100 Best Novels of the 20th Century Selections by the Board of the Modern Library, a division of Random House. 1   Ulysses James Joyce 1922 2   The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925 3   A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man James Joyce 1916 4   Lolita Vladimir Nabokov 1958 5   Brave New World Aldous Huxley 1932 6   The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner 1929 7   Catch-22 Joseph Heller 1961 8   Darkness at Noon Arthur Koestler 1941 9   Sons and Lovers D. H. Lawrence 1913 10   The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck 1939 11   Under the Volcano Malcolm Lowry 1947 12   The Way of All Flesh Samuel Butler 1903 13   1984 George Orwell 1949 14   I, Claudius Robert Graves 1934 15   To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf 1927 16   An American Tragedy Theodore Dreiser 1925 17   The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter Carson McCullers 1940 18   Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut 1969 19   Invisible Man Ralph Ellison 1952 20   Native Son Richard Wright 1940 21   Henderson the Rain King Saul Bellow 1959 22   Appointment in Samarra John O'Hara 1934 23   U.S.A. (trilogy) John Dos Passos 1937-trilogy completed 24   Winesburg, Ohio Sherwood Anderson 1919 25   A Passage to India E. M. Forster 1924 1-25 | 26-50 | 51-75 | 76-100