Art of War
 * Tu Fu : Poems
 * Unknown : Classic Japanese Poetry
 * Lao Tzu : Tao Te Ching
 * Unknown : The Bhagavad-Gita
 * Ssu-Ma Chien : Records of the Grand Historian of China
 * Unknown : Catullus
 * Unknown : The Early Irish Epic
 * Unknown : The English and Scottish Popular Ballad
 * Sei Shonagon : The Pillow Book
 * Abelard and Heloise : Various
 * Heike Monogatari : Various
 * Lady Murasaki : The Tale of Genji
 * Virgil : The Aeneid, Eclogues, Georgics
 * Ptolemy : The Almagest
 * Nicolaus Copernicus : On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
 * Lucian : Works
 * Plotinus : The Enneads
 * Saint Augustine : On the Teacher, Confessions, City of God, On Christian Doctrine
 * Unknown : The Song of Roland
 * Unknown : The Song of Songs
 * Unknown : The Nibelungenlied (Volsunga Saga as Scandinavian version)
 * Unknown : The Mahabharata
 * Unknown : The Kalevala
 * Unknown : The Journal of John Woolman
 * Njal : The Saga
 * Thomas Aquinas : Summa Theologica, vol. I and II
 * Dante Alighieri : The New Life, On Monarchy, Divine Comedy
 * Geoffrey Chaucer : Troilus and Cressida, The Canterbury Tales
 * Leonardo da Vinci : Notebooks
 * Nicolo Machiavelli : The Prince, Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
 * Thomas Malory : Le Morte d'Arthur
 * John Gardner : Grendel
 * Mary Stewart : The Crystal Cave, etc.
 * John Dryden : MacFlecknoe, etc.
 * Christopher Marlowe : Poems, Doctor Faustus
 * Thomas Gray : Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
 * Matthew Arnold : Dover Beach
 * Robert Browning : Collected Works
 * Emily Dickinson : Collected Works
 * John Keats : Collected Works
 * Percy Bysshe Shelley : Collected Works
 * Alfred Tennyson : Idylls of the King, etc.
 * Charlotte Bronte : Jane Eyre
 * James Fenimore Cooper : Last of the Mohicans
 * Walter Scott : Ivanhoe, etc.
 * Bertold Brecht : Mother Courage
 * Lorraine Hansberry : A Raisin in the Sun
 * Arthur Miller : Death of a Salesman, Crucible
 * Luigi Pirandello : Six Characters in Search of an Author
 * August Strindberg : Miss Julie, etc.
 * John Synge : Playboy of the Western World
 * Oscar Wilde : The Importance of Being Ernest
 * Thornton Wilder : Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth
 * Tennessee Williams : A Streetcar Named Desire
 * E. E. Cummings : Collected Works
 * Gerard Manley Hopkins : Collected Works
 * A.E. Housman : Collected Works
 * Theodore Roethke : Collected Works
 * Joan Didion : Collected Works
 * Annie Dillard : Collected Works
 * Loren Eiseley : Immense Journey, etc.
 * John McPhee : Collected Works
 * Saki (Munro) : Collected Short Stories
 * Leslie Thomas : Collected Works
 * James Thurber : Carnival, etc.
 * E. B. White : Essays
 * Walter M. Miller : A Canticle for Liebowitz
 * Sherwood Anderson : Winesburg, Ohio
 * F. Scott Fitzgerald : Great Gatsby
 * John Galsworthy : Forsyte Saga
 * Ernest Hemingway : The Sun Also Rises
 * Sinclair Lewis : Main Street
 * John Steinbeck : The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men
 * Richard Wright : Native Son
 * Ray Bradbury : The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451
 * Anthony Burgess : Enderby, A Clockwork Orange
 * John Gardner : October Light
 * James Herriot : All Creatures Great and Small
 * John Knowles : A Separate Peace
 * Harper Lee : To Kill a Mockingbird
 * Toni Morrison : Song of Solomon
 * Alan Paton : Cry the Beloved Country
 * J. R. R. Tolkien : The Lord of the Rings
 * James D. Watson : The Double Helix
 * Thomas Hobbes : Leviathan
 * Desiderius Erasmus : The Praise of Folly
 * Sir Thomas More : Utopia
 * Mary Renault : The King Must Die, etc.
 * J. William : Augustus
 * Bede : History of the English Church and People
 * A.C. Cawley : Everyman Miracle Plays
 * Ackerman : Backgrounds to Medieval Literature
 * W. Langland : Piers the Ploughman
 * E. Hamilton : Mythology, etc.
