Literature's Top 99
Frankly, if you're looking for the books to help you become well read, you're better off dipping into our chronological list of the Greatest LIterature of All Time. More diversity, more to discover, more to enjoy.
But we get it. The nearly thousand entries there can be daunting. Here's a stripped down list that's easier to handle.
The ninety-nine works below are all taken from that larger list—itself selected from hundreds of sources from around the world. The points system used in "Creating the Greatest Literature of All Time list" is adopted here to rank them. The points for each of the top titles below are indicated, to give you an idea of their relative ratings.
Are these really the ninety-nine best, greatest or most honoured works of all time? Maybe. But the list purports to shows you only the consensus on the works most acclaimed by readers, writers, critics and scholars as of this moment.
As evaluations change over time, you'll see this list adjusting as well. Will Don Quixote, Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary keep contending for the top spot as the world's favourite novel? Will more diverse and modern writers break into the top ranks of the established canon? Is The Maltest Falcon really better than Great Expectations? Will Nineteen Eighty-Four still rank high on the list as we approach 2084?
In the meantime here are the ninety-nine currently most noted literary works to help you along in your project of reading the greatest books ever. Or just to give you something to argue about.
Latest revision: June 14, 2022
The Top 99 greatest works of literature of all time
Click linked titles and authors for details, critiques and other comments.
2. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy, novel 325
4. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy, novel 298
5. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky, novel 280
6.
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, novel
274
10. Oedipus Rex, Sophocles, play 234
15. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, novel 214
16. The Divine Comedy, Alighieri Dante, poem 213
17. Moby Dick, Herman Melville, novel 212
19. In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust, novels 208
21. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez, novel 197
25. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe, novel 185
27. Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift, novel 180
28. The Outsider, Albert Camus, novella 176
Beloved, Toni Morrison, novel 176
31. Antigone, Sophocles, play 168
32. Candide, François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, novella 161
33. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie, novel 160
34. A Doll's House, Henrik Ibsen, play 157
36. Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, play 153
The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer, poems and prose 151
40. The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka, novella 150
41. Aeneid, Virgil, poem 146
42. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison, novel 144
The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James, novel 144
44. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, novel 142
52. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner, novel 133
54. Waiting for Godot Samuel Beckett, play 132
55. The Time Machine, H.G. Wells, novella 131
The Trial, Franz Kafka, novel 131
57. Medea, Euripides, play 130
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy, novella 130
61. The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco, novel 125
62. Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien, novel 123
63. The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells, novel 122
Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol, novel 118
The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky, novel 117
68. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys, novel 115
The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing, novel 114
73. A Passage to India, E.M. Forster, novel 112
75. The Red and the Black, Stendhal, novel 110
77. One Thousand and One Nights, Anonymous, stories 109
79. One Day in the lIfe of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, novella 108
82. Life of Pi, Yann Martel, novel 103
85. The Decameron, Gikovanni Boccaccio, story cycle 101
86. Tom Jones, Henry Fielding, novel 100
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess, novel 100
90. Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin, poem 98
91. Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray, novel 97
A Sentimental Education, Gustav Flaubert, novel 97
93. The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov, play 96
96. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier, novel 93
The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde, play 93
99. Old Goriot, Honoré de Balzac, novel 92
Contenders
That's the current top 99 but, in case you're interested, here are a dozen more titles that either just missed the cut or slipped off earlier versions of this list and—who knows?—may appear on future editions of this list:
Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev, novel
Mahābhārata, Vyasa, epic poem
Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges, story collection
The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Francois Rabelais, novel series