New York Public Library's Books of the Century List (1895-1995)

Submitted by dashforcover on Tue, 07/28/2009 - 23:09
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  1. The New York Public Library's Books of the Century List (1895-1995):
  2. "To commemorate the New York Public Library's Centennial in May 1995, librarians identified books that played defining roles in history and culture from 1895 to 1995 -- the Library's first one hundred years. The resulting list, which first appeared in an exhibition and later in a book, includes great books and landmarks; books that influenced the course of events; books that interpreted new worlds; and books that simply delighted millions of readers.

  3. Landmarks of Modern Literature

  4. Anton Chekhov. Tri sestry [The Three Sisters] (1901)
  5. Marcel Proust. A la recherche du temps perdu [Remembrance of Things Past] (3 vols., 1913-27)
  6. Gertrude Stein. Tender Buttons: Objects Food Rooms (1914)
  7. Franz Kafka. Die Verwandlung [The Metamorphosis] (1915)
  8. Edna St. Vincent Millay. Renascence and Other Poems (1917)
  9. William Butler Yeats. The Wild Swans at Coole (1917)
  10. Luigi Pirandello. Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore [Six Characters in Search of an Author] (1921)
  11. T. S. Eliot. The Waste Land (1922)
  12. James Joyce. Ulysses (1922)
  13. Thomas Mann. Der Zauberberg [The Magic Mountain] (1924)
  14. F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby (1925)
  15. Virginia Woolf. To the Lighthouse (1927)
  16. Federico García Lorca. Primer romancero gitano [Gypsy Ballads] (1928)
  17. Richard Wright. Native Son (1940)
  18. William Faulkner. The Portable Faulkner (1946)
  19. W. H. Auden. The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1947)
  20. Samuel Beckett. En attendant Godot [Waiting for Godot; A Tragicomedy in Two Acts] (1952)
  21. Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man (1952)
  22. Vladimir Nabokov. Lolita (1955)
  23. Jorge Luis Borges. Ficciones [Fictions] (1944; 2nd augmented edition, 1956)
  24. Jack Kerouac. On the Road (1957)
  25. Gabriel García Márquez. Cien años de soledad [One Hundred Years of Solitude] (1967)
  26. Philip Roth. Portnoy's Complaint (1969)
  27. Toni Morrison. Song of Solomon (1977)

  28. Nature's Realm

  29. Maurice Maeterlinck. La vie des abeilles [The Life of the Bee] (1901)
  30. Marie Sklodowska Curie. Traité de radioactivité [Treatise on Radioactivity] (1910)
  31. Albert Einstein. The Meaning of Relativity (1922)
  32. Roger Tory Peterson. A Field Guide to the Birds (1934)
  33. Aldo Leopold. A Sand County Almanac (1949)
  34. Konrad Z. Lorenz. Er redete mit dem Vieh, den Vögeln und den Fischen: King Solomon's Ring [King Solomon's Ring: New Light on Animal Ways] (1949)
  35. Rachel Carson. Silent Spring (1962)
  36. Smoking and Health (known as The Surgeon General's Report) (1964)
  37. James Watson. The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (1968)
  38. Edward O. Wilson. The Diversity of Life (1992)

  39. Protest & Progress

  40. Jacob Riis. The Battle with the Slum (1902)
  41. W. E. B. Du Bois. The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
  42. Upton Sinclair. The Jungle (1906)
  43. Jane Addams. Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910)
  44. Lillian Wald. The House on Henry Street (1915)
  45. Lincoln Steffens. The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (1931)
  46. John Dos Passos. U.S.A. (1937)
  47. John Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
  48. James Agee and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941)
  49. Lillian Smith. Strange Fruit (1944)
  50. Paul Goodman. Growing Up Absurd (1960)
  51. James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time (1963)
  52. Malcolm X. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)
  53. Randy Shilts. And the Band Played On (1987)
  54. Alex Kotlowitz. There Are No Children Here (1991)

