Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century

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The 100 Books of the Century (French: Les cent livres du siècle) is a list of the hundred
most memorable books of the 20th century, regardless of language, according to a poll
performed during the spring of 1999 by the French retailer Fnac and the Paris newspaper
Le Monde.

Overview
Starting from a preliminary list of 200 titles created by bookshops and journalists, 17,000
French participants responded to the question, "Which books have stuck in your mind?"
(Quels livres sont restés dans votre mémoire?) As Le Monde journalist Josyane
Savigneau aptly clarified in her article, the list is not meant to encompass the 100 most
distinguished French literary works of the 20th century, but rather to reflect the emotional
connections of the French populace.[1]

The list includes both classic novels and genre fiction (Tolkien, Agatha Christie, A. C.
Doyle), as well as poetry, drama and nonfiction literature (Freud's essays and the diary of
Anne Frank). There are also comic books on the list, one album from each of these five
Francophone or Italian series: Asterix, Tintin, Blake and Mortimer, Gaston and Corto
Maltese. The large number of French novels of the list is due to the demographics of the
surveyed group.

Likewise, comparable lists by English language sources—such as the two lists of Modern
Library 100 Best Novels published in 1998, one by the Board of the Modern Library and
the other by readers who responded—disproportionately favour British and American
authors. Non-English language works were not eligible for the two Modern Library lists.

List

No. Title Author Year Language

1 The Stranger Albert Camus 1942 French

The Outsider

2 In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust 1913–27 French

Remembrance of Things Past

3 The Trial Franz Kafka 1925 German

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No. Title Author Year Language

4 The Little Prince Antoine de Saint- 1943 French

Exupéry

5 Man's Fate André Malraux 1933 French

6 Journey to the End of the Louis-Ferdinand Céline 1932 French

Night

7 The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck 1939 English

8 For Whom the Bell Tolls Ernest Hemingway 1940 English

9 Le Grand Meaulnes Alain-Fournier 1913 French

10 Froth on the Daydream Boris Vian 1947 French

11 The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir 1949 French

12 Waiting for Godot Samuel Beckett 1952 French

13 Being and Nothingness Jean-Paul Sartre 1943 French

14 The Name of the Rose Umberto Eco 1980 Italian

15 The Gulag Archipelago Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 1973 Russian

16 Paroles Jacques Prévert 1946 French

17 Alcools Guillaume Apollinaire 1913 French

18 The Blue Lotus Hergé 1936 French

19 The Diary of a Young Girl Anne Frank 1947 Dutch

20 Tristes Tropiques Claude Lévi-Strauss 1955 French

21 Brave New World Aldous Huxley 1932 English

22 Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell 1949 English

23 Asterix the Gaul René Goscinny and 1959 French

Albert Uderzo

24 The Bald Soprano Eugène Ionesco 1952 French

25 Three Essays on the Theory Sigmund Freud 1905 German

of Sexuality

26 The Abyss Marguerite Yourcenar 1968 French

Zeno of Bruges

27 Lolita Vladimir Nabokov 1955 English

28 Ulysses James Joyce 1922 English

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No. Title Author Year Language

29 The Tartar Steppe Dino Buzzati 1940 Italian

30 The Counterfeiters André Gide 1925 French

31 The Horseman on the Roof Jean Giono 1951 French

32 Belle du Seigneur Albert Cohen 1968 French

33 One Hundred Years of Gabriel García Márquez 1967 Spanish

Solitude

34 The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner 1929 English

35 Thérèse Desqueyroux François Mauriac 1927 French

36 Zazie in the Metro Raymond Queneau 1959 French

37 Confusion of Feelings Stefan Zweig 1927 German

38 Gone with the Wind Margaret Mitchell 1936 English

39 Lady Chatterley's Lover D.H. Lawrence 1928 English

40 The Magic Mountain Thomas Mann 1924 German

41 Bonjour Tristesse Françoise Sagan 1954 French

42 Le Silence de la mer Vercors 1942 French

43 Life: A User's Manual Georges Perec 1978 French

44 The Hound of the Baskervilles Arthur Conan Doyle 1901–02 English

45 Under the Sun of Satan Georges Bernanos 1926 French

46 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925 English

47 The Joke Milan Kundera 1967 Czech

48 Contempt/A Ghost at Noon Alberto Moravia 1954 Italian

49 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd Agatha Christie 1926 English

50 Nadja André Breton 1928 French

51 Aurélien Louis Aragon 1944 French

52 The Satin Slipper Paul Claudel 1929 French

53 Six Characters in Search of an Luigi Pirandello 1921 Italian

Author

54 The Resistible Rise of Arturo Bertolt Brecht 1941 German

Ui

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No. Title Author Year Language

