"Last year, during the celebration of the Book-of-the-Month
Club's 60th anniversary, and in anticipation of the Year of the Reader
being sponsored in 1987 by The Library of Congress, we six members of the
Club's Editorial Board [Clifton Fadiman, John K. Hutchens, David Willis
McCullough, Gloria Norris, Mordecai Richler, and Wilfred Sheed]
decided to sort through our own mental bookcases and select 60 novels,
published between 1926 and 1986, whose impact still endures —
novels that have changed how we Americans talk, think,
write, feel and see ourselves. We gathered for an informal dinner and
compared lists."
— From the introduction by Gloria Norris
Title | Author | Date |
---|---|---|
The Accidental Tourist | Anne Tyler | 1985 |
All the King's Men | Robert Penn Warren | 1946 |
Angle of Repose | Wallace Stegner | 1971 |
Appointment in Samarra | John O'Hara | 1934 |
The Assistant | Bernard Malamud | 1957 |
The Bell Jar | Sylvia Plath | 1963 |
Burr | Gore Vidal | 1973 |
Catch-22 | Joseph Heller | 1961 |
The Catcher in the Rye | J.D. Salinger | 1951 |
The Day of the Locust | Nathanael West | 1939 |
Death Comes for the Archbishop | Willa Cather | 1927 |
Delta Wedding | Eudora Welty | 1946 |
A Fan's Notes | Frederick Exley | 1968 |
A Farewell to Arms | Ernest Hemingway | 1929 |
A Flag for Sunrise | Robert Stone | 1981 |
From Here to Eternity | James Jones | 1951 |
Gone with the Wind | Margaret Mitchell | 1936 |
The Grapes of Wrath | John Steinbeck | 1939 |
Guard of Honor | James Gould Cozzens | 1948 |
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter | Carson McCullers | 1940 |
Heaven's My Destination | Thornton Wilder | 1935 |
Invisible Man | Ralph Ellison | 1952 |
The Last Hurrah | Edwin O'Connor | 1956 |
The Late George Apley | John P. Marquand | 1937 |
Lie Down in Darkness | William Styron | 1952 |
Light in August | William Faulkner | 1932 |
Little Big Man | Thomas Berger | 1964 |
Lolita | Vladimir Nabokov | 1958 |
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne | Brian Moore | 1956 |
Look Homeward, Angel | Thomas Wolfe | 1929 |
The Magic Christian | Terry Southern | 1960 |
The Maltese Falcon | Dashiell Hammett | 1930 |
The Man with the Golden Arm | Nelson Algren | 1949 |
The Mountain Lion | Jean Stafford | 1947 |
The Moviegoer | Walker Percy | 1961 |
The Naked and the Dead | Norman Mailer | 1948 |
Nickel Mountain | John Gardner | 1973 |
Other Voices, Other Rooms | Truman Capote | 1948 |
The Postman Always Rings Twice | James M. Cain | 1934 |
Rabbit, Run | John Updike | 1960 |
Ragtime | E.L. Doctorow | 1975 |
The Recognitions | William Gaddis | 1955 |
Seize the Day | Saul Bellow | 1956 |
The Sheltering Sky | Paul Bowles | 1949 |
Slaughterhouse-Five | Kurt Vonnegut, Jr | 1969 |
Song of Solomon | Toni Morrison | 1977 |
The Sound and the Fury | William Faulkner | 1929 |
Studs Lonigan | James T. Farrell | 1932,4,5 |
The Sun Also Rises | Ernest Hemingway | 1926 |
Tender is the Night | F. Scott Fitzgerald | 1934 |
Them | Joyce Carol Oates | 1969 |
To Kill a Mockingbird | Harper Lee | 1960 |
The Transit of Venus | Shirley Hazzard | 1980 |
The Trees/The Fields/The Town | Conrad Richter | 1940,6,50 |
U.S.A. (The 42nd Parallel, 1919, The Big Money) | John Dos Passos | 1930,3,6 |
Vein of Iron | Ellen Glasgow | 1935 |
The Wall | John Hersey | 1950 |
The Wapshot Chronicles | John Cheever | 1957 |
What Makes Sammy Run? | Budd Schulberg | 1941 |
The World According to Garp | John Irving | 1978 |
Source: The Well-Stocked Bookcase: Sixty Enduring Novels by Americans Published Between 1926 and 1986. Book-of-the-Month Club, 1986? © 1986 BOMC?
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