 * Martin Luther : Table Talk, Three Treatises
 * Francois Rabelais : Gargantua and Pantagruel
 * Marco Polo : The Travels of Marco Polo
 * John Calvin : Institutes of the Christian Religion
 * Michel de Montaigne : Essays
 * William Gilbert : On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies
 * Galileo Galilei : The Starry Messenger, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences
 * Miguel de Cervantes : Don Quixote
 * Edmund Spenser : Prothalamion, The Faerie Queene, Shephearde's Calendar
 * Sir Francis Bacon : Essays, Advancement of Learning, Novum Organum, New Atlantis
 * William Shakespeare : Poetry, Plays and Sonnets, Macbeth, The Tempest
 * Webster : The Duchess of Malfi
 * Ayn Rand : Atlas Shrugged
 * Lewis Mumford : City in History
 * Alice Walker : Color Purple
 * Zukav : Dancing Wu-Li Masters
 * Boris Pasternak : Doctor Zhivago
 * Frank Herbert : Dune Trilogy
 * William Strunk, Jr., E.B. White : The Elements of Style
 * Rifkin : Entropy
 * Hunter S. Thompson : Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
 * Edwin Abbott Abbott : Flatland
 * Yukio Mishima : Forbidden Colors
 * Isaac Asimov : Foundation Trilogy
 * Ayn Rand : Fountainhead
 * Milton Friedman, Rose Friedman : Free to Choose
 * Douglas Hofstadter : Gödel, Escher, Bach
 * Margaret Mitchell : Gone with the Wind
 * Thomas Pynchon : Gravity's Rainbow
 * Margaret Atwood : Handmaid's Tale
 * John Hersey : Hiroshima
 * Revel : How Democracies Perish
 * Antoine de Saint-Exupery : Little Prince
 * Frankl : Man's Search for Meaning
 * Lewis : Mere Christianity
 * Edward Abbey : Monkey Wrench Gang
 * Jack Kerouac : On the Road
 * William L. Shirer : Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
 * Peck : Road Less Travelled
 * Aldo Leopold : A Sand County Almanac
 * Simone de Beauvoir : Second Sex
 * Merton : Seven Story Mountain
 * Hermann Hesse : Siddhartha, Steppenwolf
 * Kurt Vonnegut : Slaughterhouse-Five
 * E.F. Schumacher : Small Is Beautiful
 * Robert A. Heinlein : Stranger in a Strange Land
 * Kuhn : Structure of Scientific Revolutions
 * Capra : Tao of Physics
 * Alvin Toffler : Third Wave
 * Berry : Unsettling of America
 * Robert M. Pirsig : Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
 * Ben Jonson : Volpone, Epigrams, Plays
 * Izaak Walton : The Compleat Angler
 * Johannes Kepler : Epitome of Copernican Astronomy, Concerning the Harmonies of the World]]
 * William Harvey : On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals, On the Circulation of the Blood, On the Generation of Animals
 * René Descartes : Rules for the Direction of the Mind: Discourse on the Method, Geometry, Meditations on First Philosophy and other works
 * Moliere : Comedies
 * John Milton : English Minor Poems, Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, Areopagitica, Lycidas, On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, Sonnets, L'Allegro
 * William Blake : Selected Works
 * Blaise Pascal : The Provincial Letters, Pensees, Scientific Treatises
 * Sir Isaac Newton : Principia and Optics, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
 * Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz : Discourse on Metaphysics, New Essays Concerning Human Understanding, Monadology
 * Benedict de Spinoza : Ethics
 * Christiaan Huygens : Treatise on Light
 * John Locke : A Letter Concerning Toleration, Second Essay Concerning Civil Government, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Thoughts Concerning Education
 * Jean Baptiste Racine : Tragedies, Phedre
 * John Bunyan : Pilgrim's Progress
 * Tsao Hsueh Chin : The Dream of the Red Chamber
 * Daniel Defoe : Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders
 * Jonathon Swift : Gulliver's Travels, A Tale of a Tub, Meditations upon a Broomstick, Resolutions When I Come to Be Old, Journal to Stella, A Modest Proposal
 * Choderlos de Laclos : Dangerous Acquaintances
 * Laurence Sterne : Tristram Shandy, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy
 * Restif de la Bretonne : Monsieur Nicolas
 * William Congreve : The Way of the World
 * George Berkeley : The Principles of Human Knowledge
 * Alexander Pope : Essay on Criticism, Rape of the Lock, Essay on Man
 * Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu : Persian Letters, Spirit of Laws
 * Voltaire : Letters on the English, Candide, Philosophical Dictionary
 * Giacomo Casanova : History of My Life
 * Henry Fielding : Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones
 * Samuel Johnson : The Vanity of Human Wishes, Dictionary, Rasselas, The Lives of the Poets
 * David Hume : Treatise on Human Nature, Essays Moral and Political, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
 * Montesquieu : Spirit of Laws,
 * Jean Jaques Rousseau : On the Origin of Inequality, On the Political Economy, Emile, The Social Contract, Confessions
 * Adam Smith : The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Wealth of Nations
 * Immanuel Kant : Critique of Pure Reason,
 * Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals,
 * Critique of Practical Reason, The Science of Right, Critique of Judgment, Perpetual Peace
 * Edward Gibbon : The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Autobiography
 * James Boswell : Journal, Life of Samuel Johnson
 * Antoine Laurent Lavoisier : Elements of Chemistry
 * John Jay, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton : Federalist Papers, (together with Articles of Confederation, Constitution of the United States and Declaration of Independence)
 * Thomas Jefferson : Writings
 * Flannery O'Connor : Wise Blood, Collected Works
 * Abraham Lincoln : Speeches and Writings 1832-1858, Speeches and Writings 1859-1865
 * Ulysses S. Grant : Personal Memoirs and Selected Letters
 * William Tecumseh Sherman : Memoirs
 * Richard B. Morris, ed. : Basic Documents in American History
 * Clinton Rossiter, ed. : The Federalist Papers
 * Jeremy Bentham : Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Theory of Fictions
 * Johann Wolfgang von Goethe : Faust, Poetry and Truth
 * Anton Chekhov : Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard
 * Flann O'Brien : At Swim-Two-Birds
 * Graham Greene : The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter
 * Eugene O'Neill : Mourning Becomes Electra, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey into Night, Ah Wilderness
 * Samuel Beckett : Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape, Murphy
 * E. Bradlee Watson and Benfield Pressey, eds. : Contemporary Drama
 * Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier : Analytical Theory of Heat
 * William Wordsworth : Poems, The Prelude, Selected Shorter Poems, Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, 1800
 * Samuel Taylor Coleridge : Poems, Biographia Literaria, The Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Kubla Khan, Writings on Shakespeare
 * William Butler Yeats : Collected Poems, Collected Plays, The Autobiography
 * Jane Austen : Pride and Prejudice, Emma
 * Emily Bronte : Wuthering Heights
 * William Makepeace Thackeray : Vanity Fair
 * Karl von Clausewitz : On War
 * Stendhal : The Red and the Black, The Charterhouse of Parma, On Love
 * Baudelaire : Poems
 * George Gordon, Lord Byron : Don Juan
 * Arthur Schopenhauer : Studies in Pessimism
 * Michael Faraday : Chemical History of a Candle, Experimental Researches in Electricity
 * Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel : Phenomenology of Spirit, Philosophy of Right, Lectures on the Philosophy of History
 * Charles Lyell : Principles of Geology
 * Auguste Comte : The Positive Philosophy
 * Honore de Balzac : Pere Goriot, Eugenie Grandet
 * Ralph Waldo Emerson : Representative Men, Essays, Journal, American Scholar
 * Nathaniel Hawthorne : The Scarlet Letter, Selected Tales
 * Alexis de Tocqueville : Democracy in America
 * John Stuart Mill : A System of Logic, On Liberty, Representative Government, Utilitarianism, The Subjection of Women
 * Charles Darwin : The Origin of Species, the Descent of Man, Autobiography
 * Charles Dickens : The Pickwick Papers,David Copperfield, Bleak House, Great Expectations, Hard Times, Our Mutual Friend, Little Dorrit
 * Francis Parkman : France and England in North America
 * Harriet Beecher Stowe : Uncle Tom's Cabin
 * Frederick Douglass : Various
 * Claude Bernard : Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine*
 * Henry David Thoreau : Civil Disobedience, Walden, A Week, Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod
 * Karl Marx : Capital (together with Communist Manifesto)
