Greatest novel ever

Yesterday I told my class in the Twentienth-Century American Novel what I firmly believe: Lolita is the greatest novel written in English of all time. The Modern Library’s board of experts ranked it fourth. The Radcliffe Publishing Course, in its “rival list,” placed Nabokov’s novel eleventh. As a preliminary to defending my nomination of Lolita, which I will offer in my closing lecture on the novel and post here on Monday, here is a list of the greatest English-language novels published since the era of Dickens and Eliot. I have included only fifty titles. One hundred were too much work for one day. Only restriction: one book per author. No double-dipping.

(  1) Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
(  2) Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
(  3) Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
(  4) James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
(  5) F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
(  6) Willa Cather, My Ántonia (1918)
(  7) Philip Roth, American Pastoral (1997)
(  8) Saul Bellow, Mr Sammler’s Planet (1970)
(  9) E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910)
(10) George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
(11) Janet Lewis, The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941)
(12) Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (1907)
(13) Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)
(14) Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust (1934)
(15) Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895)
(16) William Faulkner, Light in August (1932)
(17) Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920)
(18) Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (1954)
(19) J. G. Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur (1973)
(20) Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
(21) C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–56)
(22) Esther Forbes, A Mirror for Witches (1928)
(23) Henry Roth, Call It Sleep (1934)
(24) Elizabeth Taylor, The Soul of Kindness (1964)
(25) Barbara Pym, Less Than Angels (1957)
(26) Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart (1939)
(27) Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
(28) Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926)
(29) Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter (1948)
(30) Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004)
(31) Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution (1954)
(32) Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
(33) Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano (1947)
(34) D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (1920)
(35) David Garnett, Lady into Fox (1922)
(36) Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin (1939)
(37) Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934)
(38) J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
(39) Iris Murdoch, The Flight from the Enchanter (1956)
(40) L. P. Hartley, Eustace and Hilda (1944–47)
(41) Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (1952)
(42) Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900)
(43) Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House on the Prarie (1935)
(44) Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896)
(45) Richard Wright, Native Son (1940)
(46) Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (1919)
(47) Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men (1946)
(48) J. F. Powers, Morte D’Urban (1962)
(49) Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children (1940)
(50) Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)

These are my favorites—the best-written, the most provoking and memorable, the titles I am likeliest to reread when stuck between books.