In 2005, Time magazine’s literary critics, Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo selected what they considered to be the top 100 English-language novels published from 1923 to 2005 (1923 being the year Time® began publishing).

This is their list:

1.       The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow 1953

2.       All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren 1946

3.       American Pastoral by Philip Roth 1997

4.       An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser 1925

5.      Animal Farm by George Orwell 1946

6.       Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara 1934

7.       Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume 1970

8.       The Assistant by Bernard Malamud 1957

9.       At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien 1938

10.   Atonement by Ian McEwan 2002

11.   Beloved by Toni Morrison 1987

12.   The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood 1946

13.   The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler 1939

14.   The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood 2000

15.   Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy 1986

16.   Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh 1946

17.   The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder 1927

18.   Call It Sleep by Henry Roth 1935

19.   Catch-22 by Joseph Heller 1961

20.   The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger 1951

21.   A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess 1963

22.   The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron 1967

23.   The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen 2001

24.   The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon 1966

25.   A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell 1951

26.   The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West 1939

27.   Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather 1927

28.   A Death in the Family by James Agee 1958

29.   The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen 1938

30.   Deliverance by James Dickey 1970

31.   Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone 1974

32.   Falconer by John Cheever 1977

33.   The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles 1969

34.   The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing 1962

35.   Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin 1953

36.   Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell 1936

37.   The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck 1939

38.   Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon 1973

39.   The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925

40.   A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh 1934

41.   The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers 1940

42.   The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene 1948

43.   Herzog by Saul Bellow 1964

44.   Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson 1981

45.   A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul 1962

46.   I, Claudius by Robert Graves 1934

47.   Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace 1996

48.   Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison 1952

49.   Light in August by William Faulkner 1932

50.   The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis 1950

51.   Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov 1955

52.   Lord of the Flies by William Golding 1955

53.   The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien 1954

54.   Loving by Henry Green 1945

55.   Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis 1954

56.   The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead 1940

57.   Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie 1981

58.   Money: A Suicide Note by Martin Amis 1984

59.   The Moviegoer by Walker Percy 1961

60.   Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf 1925

61.   Naked Lunch by William Burroughs 1959

62.   Native Son by Richard Wright 1940

63.   Neuromancer by William Gibson 1984

64.   Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro 2005

65.   1984 by George Orwell 1948

66.   On the Road by Jack Kerouac 1957

67.   One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey 1962

68.   The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski 1965

69.   Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov 1962

70.   A Passage to India by E.M. Forster 1924

71.   Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion 1970

72.   Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth 1969

73.   Possession by A.S. Byatt 1990

74.   The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene 1939

75.   The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark 1961

76.   Rabbit, Run by John Updike 1960

77.   Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow 1975

78.   The Recognitions by William Gaddis 1955

79.   Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett 1929

80.   Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates 1961

81.   The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles 1949

82.   Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut 1969

83.   Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson 1992

84.   The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth 1960

85.   The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner 1929

86.   The Sportswriter by Richard Ford 1986

87.   The Spy Who Came In From the Cold by John le Carre 1964

88.   The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway 1926

89.   Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston 1937

90.   Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe 1959

91.   To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee 1960

92.   To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf 1927

93.   Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller 1934

94.   Ubik by Philip K. Dick 1969

95.   Under the Net by Iris Murdoch 1954

96.   Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry 1947

97.   Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons 1986

98.   White Noise by Don DeLillo 1985

99.   White Teeth by Zadie Smith 2000

100.           Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys 1966