 * George Eliot : Adam Bede, Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss
 * T.S. Eliot : Collected Poems and Collected Plays, Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
 * Walt Whitman : Selected Poems, Democratic Vistas, Preface to the first issue of Leaves of Grass (1855), A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads
 * Robert Frost : Collected Poems
 * Lewis Carroll : Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass
 * Thomas Hardy : The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d'Urbervilles
 * Joseph Conrad : Nostromo, Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness
 * E.M. Forster : A Passage to India
 * Herman Melville : Moby Dick, Billy Budd, Bartleby the Scrivener,
 * Redburn, White-Jacket The Confidence-Man, Israel Potter, Pierre
 * Friedrich Engels : The Communist Manifesto
 * Fyodor Dostoevsky : Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov
 * Gustave Flaubert : Madame Bovary, Three Stories, A Sentimental Education
 * Edmond and Jules de Goncourt : Journal
 * Rimbaud : Poems
 * Henrik Ibsen : Plays, A Doll's House
 * Count Leo Tolstoy : War and Peace, Anna Karenina, What is Art?, Twenty-Three Tales, The Kingdom of God is within You
 * Mark Twain : The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Mysterious Stranger, Mississippi Writings, The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It
 * William James : The Principles of Psychology,
 * The Varieties of Religious Experience, Pragamatism and Four Essays from The Meaning of Truth, Essays in Radical Empiricism
 * Henry James : The American, The Ambassadors
 * Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche : Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morals, The Will to Power
 * Jules Henri Poincare : Science and Hypothesis, Science and Method
 * Sigmund Freud : The Interpretation of Dreams,Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Civilization and Its Discontents,New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
 * Gilbert White : A Natural History and Antiquity of Selbourne
 * Robert Burns : Various
 * George Bernard Shaw : Plays and Prefaces, Pygmalion, Major Barbara
 * Max Planck : Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory, Where Is Science Going?, Scientific Autobiography
 * Henri Bergson : Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory,Creative Evolution, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
 * John Dewey : How We Think, Democracy and Education, Experience and Nature, Logic, the Theory of Inquiry, Human Nature and Conduct
 * Alfred North Whitehead : An Introduction to Mathematics, Science and the Modern World, The Aims of Education and Other Essays, Adventures of Ideas
 * George Santayana : The Life of Reason, Skepticism and Animal Faith]], Persons and Places
 * John Donne : Selected Works
 * Nikolai Lenin : The State and Revolution
 * Marcel Proust : Remembrance of Things Past
 * Bertrand Russell : The Problems of Philosophy, The Analysis of Mind, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, Human Knowledge; Its Scope and Limits
 * Thomas Mann : The Magic Mountain, Joseph and His Brothers
 * Albert Einstein : The Meaning of Relativity, On the Method of Theoretical Physics, The Evolution of Physics (with L. Infeld)
 * James Joyce : The Dead in Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake
 * Virginia Woolf : Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves, Room of One's Own
 * D.H. Lawrence : Sons and Lovers, Women in Love
 * Aldous Huxley : Brave New World, Collected Essays, After Many a Summer, Ape and Essence, Island
 * L.P. Hartley : Facial Justice
 * Olivia Manning : The Balkans Trilogy (to 1965)
 * Ivy Compton-Burnett : The Mighty and Their Fall
 * Joseph Heller : Catch-22
 * Richard Hughes : The Fox in the Attic
 * Patrick White : Riders in the Chariot
 * Angus Wilson : The Old Men at the Zoo, Late Call
 * James Baldwin : Another Country, Go Tell it on the Mountain
 * Pamela Hansford Johnson : An Error of Judgment
 * Malcolm Lowry : Under the Volcano
 * V.S. Naipaul : A Bend in the River
 * William Styron : Sophie's Choice
 * Brian Aldiss : Life in the West
 * Russell Hoban : Riddley Walker
 * David Lodge : How Far Can You Go?