  55. Colonialism & Its Aftermath

  56. Joseph Conrad. Lord Jim (1900)
  57. Rudyard Kipling. Kim (1901)
  58. Mohandas K. Gandhi. Satyagraha [Non-Violent Resistance] (1921-40)
  59. E.M. Forster. A Passage to India (1924)
  60. Albert Camus. L'étranger [The Stranger] (1942)
  61. United Nations Charter (1945)
  62. Alan Paton. Cry, the Beloved Country (1948)
  63. Edward Steichen. The Family of Man: The Photographic Exhibition Created by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art (1955)
  64. Chinua Achebe. Things Fall Apart (1958)
  65. Frantz Fanon. Les damnés de la terre [The Wretched of the Earth] (1961)
  66. Jean Rhys. Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
  67. Tayeb el-Salih. Mawsim al-Hijra ila al-Shamal [Season of Migration to the North] (1969)
  68. V.S. Naipaul. Guerrillas (1975)
  69. Buchi Emecheta. The Bride Price (1976)
  70. Ryszard Kapuscinski. Cesarz [The Emperor] (1978)
  71. Rigoberta Menchú. Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació conciencia [I, Rigoberta Menchú] (1983)
  72. Marguerite Duras. L'amant [The Lover] (1984)

  73. Mind & Spirit

  74. Emile Durkheim. Le suicide: étude de sociologie [Suicide: A Study in Sociology] (1897)
  75. Sigmund Freud. Die Traumdeutung [The Interpretation of Dreams] (1900)
  76. Havelock Ellis. Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1901-28)
  77. William James. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902)
  78. Kahlil Gibran. The Prophet (1923)
  79. Bertrand Russell. Why I Am Not a Christian (1927)
  80. Margaret Mead. Coming of Age in Samoa (1928)
  81. Jean-Paul Sartre. L'être et le néant [Being and Nothingness] (1943)
  82. Dr. Benjamin Spock. The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946)
  83. The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version (1952)
  84. Paul Tillich. The Courage to Be (1952)
  85. Ken Kesey. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962)
  86. Timothy Leary. The Politics of Ecstasy (1968)
  87. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. On Death and Dying (1969)
  88. Bruno Bettelheim. The Uses of Enchantment (1976)

  89. Popular Culture & Mass Entertainment

  90. Bram Stoker. Dracula (1897)
  91. Henry James. The Turn of the Screw (1898)
  92. Arthur Conan Doyle. The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)
  93. Edgar Rice Burroughs. Tarzan of the Apes (1912)
  94. Zane Grey. Riders of the Purple Sage (1912)
  95. Agatha Christie. The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920)
  96. Dale Carnegie. How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936)
  97. Margaret Mitchell. Gone with the Wind (1936)
  98. Raymond Chandler. The Big Sleep (1939)
  99. Nathanael West. The Day of the Locust (1939)
  100. Grace Metalious. Peyton Place (1956)
  101. Dr. Seuss. The Cat in the Hat (1957)
  102. Robert A. Heinlein. Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)
  103. Joseph Heller. Catch-22 (1961)
  104. Truman Capote. In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (1965)
  105. Jim Bouton. Ball Four: My Life and Hard Times Throwing the Knuckleball in the Big Leagues (1970)
  106. Stephen King. Carrie (1974)
  107. Tom Wolfe. The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987)

  108. Women Rise

  109. Edith Wharton. The Age of Innocence (1920)
  110. Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler. Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement (1923)
  111. Margaret Sanger. My Fight for Birth Control (1931)
  112. Zora Neale Hurston. Dust Tracks on a Road (1942)
  113. Simone de Beauvoir. Le deuxième sexe [The Second Sex] (1949)
  114. Doris Lessing. The Golden Notebook (1962)
  115. Betty Friedan. The Feminine Mystique (1963)
  116. Maya Angelou. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)
  117. Robin Morgan, editor. Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement (1970)
  118. Susan Brownmiller. Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975)
  119. Alice Walker. The Color Purple (1982)

