# Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century

The 100 Books of the Century (French: Les cent livres du siècle) is a list of the hundred most memorable books of the 20th century, regardless of language, according to a poll performed during the spring of 1999 by the French retailer Fnac and the Paris newspaper Le Monde.

## Overview

Starting from a preliminary list of 200 titles created by bookshops and journalists, 17,000 French participants responded to the question, "Which books have stuck in your mind?" (Quels livres sont restés dans votre mémoire?) As Le Monde journalist Josyane Savigneau aptly clarified in her article, the list is not meant to encompass the 100 most distinguished French literary works of the 20th century, but rather to reflect the emotional connections of the French populace.
The list includes both classic novels and genre fiction (Tolkien, Agatha Christie, A. C. Doyle), as well as poetry, drama and nonfiction literature (Freud's essays and the diary of Anne Frank). There are also comic books on the list, one album from each of these five Francophone or Italian series: Asterix, Tintin, Blake and Mortimer, Gaston and Corto Maltese. The large number of French novels of the list is due to the demographics of the surveyed group.
Likewise, comparable lists by English language sources—such as the two lists of Modern Library's 100 Best Novels published in 1998, one by the Board of the Modern Library and the other by readers who responded—disproportionately favour British and American authors. Non-English language works were not eligible for the two Modern Library lists.