 * John Kennedy Toole : A Confederacy of Dunces
 * Alasdair Gray : Lanark
 * Alexander Theroux : Darconville's Cat
 * Paul Theroux : The Mosquito Coast
 * Gore Vidal : Creation
 * Norman Mailer : The Naked and the Dead, Ancient Evenings, Armies of the Night
 * Nevil Shute : No Highway
 * Elizabeth Bowen : The Heat of the Day
 * Jaques Maritain : Art and Scholasticism, The Degrees of Knowledge, The Rights of Man and Natural Law, True Humanism
 * Franz Kafka : The Trial, The Castle
 * Arnold Toynbee : A Study of History, Civilization on Trial
 * Jean Paul Sartre : Nausea, No Exit, Being and Nothingness
 * Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn : The First Circle, The Cancer Ward
 * George Orwell : Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four
 * Andre Malraux : Man's Fate
 * Albert Camus : The Plague, The Stranger, Outsider
 * Edgar Allan Poe : Short Stories and Other Works, The Raven
 * Mary McCarthy : The Groves of Academe
 * Raymond Chandler : The Long Goodbye
 * Kingsley Amis : Lucky Jim, The Anti-Death League
 * John Braine : Room at the Top
 * Lawrence Durrell : The Alexandria Quartet (to 1960)
 * Colin MacInnes : The London Novels (to 1960)
 * Malcolm Bradbury : The History Man
 * Brian Moore : The Doctor's Wife
 * Robert Nye : Falstaff
 * Erica Jong : How to Save Your Own Life
 * James Plunkett : Farewell Companions
 * Paul Scott : Staying On
 * John Updike : The Coup
 * J.G. Ballard : The Unlimited Dream Company
 * Bernard Malamud : The Assistant, Dubin's Lives
 * Iris Murdoch : The Bell
 * Alan Sillitoe : Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
 * T.H. White : The Once and Future King
 * William Faulkner : The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, The Mansion
 * Ian Fleming : Goldfinger
 * C.P. Snow : Strangers and Brothers (to 1970)
 * Ernest Hemingway : Short Stories, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and The Sea, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms
 * Rex Warner : The Aerodrome
 * Joyce Cary : The Horse's Mouth
 * Somerset Maugham : The Razor's Edge, Of Human Bondage
 * Evelyn Waugh : Brideshead Revisited, Sword of Honour (to 1961)
 * Mervyn Peake : Titus Groan
 * John O'Hara : The Lockwood Concern
 * Chinua Achebe : A Man of the People
 * John Barth : Giles Goat-Boy, The End of the Road
 * Nadine Gordimer : The Late Bourgeois World
 * Walker Percy : The Last Gentleman
 * R.K. Narayan : The Vendor of Sweets
 * J.B. Priestley : The Image Men
 * Mordecai Richler : Cocksure
 * Keith Roberts : Pavane
 * John Fowles : The French Lieutenant's Woman
 * Saul Bellow : The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, Humboldt's Gift
 * Miguel de Cervantes de Saavedra : Don Quixote
 * Jorge Luis Borges : Labyrinths, Dreamtigers
 * Gabriel Garcia Marquez : One Hundred Years of Solitude
 * Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol : Dead Souls
 * Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev : Fathers and Sons
 * Arthur Conan Doyle : Sherlock Holmes
 * Alexander Berkman : Various
 * Doris Lessing : The Golden Notebook
 * Muriel Spark : The Girls of Slender Means, The Mandelbaum Gate
 * William Golding : The Spire, The Lord of the Flies
 * Wilson Harris : Heartland
 * Christopher Isherwood : A Single Man
 * Vladimir Nabokov : Lolita, Pale Fire, Speak, Memory, The Defence
 * Henry Adams : The Education of Henry Adams, History of the United States during the Administration of Jefferson, History of the United States during the Administration of Madison
 * Frank Norris : Novels and Essays
 * W.E.B. Du Bois : Writings
 * Willa Cather : Early Novels and Stories, My Antonia
 * Theodore Dreiser : Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, Twelve Men
 * Benjamin Franklin : Writings
 * Fernand Braudel : The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century
 * William H. McNeill : The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community
 * Will and Ariel Durant : The Story of Civilization
 * Samuel Eliot Morison : The Oxford History of the American People
 * Page Smith : A People's History of the United States
 * E.H. Gombrich : The Story of Art
 * H.G. Wells : Various
 * Ford Madox Ford : Parade's End, The Good Soldier
 * Herbert Read : The Green Child
 * William Carlos Williams : Poems
 * Jack London : Novels and Stories, Novels and Social Writings
 * William Dean Howells : Novels 1875-1886
 * Washington Irving : History, Tales, and Sketches, Legend of Sleepy Hollow
 * Stephen Crane : Prose and Poetry
 * James Fenimore Cooper : The Leatherstocking Tales vol. I and II
 * William Sansom : The Body
 * William Cooper : Scenes from Provincial Life
 * Budd Schulberg : The Disenchanted
 * Anthony Powell : A Dance to the Music of Time (to 1975)
 * J.D. Salinger : The Catcher in the Rye
 * Henry Williamson : The Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight (to 1969)
 * Herman Wouk : The Caine Mutiny
 * Ralph Ellison : Invisible Man
 * Henry Green : Party Going
 * Edith Wharton : Ethan Frome
 * Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren : How to Read a Book

Supplementary

 * W.H. Auden, Norman Holmes Pearson, eds. : Poets of the English Language
 * Richard Ellmann, Robert O'Clair, eds. : The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry