20th Century's Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction

The 20th Century’s Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction is a popular "best of" list compiled by Larry McCaffery 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 his 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, whose four works, Ulysses (#2), Finnegans Wake (#10), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (#21), and Dubliners (#63), all made the list. Robert Coover and William H. Gass each have three works on the list.^[2]

Top 10

#	Year	Title	Author
1	1962	Pale Fire	Vladimir Nabokov
2	1922	Ulysses	James Joyce
3	1973	Gravity’s Rainbow	Thomas Pynchon
4	1977	The Public Burning	Robert Coover
5	1929	The Sound and the Fury	William Faulkner
6	1953/56/57	Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable	Samuel Beckett
7	1925	The Making of Americans	Gertrude Stein
8	1962/64/67	The Nova Trilogy: The Soft Machine, Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded	William S. Burroughs
9	1955	Lolita	Vladimir Nabokov
10	1941	Finnegans Wake	James Joyce