Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century

The 100 Books of the Century is a grading of the books considered as the hundred best of the 20th century, drawn up in the spring of 1999 through a poll conducted by the French retailer Fnac and the Paris newspaper Le Monde.

Starting from a preliminary list of 200 titles created by bookshops and journalists, 17,000 French voted by responding to the question, "Which books have stayed in your memory?" (« Quels livres sont restés dans votre mémoire ? »).^[1]

The list of acclaimed titles mixes great novels with poetry and theatre, as well as the comic strip. The first fifty works on the list were the subject of an essay by Frédéric Beigbeder, The Last Inventory Before Liquidation, in which he notably drew attention to its French-centredcharacter.

[edit]The 100 Books of the Century

#	Title	Author	Year
1	The Stranger (The Outsider)	Albert Camus	1942
2	Remembrance of Things Past	Marcel Proust	1913–1927
3	The Trial	Franz Kafka	1925
4	The Little Prince	Antoine de Saint-Exupéry	1943
5	Man's Fate	André Malraux	1933
6	Journey to the End of the Night	Louis-Ferdinand Céline	1932
7	The Grapes of Wrath	John Steinbeck	1939
8	For Whom the Bell Tolls	Ernest Hemingway	1940
9	Le Grand Meaulnes	Alain-Fournier	1913
10	Froth on the Daydream	Boris Vian	1947
11	The Second Sex	Simone de Beauvoir	1949
12	Waiting for Godot	Samuel Beckett	1952
13	Being and Nothingness	Jean-Paul Sartre	1943
14	The Name of the Rose	Umberto Eco	1980
15	The Gulag Archipelago	Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn	1973
16	Paroles	Jacques Prévert	1946
17	Alcools	Guillaume Apollinaire	1913
18	The Blue Lotus	Hergé	1936
19	The Diary of a Young Girl	Anne Frank	1947
20	Tristes Tropiques	Claude Lévi-Strauss	1955
21	Brave New World	Aldous Huxley	1932
22	Nineteen Eighty-Four	George Orwell	1949
23	Asterix the Gaul	René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo	1959
24	The Bald Soprano	Eugène Ionesco	1952
25	Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality	Sigmund Freud	1905
26	The Abyss	Marguerite Yourcenar	1968
27	Lolita	Vladimir Nabokov	1955
28	Ulysses	James Joyce	1922
29	The Tartar Steppe	Dino Buzzati	1940
30	The Counterfeiters	André Gide	1925
31	The Horseman on the Roof	Jean Giono	1951
32	Belle du Seigneur	Albert Cohen	1968
33	One Hundred Years of Solitude	Gabriel García Márquez	1967
34	The Sound and the Fury	William Faulkner	1929
35	Thérèse Desqueyroux	François Mauriac	1927
36	Zazie in the Metro	Raymond Queneau	1959
37	Confusion of Feelings	Stefan Zweig	1927
38	Gone with the Wind	Margaret Mitchell	1936
39	Lady Chatterley's Lover	D. H. Lawrence	1928
40	The Magic Mountain	Thomas Mann	1924
41	Bonjour Tristesse	Françoise Sagan	1954
42	Le Silence de la mer	Vercors	1942
43	Life: A User's Manual	Georges Perec	1978
44	The Hound of the Baskervilles	Arthur Conan Doyle	1901–1902
45	Under the Sun of Satan	Georges Bernanos	1926
46	The Great Gatsby	F. Scott Fitzgerald	1925
47	The Joke	Milan Kundera	1967
48	A Ghost at Noon (Contempt)	Alberto Moravia	1954
49	The Murder of Roger Ackroyd	Agatha Christie	1926
50	Nadja	André Breton	1928
51	Aurélien	Louis Aragon	1944
52	The Satin Slipper	Paul Claudel	1929
53	Six Characters in Search of an Author	Luigi Pirandello	1921
54	The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui	Bertolt Brecht	1959
55	Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique	Michel Tournier	1967
56	The War of the Worlds	H. G. Wells	1898
57	If This Is a Man  Survival in Auschwitz	Primo Levi	1947
58	The Lord of the Rings	J. R. R. Tolkien	1954–1955
59	Les Vrilles de la vigne	Colette	1908
60	Capitale de la douleur	Paul Éluard	1926
61	Martin Eden	Jack London	1909
62	Ballad of the Salt Sea	Hugo Pratt	1967
63	Writing Degree Zero	Roland Barthes	1953
64	The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum	Heinrich Böll	1974
65	The Opposing Shore	Julien Gracq	1951
66	The Order of Things	Michel Foucault	1966
67	On the Road	Jack Kerouac	1957
68	The Wonderful Adventures of Nils	Selma Lagerlöf	1906–1907
69	A Room of One's Own	Virginia Woolf	1929
70	The Martian Chronicles	Ray Bradbury	1950
71	The Ravishing of Lol Stein	Marguerite Duras	1964
72	The Interrogation	J. M. G. Le Clézio	1963
73	Tropisms	Nathalie Sarraute	1939
74	Journal, 1887–1910	Jules Renard	1925
75	Lord Jim	Joseph Conrad	1900
76	Écrits	Jacques Lacan	1966
77	The Theatre and its Double	Antonin Artaud	1938
78	Manhattan Transfer	John Dos Passos	1925
79	Ficciones	Jorge Luis Borges	1944
80	Moravagine	Blaise Cendrars	1926
81	The General of the Dead Army	Ismail Kadare	1963
82	Sophie's Choice	William Styron	1979
83	Gypsy Ballads	Federico García Lorca	1928
84	The Strange Case of Peter the Lett	Georges Simenon	1931
85	Our Lady of the Flowers	Jean Genet	1944
86	The Man Without Qualities	Robert Musil	1930–1932
87	Fureur et mystère	René Char	1948
88	The Catcher in the Rye	J. D. Salinger	1951
89	No Orchids For Miss Blandish	James Hadley Chase	1939
90	Blake and Mortimer	Edgar P. Jacobs	1950
91	The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge	Rainer Maria Rilke	1910
92	Second Thoughts	Michel Butor	1957
93	The Origins of Totalitarianism	Hannah Arendt	1951
94	The Master and Margarita	Mikhail Bulgakov	1967
95	The Rosy Crucifixion	Henry Miller	1949–1960
96	The Big Sleep	Raymond Chandler	1939
97	Amers	Saint-John Perse	1957
98	Gaston (Gomer Goof)	André Franquin	1957
99	Under the Volcano	Malcolm Lowry	1947
100	Midnight's Children	Salman Rushdie	1981