World’s Greatest Books

Below is a table that is like a “best sellers” list, except that it only includes books that were published at least 50 years ago. Many of today’s best-selling novels will be forgotten in a few decades. The test of a really good novel is that people continue to read it decades after it was written. Based on this idea, the following table presents a list of novels that were written at least 50 years ago and that continue to be widely read. The books are arranged according to their popularity (how many people have read them) on the website LibraryThing, which tracks the reading habits of millions of users.

Rank	Title	Author	Publication Year
1	The Lord of the Rings Trilogy	J. R. R. Tolkien	1954-55
2	The Hobbit	J. R. R. Tolkien	1937
3	1984	George Orwell	1949
4	Pride and Prejudice	Jane Austen	1813
5	To Kill a Mockingbird	Harper Lee	1960
6	The Catcher in the Rye	J. D. Salinger	1951
7	The Great Gastby	F. Scott Fitzgerald	1925
8	Jane Eyre	Charlotte Brontë	1847
9	Animal Farm	George Orwell	1945
10	Brave New World	Aldous Huxley	1932
11	Fahrenheit 451	Ray Bradbury	1953
12	Wuthering Heights	Emily Brontë	1845-46
13	Lord of the Flies	William Golding	1954
14	The Odyssey	Homer	700 BC
15	The Complete Works of Shakespeare	William Shakespeare	1621
16	Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass	Lewis Carroll	1871
17	One Hundred Years of Solitude	Gabriel Garcia Marquez	1967
18	Crime and Punishment	Fyodor Dostoevsky	1866
19	Catch-22	Joseph Heller	1961
20	Adventures of Huckleberry Finn	Mark Twain	1885
21	The Chronicles of Narnia	C. S. Lewis	1950-1956
22	The Little Prince	Antoine de Saint-Exupéry	1943
23	Of Mice and Men	John Steinbeck	1937
24	Anna Karenina	Leo Tolstoy	1873-1877
25	Sense and Sensibility	Jane Austen	1811
26	Frankenstein	Mary Shelley	1818
27	Emma	Jane Austen	1815
28	Great Expectations	Charles Dickens	1861
29	The Iliad	Homer	700 BC
30	Dune	Frank Herbert	1965
31	The Picture of Dorian Gray	Oscar Wilde	1890
32	The Stranger	Albert Camus	1942
33	A Wrinkle in Time	Madeleine L’Engle	1962
34	The Scarlet Letter	Nathaniel Hawthorne	1850
35	A Tale of Two Cities	Charles Dickens	1859
36	The Grapes of Wrath	John Steinbeck	1939
37	Lolita	Vladimir Nabokov	1955
38	Moby Dick	Herman Melville	1851
39	Dracula	Bram Stoker	1897
40	Charlotte’s Web	E. B. White	1952
41	On the Road	Jack Kerouac	1957
42	The Secret Garden	Frances Hodgson Burnett	1911
43	The Old Man and The Sea	Ernest Hemingway	1952
44	The Brothers Karamazov	Fyodor Dostoevsky	1879-1880
45	Treasure Island	Robert Louis Stevenson	1883
46	The Bell Jar	Sylvia Plath	1963
47	The Adventures of Tom Sawyer	Mark Twain	1876
48	Siddhartha	Hermann Hesse	1951
49	Persuasion	Jane Austen	1817
50	Don Quixote	Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra	1615
51	War and Peace	Leo Tolstoy	1867
52	A Clockwork Orange	Anthony Burgess	1962
53	Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl	Anne Frank	1947
54	Madame Bovary	Gustave Flaubert	1856
55	Night	Elie Wiesel	1956
56	One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest	Ken Kesey	1962
57	Atlas Shrugged	Ayn Rand	1957
58	Ulysses	James Joyce	1918-1920
59	Mere Christianity	C. S. Lewis	1952
60	Gone With the Wind	Margaret Mitchell	1936
61	Les Misérables	Victor Hugo	1862
62	The Sun Also Rises	Ernest Hemingway	1926
63	Cat’s Cradle	Kurt Vonnegut	1963
64	In Cold Blood	Truman Capote	1966
65	Heart of Darkness	Joseph Conrad	1899
66	Anne of Green Gables	Lucy Maud Montgomery	1908
67	Beowulf	Anonymous	1025
68	The Count of Monte Cristo	Alexandre Dumas	1844
69	East of Eden	John Steinbeck	1952
70	The Inferno	Dante	1320
71	A Farewell to Arms	Ernest Hemingway	1929
72	Where the Wild Things Are	Maurice Sendak	1963
73	Mansfield Park	Jane Austen	1814
74	A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man	James Joyce	1916
75	Robinson Crusoe	Daniel Defoe	1719
76	Oliver Twist	Charles Dickens	1837-39
77	The Prince	Niccolò Machiavelli	1532
78	Charlie and the Chocolate Factory	Roald Dahl	1964
79	The Aeneid	Virgil	19 BC
80	Gulliver’s Travels	Jonathan Swift	1726
81	The Canterbury Tales	Geoffrey Chaucer	1400
82	The Fountainhead	Ayn Rand	1943
83	The Elements of Style	William Strunk	1918
84	Little Women / Good Wives	Louisa May Alcott	1869
85	Northanger Abbey	Jane Austen	1803
86	A Christmas Carol	Charles Dickens	1843
87	The Republic	Plato	380 BC
88	Candide	Voltaire	1759
89	Mrs. Dalloway	Virginia Woolf	1925
90	David Copperfield	Charles Dickens	1849-50
91	The Trial	Franz Kafka	1914-15
92	The Three Musketeers	Alexander Dumas	1844
93	The Art of War	Sun Tzu	450 BC
94	The Wind in the Willows	Kenneth Grahame	1908
95	Confessions	Augustine	397-400
96	Dubliners	James Joyce	1914
97	Foundation Trilogy	Isaac Asimov	1951-53
98	Tess of the D’Urbervilles	Thomas Hardy	1891
99	The Master and Margarita	Mikhail Bulgakov	1928-1940
100	Things Fall Apart	Chinua Achebe	1958
101	Rebecca	Daphne du Maurier	1938
102	Commedia	Dante	1308-1321
103	For Whom the Bell Tolls	Ernest Hemingway	1940
104	The Wonderful Wizard of Oz	L. Frank Baum	1900
105	Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?	Philip K. Dick	1968
106	The Plague	Albert Camus	1947
107	To the Lighthouse	Virginia Woolf	1927
108	The Outsiders	S. E. Hinton	1967
109	Their Eyes Were Watching God	Zora Neale Hurston	1937
110	All Quiet on the Western Front	Erich Maria Remarque	1929
111	The Sound and the Fury	William Faulkner	1929
112	And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie	Agatha Christie	1939
113	Tao Te Ching	Lao Tzu	550 BC
114	Middlemarch	George Eliot	1871-72
115	The Time Machine	H. G. Wells	1895
116	James and the Giant Peach	Roald Dahl	1961
117	The Pilgrim’s Progress	ohn Bunyan	1684