40 Great, Iconic Novels

1. Pride and Prejudice - Austen***
   
2. Emma - Austen
   
3. Père Goriot - Balzac
   
4. Jane Eyre - Brontë, Charlotte
   
5. Wuthering Heights - Brontë, Emily
   
6. The Master and the Margarita - Bulgakov, Mikhail
   
7. The Stranger - Camus
   
8. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland | Through the Looking-Glass - Lewis Carroll
   
9. Robinson Crusoe - Defoe
   
10. Great Expectations - Dickens
    
11. Don Quixote - Cervantes***
    
12. Heart of Darkness - Conrad
    
13. Crime and Punishment - Dostoevsky***
    
14. The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoevsky***
    
15. The Count of Monte Cristo - Dumas
    
16. Hunger - Hamsun
    
17. The Mayor of Casterbridge - Hardy
    
18. The Scarlet Letter - Hawthorne
    
19. The Sun Also Rises - Hemingway
    
20. The Ambassadors - James, Henry
    
21. Ulysses - Joyce
    
22. The Castle - Kafka
    
23. Gulliver's Travels - Swift***
    
24. Vanity Fair - Thackeray***
    
25. War and Peace - Tolstoy***
    
26. Anna Karenina - Tolstoy***
    
27. Huckleberry Finn - Twain
    
28. To the Lighthouse - Woolf
    
29. Candide - Voltaire
    
30. Tristram Shandy - Sterne
    
31. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Solzhenitsyn
    
32. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) - Orwell
    
33. Ivanhoe - Scott
    
34. Moby-Dick - Melville***
    
35. The Magic Mountain - Mann
    
36. Hunchback of Notre Dame - Hugo
    
37. Madame Bovary - Flaubert
    
38. A Passage to India - Forster, E. M.
    
39. Tom Jones - Fielding***
    
40. As I Lay Dying - Faulkner
    

[I used the cumulative index at that Great Books site (the one with all the great books lists), and then I checked what I got with a book I have where I'd written down pretty much every one of the most basic and great novels of all time and found I hadn't overlooked or not seen any of them. So, though no list like this can be perfect, this one at least has all the most iconically great novels and most of the outer lying hills. It also contains a little bit of everything in terms of time periods and styles. One note: for the authors with a zillion great titles to their names like Dickens and Faulkner I just chose one representative work. Any other will do for them too.]

Titles with three '***' are the ten major works (I could change my mind on the Austen). This list will most likely be refined. I mean, Stendhal may rate a place...Proust, I suppose....Céline, George Eliot, Gabriel García Márquez, Hesse, Kipling, Lawrence......I didn't include too many American highschool standards (Fitzgerald and Steinbeck could have been included) on purpose since that is my default thinking. Others. As it is this list is usable. Use it to see what I may have left out and to make up your own maybe.