55 Friday Michel Tournier 1967 French

56 The War of the Worlds H.G. Wells 1898[a] English

57 If This Is a Man Primo Levi 1947 Italian

Se questo è un uomo, Survival
in Auschwitz

58 The Lord of the Rings J.R.R. Tolkien 1954–55 English

59 The Tendrils of the Vine Colette 1908 French

60 Capital of Pain Paul Éluard 1926 French

61 Martin Eden Jack London 1909 English

62 The Ballad of the Salty Sea Hugo Pratt 1967 Italian

63 Writing Degree Zero Roland Barthes 1953 French

64 The Lost Honour of Katharina Heinrich Böll 1974 German

Blum

65 The Opposing Shore Julien Gracq 1951 French

66 The Order of Things Michel Foucault 1966 French

67 On the Road Jack Kerouac 1957 English

68 The Wonderful Adventures of Selma Lagerlöf 1906–07 Swedish

Nils

69 A Room of One's Own Virginia Woolf 1929 English

70 The Martian Chronicles Ray Bradbury 1950 English

71 The Ravishing of Lol Stein Marguerite Duras 1964 French

72 The Interrogation J.M.G. Le Clézio 1963 French

73 Tropisms Nathalie Sarraute 1939 French

74 Journal, 1887–1910 Jules Renard 1925 French

75 Lord Jim Joseph Conrad 1900 English

76 Écrits Jacques Lacan 1966 French

77 The Theatre and Its Double Antonin Artaud 1938 French

78 Manhattan Transfer John Dos Passos 1925 English

79 Ficciones Jorge Luis Borges 1944 Spanish

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 No. Title Author Year Language

80 Moravagine Blaise Cendrars 1926 French

81 The General of the Dead Army Ismail Kadare 1963 Albanian

82 Sophie's Choice William Styron 1979 English

83 Gypsy Ballads Federico García Lorca 1928 Spanish

84 The Strange Case of Peter the Georges Simenon 1931 French

Lett

85 Our Lady of the Flowers Jean Genet 1944 French

86 The Man Without Qualities Robert Musil 1930–42 German

87 Furor and Mystery René Char 1948 French

88 The Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger 1951 English

89 No Orchids For Miss Blandish James Hadley Chase 1939 English

90 Blake and Mortimer Edgar P. Jacobs 1950 French

91 The Notebooks of Malte Rainer Maria Rilke 1910 German

Laurids Brigge

92 Second Thoughts Michel Butor 1957 French

93 The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt 1951 English

The Burden of Our Time

94 The Master and Margarita Mikhail Bulgakov 1967 Russian

95 The Rosy Crucifixion Henry Miller 1949–60 English

96 The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler 1939 English

97 Amers Saint-John Perse 1957 French

98 Gaston André Franquin 1957 French

Gomer Goof

99 Under the Volcano Malcolm Lowry 1947 English

100 Midnight's Children Salman Rushdie 1981 English

Note: Classified by the language of the book's first publication, which might not be the
author's principal language.

See also
Bokklubben World Library (Norway)

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 List of Nobel laureates in Literature (Sweden) – including Camus, Steinbeck, Hemingway,
Beckett, Sartre, Solzhenitsyn, Gide, García Márquez, Faulkner, Mauriac, Mann, Pirandello, Böll,
Lagerlöf, Le Clézio, and Perse
List of recipients of the Grand Prize of the Académie française (France) – including
de Saint-Exupéry, Cohen, Mauriac, Bernanos, and Tournier
List of recipients of the Prix Goncourt (France) – including Proust, Malraux, de Beauvoir,
Tournier, Gracq, and Duras
List of recipients of the Prix Renaudot (France) – including Céline, Perec, Aragon, Le
Clézio, and Beigbeder
List of recipients of the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca (France) – including Kundera,
Borges, Kadare, and Styron
List of recipients of the Prix Médicis (France) – including Eco, Perec, and Kundera
List of recipients of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (US) – including Steinbeck, Hemingway,
Faulkner, Mitchell, and Styron
List of recipients of the Neustadt Prize for Literature (US) – including García Márquez
and Kadare
List of recipients of the European Literary Award (Austria) – including de Beauvoir, Eco,
Ionesco, Kundera, Duras, and Rushdie
List of recipients of the Jerusalem Prize (Israel) – including de Beauvoir, Ionesco,
Kundera, Borges, and Kadare
List of recipients of the Strega Prize (Italy) – including Eco, Buzzati, Moravia, and Levi
List of recipients of the Prince of Asturias Award (Spain) – including Kadare
List of recipients of the Cervantes Prize (Spain) – including Borges
Modern Library 100 Best Novels (US) – all were first published in English
TIME's List of the 100 Best Novels (US) – all were first published in English
The Big Read (UK)

Notes
1. ^ Included because it was not published in French until 1900.

References
1. ^ Savigneau, Josyane (15 October 1999). "Écrivains et choix sentimentaux"
[Authors and sentimental choices]. Le Monde (in French). Archived from the original
on 27 May 2012.

External links
Newsweek's Top 100 Books
Books o' the Ages: A Millennial/Centennial/Decennial/Annual Reassessment,
overview of Best of Century lists

Books

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