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7.27.2005

W. Somerset Maugham's list of what he considered the ten greatest novels

  • Tom Jones - Fielding
  • Pride and Prejudice - Austen
  • The Red and the Black - Stendahl
  • Old Man Goriot - Balzac
  • David Copperfield - Dickens
  • Wuthering Heights - Bronte
  • Madame Bovary - Flaubert
  • Moby Dick - Melville
  • War and Peace - Tolstoy
  • The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoevsky


(I use to collect all these lists. I came across this old one on someone's blog. I might make an ultimate list of great novels, like 40 greatest novels. They'd have to be literary/classic novels otherwise you're talking about an encyclopedia including every genre category and not a list of Great Books. Making an ultimate list can be difficult I recall because many novelists wrote numerous great novels but not just one that time points to as their greatest. Dickens and Faulkner are good examples. But a good enough list can be made nevertheless... Also: you tend to want to add works that are maybe not completely in the definition of novel, like Gargantua and Pantagruel; so you have to define some kind of parameters...)

Posted by c.t. at 21:36