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Le Monde’s 100 Books of the Century

Le Monde’s 100 Books of the Century is a list compiled in 1999 through a public poll conducted by the French newspaper Le Monde and the retailer Fnac. The poll invited 17,000 French readers to respond to the question, “Which books have remained in your memory?” The resulting list reflects the books that left a lasting impression on the French public during the 20th century.

The selection includes a diverse range of literary works, encompassing novels, poetry, plays, and even comic books. Notable entries feature Albert Camus’s The Stranger, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Franz Kafka’s The Trial, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. The list also acknowledges genre fiction and philosophical texts, such as works by Tolkien, Agatha Christie, and Sigmund Freud.

Given the demographic of the respondents, the list has a strong French representation, but it also includes significant international works, highlighting the global impact of literature in the 20th century. Unlike other literary rankings, this compilation emphasizes the emotional and cultural resonance of the books with readers, rather than solely their critical acclaim or scholarly significance.

  1. The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942)
  2. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (1913–27)
  3. The Trial by Franz Kafka (1925)
  4. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1943)
  5. Man’s Fate by André Malraux (1933)
  6. Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1932)
  7. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)
  8. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (1940)
  9. Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier (1913)
  10. Froth on the Daydream by Boris Vian (1947)
  11. The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1949)
  12. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (1952)
  13. Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre (1943)
  14. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (1980)
  15. The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1973)
  16. Paroles by Jacques Prévert (1946)
  17. Alcools by Guillaume Apollinaire (1913)
  18. The Blue Lotus by Hergé (1936)
  19. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (1947)
  20. Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1955)
  21. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)
  22. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)
  23. Asterix the Gaul by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo (1959)
  24. The Bald Soprano by Eugène Ionesco (1952)
  25. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality by Sigmund Freud (1905)
  26. The Abyss by Marguerite Yourcenar (1968)
  27. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
  28. Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
  29. The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati (1940)
  30. The Counterfeiters by André Gide (1925)
  31. The Horseman on the Roof by Jean Giono (1951)
  32. Belle du Seigneur by Albert Cohen (1968)
  33. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967)
  34. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929)
  35. Thérèse Desqueyroux by François Mauriac (1927)
  36. Zazie in the Metro by Raymond Queneau (1959)
  37. Confusion of Feelings by Stefan Zweig (1927)
  38. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (1936)
  39. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence (1928)
  40. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (1924)
  41. Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan (1954)
  42. Le Silence de la mer by Vercors (1942)
  43. Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec (1978)
  44. The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle (1901–02)
  45. Under the Sun of Satan by Georges Bernanos (1926)
  46. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
  47. The Joke by Milan Kundera (1967)
  48. Contempt/A Ghost at Noon by Alberto Moravia (1954)
  49. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie (1926)
  50. Nadja by André Breton (1928)
  51. Aurélien by Louis Aragon (1944)
  52. The Satin Slipper by Paul Claudel (1929)
  53. Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello (1921)
  54. The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht (1941)
  55. Friday by Michel Tournier (1967)
  56. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (1898[a])
  57. If This Is a Man by Primo Levi (1947)
  58. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (1954–55)
  59. The Tendrils of the Vine by Colette (1908)
  60. Capital of Pain by Paul Éluard (1926)
  61. Martin Eden by Jack London (1909)
  62. The Ballad of the Salty Sea by Hugo Pratt (1967)
  63. Writing Degree Zero by Roland Barthes (1953)
  64. The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum by Heinrich Böll (1974)
  65. The Opposing Shore by Julien Gracq (1951)
  66. The Order of Things by Michel Foucault (1966)
  67. On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
  68. The Wonderful Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlöf (1906–07)
  69. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf (1929)
  70. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury (1950)
  71. The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras (1964)
  72. The Interrogation by J.M.G. Le Clézio (1963)
  73. Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute (1939)
  74. Journal, 1887–1910 by Jules Renard (1925)
  75. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (1900)
  76. Écrits by Jacques Lacan (1966)
  77. The Theatre and Its Double by Antonin Artaud (1938)
  78. Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos (1925)
  79. Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges (1944)
  80. Moravagine by Blaise Cendrars (1926)
  81. The General of the Dead Army by Ismail Kadare (1963)
  82. Sophie’s Choice by William Styron (1979)
  83. Gypsy Ballads by Federico García Lorca (1928)
  84. The Strange Case of Peter the Lett by Georges Simenon (1931)
  85. Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet (1944)
  86. The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil (1930–42)
  87. Furor and Mystery by René Char (1948)
  88. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951)
  89. No Orchids For Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase (1939)
  90. Blake and Mortimer by Edgar P. Jacobs (1950)
  91. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke (1910)
  92. Second Thoughts by Michel Butor (1957)
  93. The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (1951)
  94. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)
  95. The Rosy Crucifixion by Henry Miller (1949–60)
  96. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939)
  97. Amers by Saint-John Perse (1957)
  98. Gaston by André Franquin (1957)
  99. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1947)
  100. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)