"This list was compiled by tabulating nominations by UWM faculty, staff and students for the Select 100. It includes changes which have resulted from nominations received since the original list was released. We asked you to recommend books which you have found to be so useful and important that no one could consider himself/herself an educated or enlightened person without having read them. This is your cumulative response.''
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Ulysses by James Joyce
- Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
- Moby Dick by Herman Melville
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- The Odyssey by Homer
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- The Iliad by Homer
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
- The Bible by Christian Church
- The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- The Stranger by Albert Camus
- Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
- On the Road by Jack Kerouac
- As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- Candide by Voltaire
- The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
- Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- Confessions by Augustine
- Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
- On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
- Paradise Lost by John Milton
- The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
- A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
- Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- First Folio by William Shakespeare
- The Color Purple by Alice Walker
- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
- Walden by Henry David Thoreau
- The Republic by Plato
- The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
- A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
- Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
- My Antonia by Willa Cather
- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
- Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
- Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson
- Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
- Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
- A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
- The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA by James D. Watson
- The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
- Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
- The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
- The Plague by Albert Camus
- The Quran by Various Authors
- Dune by Frank Herbert
- Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu
- The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr and E. B. White
- Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
- Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
- The Art of War by Sun Zi
- Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
- The City in History by Lewis Mumford
- The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay
- The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
- Foundation by Isaac Asimov
- Hiroshima by John Hersey
- Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl
- Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis
- The Crucible by Arthur Miller
- The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey
- The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer
- Utopia by Thomas More
- Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton
- Forbidden Colours by Yukio Mishima
- Future Shock: The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler
- Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
- Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
- The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra
- The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry
- A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller
- A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold
- Entropy by Jeremy Rifkin, Ted Howard
- Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott
- Free to Choose: A Personal Statement by Milton Friedman, Rose Friedman
- How Democracies Perish by Jean François Revel
- Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by E. F. Schumacher
- The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav
- The Road Less Travelled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth by M. Scott Peck