The Rainbow is perhaps DH Lawrence’s finest work, showing him for the radical, protean, thoroughly modern writer he was. Stephen Crane’s account of a young man’s passage to manhood through soldiery is a blueprint for the great American war novel. Jerome K Jerome’s accidental classic about messing about on the Thames remains a comic gem. Inspired by the author’s fury at the corrupt state of England, and dismissed by critics at the time, The Way We Live Now is recognised as Trollope’s masterpiece.
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981).
Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler (1988).
$18.00. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5). English by Niccolò Machiavelli (722), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (683), Jane Eyre: An Autobiography by Charlotte Brontë (656), Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau (656), Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (623), Grimms' Fairy Tales by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm (591), The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (583), The Amazing City by John Frederick Macdonald (574), Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (560), The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle (559), The Call of the Wild by Jack London (552), Coming of the Gods by Chester Whitehorn (506), Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (498), Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (481), A History of the Philippines by David P. Barrows (457), The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African by Equiano (452), The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum (441), The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells (379), The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe (377), The Count of Monte Cristo, Illustrated by Alexandre Dumas (371), Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery (371), Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome by E. M. Berens (357), A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle (351), The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe (350), Raiders of the Second Moon by Gene Ellerman (349), Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein (348), Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson by Ralph Waldo Emerson (343), The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (339), Second Treatise of Government by John Locke (335), An American Crusader at Verdun by Philip Sidney Rice (326), Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (322), A Dictionary of Cebuano Visayan by John U. Wolff (321), The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 — Volume 07 of 55 (320), The Happy Prince, and Other Tales by Oscar Wilde (318), The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (314), The Vanishing Venusians by Leigh Brackett (312), The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 2 by Edgar Allan Poe (311), Le jardin des supplices by Octave Mirbeau (302), Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell by Dante Alighieri (297), Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin (294), Fossil Forests of the Yellowstone National Park by Frank Hall Knowlton (289), Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne (285), Vandals of the Void by Robert Pierpont Wilson (285), Prestuplenie i nakazanie. 89. 87. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719).
39. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1929). Their selections were then weighted according to the order and the results were tabulated. The influence of William Faulkner’s immersive tale of raw Mississippi rural life can be felt to this day. 67. Laurence Sterne’s vivid novel caused delight and consternation when it first appeared and has lost little of its original bite. An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro (1986). Here’s a list of important Penguin Classics. A guilty pleasure it may be, but it is impossible to overlook the enduring influence of a tale that helped to define the jazz age. In his Booker-winning masterpiece, Coetzee’s intensely human vision infuses a fictional world that both invites and confounds political interpretation.
100. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915). Sylvia Plath’s painfully graphic roman à clef, in which a woman struggles with her identity in the face of social pressure, is a key text of Anglo-American feminism. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850). 90. This entertaining if contrived story of a hack writer and priest who becomes pope sheds vivid light on its eccentric author – described by DH Lawrence as a “man-demon”. Fitzgerald’s jazz age masterpiece has become a tantalising metaphor for the eternal mystery of art. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926). Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926). Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome (1889). Paperback.
The middle volume of John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy is revolutionary in its intent, techniques and lasting impact.
96.