There are many lists proclaiming to contain the 100 best books ever written. A cursory comparison of these lists will quickly reveal that their creators do not agree very much on what constitutes a truly great book. So, it seems to make sense to merge these lists into one compilation of great books. Here in this listing is a ranking of the greatest books of all time selected by combining the most mentioned books on ten of the most popular “top 100” books lists.

Each book in this list is followed by the number of times it appeared on the ten lists that were examined. As can be readily seen, no book made it on more than seven of the ten lists. Also, this listing is actually 113 books long, as there was no way to break the tie at the end, so all books appearing on at least three lists were included.

No, this listing is not touted as the definitive answer for all time. But, it has gleaned the commonality of books that run through the most popular listings of great books. Religious books, such as the Bible or the Koran, were not considered in these calculations. Surprisingly, a few books did not make the list, and some others did make it that seemed unlikely. Here they are… the top 100 books of all time… as determined by their frequency of appearance on ten different “Top 100” listings.
1.A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man by James Joyce – 7
2.Brave New World by Aldous Huxley – 7
3.The Sound And The Fury by William Faulkner – 7
4.The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger – 7
5.The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald – 7
6.Ulysses by James Joyce – 7
7.Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck – 7
8.Animal Farm by George Orwell – 6
9.Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell – 6
10.The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne – 6
11.A Farewell To Arms by Ernest Hemingway – 6
12.Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes – 6
13.Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontл – 6
14.Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad – 6
15.War And Peace by Leo Tolstoy – 6
16.The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien – 6
17.Beloved by Toni Morrison – 6
18.Moby Dick, or The Whale by Herman Melville – 5
19.Of Mice And Men by John Steinbeck – 5
20.Pride And Prejudice by Jane Austen – 5
21.The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky – 5
22.The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli – 5
23.Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontл – 5
24.Little Women by Louisa May Alcott – 5
25.Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain – 5
26.Frankenstein by Mary Shelley – 5
27.David Copperfield by Charles Dickens – 5
28.Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov – 5
29.1984 by George Orwell – 5
30.To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf – 5
31.Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut – 5
32.Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison – 5
33.Native Son by Richard Wright – 5
34.Lord of the Flies by William Golding – 5
35.The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway – 5
36.On the Road by Jack Kerouac – 5
37.To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee – 5
38.Catch-22 by Joseph Heller – 5
39.The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling – 4
40.The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan – 4
41.Great Expectations by Charles Dickens – 4
42.Candide by Voltaire – 4
43.The Last Of The Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper – 4
44.Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe – 4
45.On The Origin Of Species by Charles Darwin – 4
46.Les Misйrables by Victor Hugo – 4
47.Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad – 4
48.The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas – 4
49.Madam Bovary by Gustave Flaubert – 4
50.Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe – 4
51.The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri – 4
52.The Analects of Confucius by Confucius – 4
53.Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray – 4
54.Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy – 4
55.Tess Of The D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy – 4
56.Dracula by Bram Stoker – 4
57.A Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickens – 4
58.The Republic by Plato – 4
59.Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky – 4
60.The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton – 4
61.My Antonia by Willa Cather – 4
62.One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez – 4
63.A Passage to India by E.M. Forster – 4
64.The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand – 4
65.As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner – 4
66.Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov – 4
67.Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad – 4
68.The Call of the Wild by Jack London – 4
69.Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea by Jules Verne – 3
70.Gulliver’s Travels by Johnathan Swift – 3
71.The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane – 3
72.The Odyssey by Homer – 3
73.Oedipus The King by Sophocles – 3
74.The Portrait Of A Lady by Henry James – 3
75.Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson – 3
76.The Iliad by Homer – 3
77.The Count Of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas – 3
78.Aesop’s Fables by Aesop – 3
79.The Aeneid by Virgil – 3
80.The Necklace And Other Tales by Guy de Maupassant – 3
81.Fathers And Sons by Ivan Turgenev – 3
82.Alice’s Adventure In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll – 3
83.The Red And The Black by Stendhal – 3
84.Tom Jones by Henry Fielding – 3
85.The Confessions by St. Augustine – 3
86.The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler – 3
87.A Prayer of Owen Meany by John Irving – 3
88.The Stand by Stephen King – 3
89.Rebecca by DuMaurier – 3
90.The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway – 3
91.The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood – 3
92.The Trial by Franz Kafka – 3
93.Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence – 3
94.Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry – 3
95.I, Claudius by Robert Graves – 3
96.An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser – 3
97.The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers – 3
98.A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh – 3
99.The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene – 3
100.Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence – 3
101.Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller – 3
102.Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth – 3
103.Light in August by William Faulkner – 3
104.The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett – 3
105.Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham – 3
106.Finnegans Wake by James Joyce – 3
107.Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh – 3
108.Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon 3
109.Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner – 3
110.Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – 3
111.Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie – 3
112.For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway – 3
113.Emma by Jane Austen – 3

The lists that were examined in compiling the listing above include the favorites of the public, librarians, educational boards, publishers, authors and magazines. Each list is subjective because it represents the viewpoint of a limited segment of society. By compiling these various viewpoints into one amalgamated list, the results above should give an objective answer to the question all the various lists seek to uncover: What are the 100 greatest books of all time? Suffice it to say that if your personal library contains these books you have a collection including 100 of the greatest books ever written. If it doesn’t, then shouldn’t you consider adding the ones you are missing?

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