  120. Economics & Technology

  121. Thorstein Veblen. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1899)
  122. Max Weber. Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus [The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism] (1904)
  123. Henry Adams. The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
  124. John Maynard Keynes. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936)
  125. Friedrich A. von Hayek. The Road to Serfdom (1944)
  126. Milton Friedman. A Theory of the Consumption Function (1957)
  127. John Kenneth Galbraith. The Affluent Society (1958)
  128. Jane Jacobs. The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)
  129. Helen Leavitt. Superhighway - Super Hoax (1970)
  130. E.F. Schumacher. Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (1973)
  131. Ed Krol. The Whole Internet: User's Guide & Catalog (1992)

  132. Utopias & Dystopias

  133. H.G. Wells. The Time Machine (1895)
  134. Theodor Herzl. Der Judenstaat [The Jewish State] (1896)
  135. L. Frank Baum. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)
  136. J.M. Barrie. Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906)
  137. Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Herland (1915)
  138. Aldous Huxley. Brave New World (1932)
  139. James Hilton. Lost Horizon (1933)
  140. B.F. Skinner. Walden Two (1948)
  141. George Orwell. 1984 (1949)
  142. Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
  143. Ayn Rand. Atlas Shrugged (1957)
  144. Anthony Burgess. A Clockwork Orange (1962)
  145. Margaret Atwood. The Handmaid's Tale (1985)

  146. War, Holocaust, Totalitarianism

  147. Arnold Toynbee. Armenian Atrocities: The Murder of a Nation (1915)
  148. John Reed. Ten Days That Shook the World (1919)
  149. Siegfried Sassoon. The War Poems (1919)
  150. Jaroslav Hasek. Osudy dobrého vojáka Svejka za svetové války [The Good Soldier Schweik] (1920-23)
  151. Adolf Hitler. Mein Kampf (1925-26)
  152. Erich Maria Remarque. Im Westen nichts Neues [All Quiet on the Western Front] (1928)
  153. Anna Akhmatova. Rekviem [Requiem] (1935-40)
  154. Ernest Hemingway. For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
  155. Arthur Koestler. Darkness at Noon (1941)
  156. John Hersey. Hiroshima (1946)
  157. Anne Frank. Het Achterhuis [The Diary of a Young Girl] (1947)
  158. Winston Churchill. The Gathering Storm (1948)
  159. Elie Wiesel. La nuit [Night] (1958)
  160. Mao Zedong. Quotations from Chairman Mao (1966)
  161. Dee Alexander Brown. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (1970)
  162. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn. Arkhipelag GULag, 1918-1956 [The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation] (1973-75)
  163. Michael Herr. Dispatches (1977)
  164. Art Spiegelman. Maus: A Survivor's Tale (2 vols., 1986-91)

  165. Optimism, Joy, Gentility

  166. Sarah Orne Jewett. The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896)
  167. Helen Keller. The Story of My Life (1903)
  168. G.K. Chesterton. The Innocence of Father Brown (1911)
  169. Juan Ramón Jiménez. Platero y yo [Platero and I; An Andalusian Elegy] (1914)
  170. George Bernard Shaw. Pygmalion (1914)
  171. Emily Post. Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home (1922)
  172. P.G. Wodehouse. The Inimitable Jeeves (1923)
  173. A.A. Milne. Winnie-the-Pooh (1926)
  174. Willa Cather. Shadows on the Rock (1931)
  175. Irma S. Rombauer. The Joy of Cooking: A Compilation of Reliable Recipes with a Casual Culinary Chat (1931)
  176. J.R.R. Tolkien. The Hobbit (1937)
  177. Margaret Wise Brown. Goodnight Moon (1947)
  178. Harper Lee. To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
  179. Langston Hughes. The Best of Simple (1961)
  180. Elizabeth Bishop. The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 (1983)

  181. Favorites of Childhood & Youth

  182. Beatrix Potter. The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1901)
  183. Betty Smith. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943)
  184. C.S. Lewis. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950)
  185. J.D. Salinger. The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
  186. E.B. White. Charlotte's Web (1952)
  187. Ezra Jack Keats. The Snowy Day (1962)
  188. Maurice Sendak. Where the Wild Things Are (1963)
  189. Patricia MacLachlan. Sarah, Plain and Tall (1985)


  191. B. Bergeron, rev. 9/97
Author Comments: 

List pulled from here.

Cloned From: 
The New York Public Library's Books of the Century List (1895-1995)