## List

| No. | Title | Author | Year | Language |
| 1 | The Stranger The Outsider | Albert Camus | 1942 | French |
| 2 | In Search of Lost Time Remembrance of Things Past | Marcel Proust | 1913–27 | French |
| 3 | The Trial | Franz Kafka | 1925 | German |
| 4 | The Little Prince | Antoine de Saint-Exupéry | 1943 | French |
| 5 | Man's Fate | André Malraux | 1933 | French |
| 6 | Journey to the End of the Night | Louis-Ferdinand Céline | 1932 | French |
| 7 | The Grapes of Wrath | John Steinbeck | 1939 | English |
| 8 | For Whom the Bell Tolls | Ernest Hemingway | 1940 | English |
| 9 | Le Grand Meaulnes | Alain-Fournier | 1913 | French |
| 10 | Froth on the Daydream | Boris Vian | 1947 | French |
| 11 | The Second Sex | Simone de Beauvoir | 1949 | French |
| 12 | Waiting for Godot | Samuel Beckett | 1952 | French |
| 13 | Being and Nothingness | Jean-Paul Sartre | 1943 | French |
| 14 | The Name of the Rose | Umberto Eco | 1980 | Italian |
| 15 | The Gulag Archipelago | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | 1973 | Russian |
| 16 | Paroles | Jacques Prévert | 1946 | French |
| 17 | Alcools | Guillaume Apollinaire | 1913 | French |
| 18 | The Blue Lotus | Hergé | 1936 | French |
| 19 | The Diary of a Young Girl | Anne Frank | 1947 | Dutch |
| 20 | Tristes Tropiques | Claude Lévi-Strauss | 1955 | French |
| 21 | Brave New World | Aldous Huxley | 1932 | English |
| 22 | Nineteen Eighty-Four | George Orwell | 1949 | English |
| 23 | Asterix the Gaul | René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo | 1959 | French |
| 24 | The Bald Soprano | Eugène Ionesco | 1952 | French |
| 25 | Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality | Sigmund Freud | 1905 | German |
| 26 | The Abyss Zeno of Bruges | Marguerite Yourcenar | 1968 | French |
| 27 | Lolita | Vladimir Nabokov | 1955 | English |
| 28 | Ulysses | James Joyce | 1922 | English |
| 29 | The Tartar Steppe | Dino Buzzati | 1940 | Italian |
| 30 | The Counterfeiters | André Gide | 1925 | French |
| 31 | The Horseman on the Roof | Jean Giono | 1951 | French |
| 32 | Belle du Seigneur | Albert Cohen | 1968 | French |
| 33 | One Hundred Years of Solitude | Gabriel García Márquez | 1967 | Spanish |
| 34 | The Sound and the Fury | William Faulkner | 1929 | English |
| 35 | Thérèse Desqueyroux | François Mauriac | 1927 | French |
| 36 | Zazie in the Metro | Raymond Queneau | 1959 | French |
| 37 | Confusion of Feelings | Stefan Zweig | 1927 | German |
| 38 | Gone with the Wind | Margaret Mitchell | 1936 | English |
| 39 | Lady Chatterley's Lover | D.H. Lawrence | 1928 | English |
| 40 | The Magic Mountain | Thomas Mann | 1924 | German |
| 41 | Bonjour Tristesse | Françoise Sagan | 1954 | French |
| 42 | Le Silence de la mer | Vercors | 1942 | French |
| 43 | Life: A User's Manual | Georges Perec | 1978 | French |
| 44 | The Hound of the Baskervilles | Arthur Conan Doyle | 1901–02 | English |
| 45 | Under the Sun of Satan | Georges Bernanos | 1926 | French |
| 46 | The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald | 1925 | English |
| 47 | The Joke | Milan Kundera | 1967 | Czech |
| 48 | Contempt/A Ghost at Noon | Alberto Moravia | 1954 | Italian |
| 49 | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | Agatha Christie | 1926 | English |
| 50 | Nadja | André Breton | 1928 | French |
| 51 | Aurélien | Louis Aragon | 1944 | French |
| 52 | The Satin Slipper | Paul Claudel | 1929 | French |
| 53 | Six Characters in Search of an Author | Luigi Pirandello | 1921 | Italian |
| 54 | The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui | Bertolt Brecht | 1941 | German |
| 55 | Friday | Michel Tournier | 1967 | French |
| 56 | The War of the Worlds | H.G. Wells | 1898 | English |
| 57 | If This Is a Man Se questo è un uomo, Survival in Auschwitz | Primo Levi | 1947 | Italian |
| 58 | The Lord of the Rings | J.R.R. Tolkien | 1954–55 | English |
| 59 | The Tendrils of the Vine | Colette | 1908 | French |
| 60 | Capital of Pain | Paul Éluard | 1926 | French |
| 61 | Martin Eden | Jack London | 1909 | English |
| 62 | The Ballad of the Salty Sea | Hugo Pratt | 1967 | Italian |
| 63 | Writing Degree Zero | Roland Barthes | 1953 | French |
| 64 | The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum | Heinrich Böll | 1974 | German |
| 65 | The Opposing Shore | Julien Gracq | 1951 | French |
| 66 | The Order of Things | Michel Foucault | 1966 | French |
| 67 | On the Road | Jack Kerouac | 1957 | English |
| 68 | The Wonderful Adventures of Nils | Selma Lagerlöf | 1906–07 | Swedish |
| 69 | A Room of One's Own | Virginia Woolf | 1929 | English |
| 70 | The Martian Chronicles | Ray Bradbury | 1950 | English |
| 71 | The Ravishing of Lol Stein | Marguerite Duras | 1964 | French |
| 72 | The Interrogation | J.M.G. Le Clézio | 1963 | French |
| 73 | Tropisms | Nathalie Sarraute | 1939 | French |
| 74 | Journal, 1887–1910 | Jules Renard | 1925 | French |
| 75 | Lord Jim | Joseph Conrad | 1900 | English |
| 76 | Écrits | Jacques Lacan | 1966 | French |
| 77 | The Theatre and Its Double | Antonin Artaud | 1938 | French |
| 78 | Manhattan Transfer | John Dos Passos | 1925 | English |
| 79 | Ficciones | Jorge Luis Borges | 1944 | Spanish |
| 80 | Moravagine | Blaise Cendrars | 1926 | French |
| 81 | The General of the Dead Army | Ismail Kadare | 1963 | Albanian |
| 82 | Sophie's Choice | William Styron | 1979 | English |
| 83 | Gypsy Ballads | Federico García Lorca | 1928 | Spanish |
| 84 | The Strange Case of Peter the Lett | Georges Simenon | 1931 | French |
| 85 | Our Lady of the Flowers | Jean Genet | 1944 | French |
| 86 | The Man Without Qualities | Robert Musil | 1930–42 | German |
| 87 | Furor and Mystery | René Char | 1948 | French |
| 88 | The Catcher in the Rye | J.D. Salinger | 1951 | English |
| 89 | No Orchids For Miss Blandish | James Hadley Chase | 1939 | English |
| 90 | Blake and Mortimer | Edgar P. Jacobs | 1950 | French |
| 91 | The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge | Rainer Maria Rilke | 1910 | German |
| 92 | Second Thoughts | Michel Butor | 1957 | French |
| 93 | The Origins of Totalitarianism The Burden of Our Time | Hannah Arendt | 1951 | English |
| 94 | The Master and Margarita | Mikhail Bulgakov | 1967 | Russian |
| 95 | The Rosy Crucifixion | Henry Miller | 1949–60 | English |
| 96 | The Big Sleep | Raymond Chandler | 1939 | English |
| 97 | Amers | Saint-John Perse | 1957 | French |
| 98 | Gaston Gomer Goof | André Franquin | 1957 | French |
| 99 | Under the Volcano | Malcolm Lowry | 1947 | English |
| 100 | Midnight's Children | Salman Rushdie | 1981 | English |
Note: Classified by the language of the book's first publication, which might not be the author's principal language.