The 20th Century's Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction is a list of the 100 best English-language books of the 20th century compiled by American literary critic Larry McCaffery. The list was created largely in response to the Modern Library 100 Best Novels list (1999), which McCaffery considered out of touch with 20th-century fiction. McCaffery wrote that he saw his list "as a means of sharing with readers my own views about what books are going to be read 100 or 1000 years from now". [1]
The list includes many books not included in the Modern Library list, including five of the top ten: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow , Robert Coover's The Public Burning , Samuel Beckett's Trilogy ( Molloy , Malone Dies and The Unnamable ), Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans , and William S. Burrough's The Nova Trilogy . Topping the list is Vladimir Nabokov's 1962 novel Pale Fire , which McCaffery called the "most audaciously conceived novel of the century."
Not counting the tetralogies of Rikki Ducornet (#35) and Gene Wolfe (#78), the most cited author is James Joyce, who has written four works on the list: Ulysses (#2), Finnegans Wake (#10), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (#21), and Dubliners (#63). Robert Coover and William H. Gass each have three works on the list, while Samuel Delany, Don DeLillo, William Faulkner, Raymond Federman, William Gaddis, Vladimir Nabokov, and William Vollmann have two apiece.
Altogether, there are 34 titles in common between the Modern Library list and the Greatest Hits list:
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. Joyce's novel Ulysses (1922) is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, particularly stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, letters, and occasional journalism.
Pale Fire is a 1962 novel by Vladimir Nabokov. The novel is presented as a 999-line poem titled "Pale Fire", written by the fictional poet John Shade, with a foreword, lengthy commentary and index written by Shade's neighbor and academic colleague, Charles Kinbote. Together these elements form a narrative in which both fictional authors are central characters. Nabokov wrote Pale Fire in 1960–61, after the success of Lolita had made him financially independent, allowing him to retire from teaching and return to Europe. Nabokov began writing the novel in Nice and completed it in Montreux, Switzerland.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin, was a Russian-American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist. Born in Imperial Russia in 1899, Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian (1926–1938) while living in Berlin, where he met his wife. He achieved international acclaim and prominence after moving to the United States, where he began writing in English. Nabokov became an American citizen in 1945 and lived mostly on the East Coast before returning to Europe in 1961, where he settled in Montreux, Switzerland.
Ulysses is a modernist novel by the Irish writer James Joyce. Partially serialized in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, the entire work was published in Paris by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, Joyce's fortieth birthday. It is considered one of the most important works of modernist literature and has been called "a demonstration and summation of the entire movement".
This is a list of book lists (bibliographies) on Wikipedia, organized by various criteria.
The first Irish prose fiction, in the form of legendary stories, appeared in the Irish language as early as the seventh century, along with chronicles and lives of saints in Irish and Latin. Such fiction was an adaptation and elaboration of earlier oral material and was the work of a learned class who had acquired literacy with the coming of Latin Christianity. A number of these stories were still available in manuscripts of the late medieval period and even as late as the nineteenth century, though poetry was by that time the main literary vehicle of the Irish language.
Transgressive fiction is a genre of literature which focuses on characters who feel confined by the norms and expectations of society and who break free of those confines in unusual or illicit ways.
Postmodern literature is a form of literature that is characterized by the use of metafiction, unreliable narration, self-reflexivity, intertextuality, and which often thematizes both historical and political issues. This style of experimental literature emerged strongly in the United States in the 1960s through the writings of authors such as Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Philip K. Dick, Kathy Acker, and John Barth. Postmodernists often challenge authorities, which has been seen as a symptom of the fact that this style of literature first emerged in the context of political tendencies in the 1960s. This inspiration is, among other things, seen through how postmodern literature is highly self-reflexive about the political issues it speaks to.
Hutchinson Heinemann is a British publishing firm founded in 1887. It is currently an imprint which is ultimately owned by Bertelsmann, the German publishing conglomerate.
George Norman Douglas was a British writer, now best known for his 1917 novel South Wind. His travel books, such as Old Calabria (1915), were also appreciated for the quality of their writing.
Olympia Press was a Paris-based publisher, launched in 1953 by Maurice Girodias as a rebranded version of the Obelisk Press he inherited from his father Jack Kahane. It published a mix of erotic fiction and avant-garde literary fiction, and is best known for issuing the first printed edition of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita.
"Skinner's Room" is a science fiction short story by American-Canadian author William Gibson, originally composed for Visionary San Francisco, a 1990 museum exhibition exploring the future of San Francisco. It features the first appearance in Gibson's fiction of "the Bridge", which Gibson revisited as the setting of his acclaimed Bridge trilogy of novels. In the story, the Bridge is overrun by squatters, among them Skinner, who occupies a shack atop a bridgetower. An altered version of the story was published in Omni magazine and subsequently anthologized. "Skinner's Room" was nominated for the 1992 Locus Award for Best Short Story.
Lawrence F. McCaffery Jr. is an American literary critic, editor, and retired professor of English and comparative literature at San Diego State University. His work and teaching focuses on postmodern literature, contemporary fiction, and Bruce Springsteen. He also played a role in helping to establish science fiction as a major literary genre.
The Folio Society is an independent London-based publisher, founded by Charles Ede in 1947 and incorporated in 1971. Formerly privately owned, it became an employee ownership trust since 2021.
Modern Library's 100 Best Novels is a 1998 list of the best English-language novels published during the 20th century, as selected by Modern Library from among 400 novels published by Random House, which owns Modern Library. The purpose of the list was to "bring the Modern Library to public attention" and stimulate sales of its books. A separate Modern Library 100 Best Nonfiction list of the 100 best non-fiction books of the 20th century was created the same year.
Literature of the 20th century refers to world literature produced during the 20th century.
Striking and Picturesque Delineations of the Grand, Beautiful, Wonderful, and Interesting Scenery Around Loch-Earn, also published as A Description of the Beauties of Edinample and Lochearnhead, is a short book by the Scottish writer Angus McDiarmid that led the local-history populariser Archie McKerracher to call him "the world's worst author".
Lolita is a 1955 novel written by Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov that addresses the controversial subject of hebephilia. The protagonist is a French literature professor who moves to New England and writes under the pseudonym Humbert Humbert. He describes his obsession with a 12-year-old "nymphet", Dolores Haze, whom he kidnaps and sexually abuses after becoming her stepfather. Privately, he calls her "Lolita", the Spanish diminutive for Dolores. The novel was originally written in English, but fear of censorship in the U.S. and Britain led to it being first published in Paris, France, in 1955 by Olympia Press.
Bokklubben World Library is a series of classical books, mostly novels, published by the Norwegian Book Clubs since 2002. It is based on a list of the hundred best books, as proposed by one hundred writers from fifty-four countries, compiled and organized in 2002 by the Book Club. This list endeavors to reflect world literature, with books from all countries, cultures, and time periods.
William Eastlake was an American writer. His Checkerboard Trilogy, consisting of the works Go in Beauty (1956), The Bronc People (1958), and Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses (1963) was included by literary critic Larry McCaffery in his list of the 20th Century's Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction.