- Character: 100 twentieth century works written in English, ranked, limited to fiction (including children's fiction).
- Bias: Popular, reflecting the tastes and opinions of booksellers, presumably colored by what they know is selling.
- Flaws: Inclusion errors (admits a translation and non-fictional and 19th century works into its canon)
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Ulysses by James Joyce
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell
- The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
- The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
- To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
- On the Road by Jack Kerouac
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- Native Son by Richard Wright
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
- Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
- The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
- The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
- A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
- The Color Purple by Alice Walker
- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
- Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
- Rabbit, Run by John Updike
- Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
- The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
- A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
- Charlotte's Web by E. B. White
- The Call of the Wild by Jack London
- My Antonia by Willa Cather
- A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
- The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
- The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson
- Howards End by E. M. Forster
- I, Claudius by Robert Graves
- Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
- Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
- Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
- The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
- The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
- The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
- The World According to Garp by John Irving
- White Noise by Don DeLillo
- Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
- A Room With a View by E.M. Forster
- Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
- Call It Sleep by Henry Roth
- Possession by A.S. Byatt
- The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
- The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
- A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
- A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
- Dune by Frank Herbert
- Naked Lunch by William Burroughs
- Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
- The Stand by Stephen King
- Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison
- Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
- Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
- The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
- The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
- 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
- A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
- Angela's Ashes: A Memoir by Frank McCourt
- The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
- The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
- Watership Down by Richard Adams
- Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
- The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver
- The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother by James McBride
- The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough
- Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
- Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Ann Burns
- Hawaii by James Albert Michener
- Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
- Sula by Toni Morrison
- The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
- The Shell Seekers by Rosamunde Pilcher
- Time and Again by Jack Finney
- Centennial by James A. Michener
- Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernières
- Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons
- Kane and Abel by Jeffrey Archer
- Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown
- Talk Before Sleep by Elizabeth Berg
- The Alienist by Caleb Carr
- The Education of Little Tree by Forrest Carter
- The Godfather by Mario Puzo
- The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway
- War and Remembrance by Herman Wouk