Le Monde

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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[edit]

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.[citation needed]

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.[citation needed]

North America:

  1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925, USA)

  2. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939, USA)

  3. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (1940, USA)

  4. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951, USA)

  5. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955, USA/Russia)

  6. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury (1950, USA)

  7. On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957, USA)

  8. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (1936, USA)

  9. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960, USA)

  10. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966, USA)

South America:

  1. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967, Colombia)

  2. Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges (1944, Argentina)

Europe:

  1. 1984 by George Orwell (1949, UK)

  2. The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942, France)

  3. The Trial by Franz Kafka (1925, Austria-Hungary)

  4. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932, UK)

  5. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (1954-1955, UK)

  6. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967, Russia)

  7. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (1947, Netherlands)

  8. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (1980, Italy)

  9. Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1932, France)

  10. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (1953, Ireland/France)

  11. The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle (1902, UK)

  12. The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil (1930, Austria)

  13. Ulysses by James Joyce (1922, Ireland)

  14. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929, USA)

  15. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1943, France)

  16. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (1913-1927, France)

  17. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (1898, UK)

  18. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (1924, Germany)

  19. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke (1910, Austria)

  20. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie (1926, UK)

  21. The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1949, France)

  22. Asterix the Gaul by René Goscinny (1959, France)

  23. Bonjour tristesse by Françoise Sagan (1954, France)

  24. The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati (1940, Italy)

  25. Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence (1928, UK)

  26. The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1973, Russia)

  27. L'Écume des jours by Boris Vian (1947, France)

  28. Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier (1913, France)

  29. Martin Eden by Jack London (1909, USA)

  30. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939, USA)

  31. If This Is a Man • The Truce by Primo Levi (1947/1963, Italy)

  32. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (1900, UK)

  33. The Joke by Milan Kundera (1967, Czechoslovakia)

  34. Sophie’s Choice by William Styron (1979, USA)

  35. Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello (1921, Italy)

  36. Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre (1943, France)

  37. Paroles by Jacques Prévert (1946, France)

  38. Le Lotus bleu (Tintin #5) by Hergé (1936, Belgium)

  39. The Bald Soprano and Other Plays by Eugène Ionesco (1950, France)

  40. Sexus (The Rosy Crucifixion, #1) by Henry Miller (1949, USA)

  41. Nadja by André Breton (1928, France)

  42. Zazie in the Metro by Raymond Queneau (1959, France)

  43. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality by Sigmund Freud (1905, Austria)

  44. L'Œuvre au noir by Marguerite Yourcenar (1968, France)

  45. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum by Heinrich Böll (1974, Germany)

  46. The Order of Things by Michel Foucault (1966, France)

  47. Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1955, France)

  48. The Counterfeiters by André Gide (1925, France)

  49. La Confusion des sentiments by Stefan Zweig (1927, Austria)

  50. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1947, UK)

  51. The Wonderful Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlöf (1906, Sweden)

  52. Lorca: Gypsy Ballads by R. G. Havard (1928, Spain)

  53. Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec (1978, France)

  54. Alcools by Guillaume Apollinaire (1913, France)

  55. The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (1951, Germany/USA)

  56. The Horseman on the Roof by Jean Giono (1951, France)

  57. Man's Fate by André Malraux (1933, France)

  58. The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras (1964, France)

  59. Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet (1943, France)

  60. Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos (1925, USA)

  61. The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht (1941, Germany)

  62. Le Silence de la mer by Vercors (1942, France)

  63. Moravagine by Blaise Cendrars (1926, Switzerland)

  64. Contempt by Alberto Moravia (1954, Italy)

  65. Ballad of the Salt Sea by Hugo Pratt (1967, Italy)

  66. Capital of Pain by Paul Éluard (1926, France)

  67. Aurélien by Louis Aragon (1944, France)

  68. The Theater and Its Double by Antonin Artaud (1938, France)

  69. The Opposing Shore by Julien Gracq (1951, France)

  70. Le Secret de l'Espadon - 1 by Edgar P. Jacobs (1950, Belgium)

  71. Belle du Seigneur by Albert Cohen (1968, Switzerland)

  72. Friday, or, The Other Island by Michel Tournier (1967, France)

  73. Thérèse Desqueyroux by François Mauriac (1927, France)

  74. Under Satan's Sun by Georges Bernanos (1926, France)

  75. Writing Degree Zero by Roland Barthes (1953, France)

  76. Les Vrilles De La Vigne by Colette (1908, France)

  77. No Orchids for Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase (1939, UK)

  78. Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute (1939, France)

  79. The Journal of Jules Renard by Jules Renard (1925, France)

  80. Écrits by Jacques Lacan (1966, France)

  81. Gaston 1 by André Franquin (1959, Belgium)

  82. Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett by Georges Simenon (1931, Belgium)

  83. The General of the Dead Army by Ismail Kadare (1963, Albania)

  84. Le Soulier de satin by Paul Claudel (1929, France)

  85. La Modification by Michel Butor (1957, France)

  86. The Interrogation by J.M.G. Le Clézio (1963, France)

  87. Furor & Mystery and Other Writings by René Char (1948, France)

  88. Amers, suivi de Oiseaux et de Poésie by Saint-John Perse (1957, France)

Africa, Asia, and Oceania:

[none]

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