Canon Archive.
Source List · BooksMethodology

Le Monde 100 Books of the Century

Le Monde 100 Books of the Century is a ranked list published in 1999 — one of the 14 sources behind the book canon, weighted as critics' canon. 34 of its 100 entries appear in the aggregated canon. Its scope (1900–1999) is calibrated against unrestricted lists before scoring.

  1. 1The StrangerThe Outsider — Albert Camus (1942)
  2. 2In Search of Lost TimeRemembrance of Things Past — Marcel Proust (1913)
  3. 3The Trial — Franz Kafka (1925)Canon #9
  4. 4The Little Prince — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1943)Canon #35
  5. 5Man's Fate — André Malraux (1933)Canon #141
  6. 6Journey to the End of the Night — Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1932)Canon #40
  7. 7The Grapes of Wrath — John Steinbeck (1939)Canon #21
  8. 8For Whom the Bell Tolls — Ernest Hemingway (1940)Canon #77
  9. 9Le Grand Meaulnes — Alain-Fournier (1913)Canon #148
  10. 10Froth on the Daydream — Boris Vian (1947)
  11. 11The Second Sex — Simone de Beauvoir (1949)
  12. 12Waiting for Godot — Samuel Beckett (1952)
  13. 13Being and Nothingness — Jean-Paul Sartre (1943)
  14. 14The Name of the Rose — Umberto Eco (1980)Canon #116
  15. 15The Gulag Archipelago — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1973)
  16. 16Paroles — Jacques Prévert (1946)
  17. 17Alcools — Guillaume Apollinaire (1913)
  18. 18The Blue Lotus — Hergé (1936)
  19. 19The Diary of a Young Girl — Anne Frank (1947)
  20. 20Tristes Tropiques — Claude Lévi-Strauss (1955)
  21. 21Brave New World — Aldous Huxley (1932)Canon #38
  22. 22Nineteen Eighty-Four — George Orwell (1949)Canon #13
  23. 23Asterix the Gaul — René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo (1959)
  24. 24The Bald Soprano — Eugène Ionesco (1952)
  25. 25Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality — Sigmund Freud (1905)
  26. 26The AbyssZeno of Bruges — Marguerite Yourcenar (1968)
  27. 27Lolita — Vladimir Nabokov (1955)Canon #24
  28. 28Ulysses — James Joyce (1922)Canon #1
  29. 29The Tartar Steppe — Dino Buzzati (1940)
  30. 30The Counterfeiters — André Gide (1925)Canon #98
  31. 31The Horseman on the Roof — Jean Giono (1951)
  32. 32Belle du Seigneur — Albert Cohen (1968)
  33. 33One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel García Márquez (1967)Canon #4
  34. 34The Sound and the Fury — William Faulkner (1929)Canon #25
  35. 35Thérèse Desqueyroux — François Mauriac (1927)
  36. 36Zazie in the Metro — Raymond Queneau (1959)
  37. 37Confusion of Feelings — Stefan Zweig (1927)
  38. 38Gone with the Wind — Margaret Mitchell (1936)Canon #47
  39. 39Lady Chatterley's Lover — D. H. Lawrence (1928)Canon #166
  40. 40The Magic Mountain — Thomas Mann (1924)Canon #26
  41. 41Bonjour Tristesse — Françoise Sagan (1954)Canon #162
  42. 42Le Silence de la mer — Vercors (1942)
  43. 43Life: A User's Manual — Georges Perec (1978)
  44. 44The Hound of the Baskervilles — Arthur Conan Doyle (1901)Canon #72
  45. 45Under the Sun of Satan — Georges Bernanos (1926)
  46. 46The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)Canon #19
  47. 47The Joke — Milan Kundera (1967)
  48. 48Contempt/A Ghost at Noon — Alberto Moravia (1954)
  49. 49The Murder of Roger Ackroyd — Agatha Christie (1926)Canon #151
  50. 50Nadja — André Breton (1928)
  51. 51Aurélien — Louis Aragon (1944)
  52. 52The Satin Slipper — Paul Claudel (1929)
  53. 53Six Characters in Search of an Author — Luigi Pirandello (1921)
  54. 54The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui — Bertolt Brecht (1941)
  55. 55Friday — Michel Tournier (1967)
  56. 56The War of the Worlds — H. G. Wells (1898)Canon #125
  57. 57If This Is a Man Se questo è un uomo, Survival in Auschwitz — Primo Levi (1947)
  58. 58The Lord of the Rings — J.R.R. Tolkien (1954)Canon #66
  59. 59The Tendrils of the Vine — Colette (1908)
  60. 60Capital of Pain — Paul Éluard (1926)
  61. 61Martin Eden — Jack London (1909)Canon #204
  62. 62The Ballad of the Salty Sea — Hugo Pratt (1967)
  63. 63Writing Degree Zero — Roland Barthes (1953)
  64. 64The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum — Heinrich Böll (1974)
  65. 65The Opposing Shore — Julien Gracq (1951)
  66. 66The Order of Things — Michel Foucault (1966)
  67. 67On the Road — Jack Kerouac (1957)Canon #86
  68. 68The Wonderful Adventures of Nils — Selma Lagerlöf (1906)
  69. 69A Room of One's Own — Virginia Woolf (1929)
  70. 70The Martian Chronicles — Ray Bradbury (1950)
  71. 71The Ravishing of Lol Stein — Marguerite Duras (1964)
  72. 72The Interrogation — J. M. G. Le Clézio (1963)
  73. 73Tropisms — Nathalie Sarraute (1939)
  74. 74Journal, 1887–1910 — Jules Renard (1925)
  75. 75Lord Jim — Joseph Conrad (1900)Canon #108
  76. 76Écrits — Jacques Lacan (1966)
  77. 77The Theatre and Its Double — Antonin Artaud (1938)
  78. 78Manhattan Transfer — John Dos Passos (1925)
  79. 79Ficciones — Jorge Luis Borges (1944)Canon #139
  80. 80Moravagine — Blaise Cendrars (1926)
  81. 81The General of the Dead Army — Ismail Kadare (1963)
  82. 82Sophie's Choice — William Styron (1979)
  83. 83Gypsy Ballads — Federico García Lorca (1928)
  84. 84The Strange Case of Peter the Lett — Georges Simenon (1931)
  85. 85Our Lady of the Flowers — Jean Genet (1944)
  86. 86The Man Without Qualities — Robert Musil (1930)Canon #61
  87. 87Furor and Mystery — René Char (1948)
  88. 88The Catcher in the Rye — J. D. Salinger (1951)Canon #42
  89. 89No Orchids For Miss Blandish — James Hadley Chase (1939)
  90. 90Blake and Mortimer — Edgar P. Jacobs (1950)
  91. 91The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge — Rainer Maria Rilke (1910)
  92. 92Second Thoughts — Michel Butor (1957)
  93. 93The Origins of TotalitarianismThe Burden of Our Time — Hannah Arendt (1951)
  94. 94The Master and Margarita — Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)Canon #121
  95. 95The Rosy Crucifixion — Henry Miller (1949)
  96. 96The Big Sleep — Raymond Chandler (1939)Canon #165
  97. 97Amers — Saint-John Perse (1957)
  98. 98GastonGomer Goof — André Franquin (1957)
  99. 99Under the Volcano — Malcolm Lowry (1947)Canon #207
  100. 100Midnight's Children — Salman Rushdie (1981)Canon #206

List compiled and published by its original authors; positions shown as published. Canon ranks link to each entry's full evidence page.