When The Center for Fiction opened its doors in 1821 as the Mercantile Library of New York, Percy Bysshe Shelley mourned his friend John Keats in his poem, “Adonais,” William Hazlitt released his collection of essays, Table Talk, Lord Byron finished his play, Sardanapalus, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published his fourth novel, Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years. As an organization whose mission is to both reflect and advance the art of fiction, we’re honoring our 200th anniversary by looking back on how storytelling has evolved since then. We set forth to create a list of the 200 works of fiction that had the most impact on American readers, writers, and culture over these past two centuries. 

It was a daunting task. Thankfully, we had the help of a panel of writers associated with The Center: Mahogany L. Browne, Amina Cain, Alexander Chee, Kia Corthron, Michael Cunningham, Alvaro Enrigue, Neil Gaiman, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Stephen King, Maaza Mengiste, Claire Messud, Jason Reynolds, Salman Rushdie, Esmeralda Santiago, Jonathan Santlofer, V. E. Schwab, Gary Shteyngart, Jane Smiley, Monique Truong, and De'Shawn Charles Winslow. Each author contributed five titles they wanted to be included, which you can find here, and The Center’s staff set to work on completing the list.

There were many questions to consider. How do we balance the classics and books that, as Alvaro Enrigue put it, “make the world a great place for a reader” even though they are not the most read? How do we choose between the many impactful greats of prolific writers? How much do we consider the character of an author, and how do we contend with books whose impact is undeniable but perhaps not for the best? How do we draw the line between “influential” and “popular”?

The resulting 200 books shifted what types of fiction got read and written, launched or served as turning points for particular genres, opened the doors for whose work could be published, changed the rules of what we could write about and how we could write about it, inspired feverish searches for “the next” of their kind, or affected societal change far beyond the world of literature. As with any list, there are dozens of incredible books that didn’t make the final cut for each title named here, but after much anguish and debate, we present the 200 Books That Shaped 200 Years of Literature.

Mahogany L. Browne

• The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros (1983)

• Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)

• Sula by Toni Morrison (1973)

• The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1982)

• Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward (2011)

Amina Cain

• Event Factory by Renee Gladman (2010)

• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)

• The Summer Book by Tove Jansson (1972)

• The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector (1977)

• That Time of Year by Marie NDiaye (1994)

Alexander Chee

• Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks (1953)

• Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich (1984)

• Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg (1993)

• Maurice by E. M. Forster (1971)

• East Goes West by Younghill Kang (1937)

Kia Corthron

• Kindred by Octavia E. Butler (1979)

• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brönte (1847)

• The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith (1952)

• Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852)

• Native Son by Richard Wright (1940)

Michael Cunningham

• The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot (1860)

• Solaris by Stanislaw Lem (1961)

• The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa (1982)

• Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (2017)

• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927)

Alvaro Enrigue

• The Master and the Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1966)

• Cartucho by Nellie Campobello (1931)

• The Nine Guardians by Rosario Castellanos (1959)

• The Trial by Franz Kafka (1925)

• Eyes of a Blue Dog (Ojos de Perro Azul) by Gabriel García Márquez (1972)

Neil Gaiman

• The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton (1908)

• Bleak House by Charles Dickens (1853)

• Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984)

• The Outsider and Others by H. P. Lovecraft (1939)

• Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees (1926)

Rigoberto González

• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (2007)

• Obasan by Joy Kogawa (1981)

• The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector (1964)

• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967)

• Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo (1955)

Kaitlyn Greenidge

• The Claudine Novels by Collette (1900-1904)

• Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952)

• Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)

• Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966)

• Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black by Harriet E. Wilson (1859)

Stephen King

• Ulysses by James Joyce (1920)

• Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy (1985)

• The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch (1978)

• 1984 by George Orwell (1949)

• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)

Maaza Mengiste

• Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin (1956)

• The Book of Daniel by E. L. Doctorow (1971)

• Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)

• House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (1905)

Claire Messud

• Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert (1856)

• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967)

• Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)

• Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)

• The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald (1992)

Jason Reynolds

• Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)

• Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)

• The Street by Ann Petry (1946)

• Cane by Jean Toomer (1923)

• Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward (2011)

Salman Rushdie

• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958)

• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1832)

• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866)

• In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (1913)

• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884)

Esmeralda Santiago

• The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende (1982)

• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1965)

• Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871)

• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1877)

• The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1920)

Jonathan Santlofer

• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1861)

• The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles (1969)

• Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)

• The Plot Against America by Philip Roth (2004)

• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

V. E. Schwab

• Peter and Wendy by J. M. Barrie (1911)

• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (1845)

• The Secret History by Donna Tartt (1992)

• Fingersmith by Sarah Waters (2002)

• The Once and Future King by T. H. White (1958)

Gary Shteyngart

• Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert (1856)

• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)

• Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)

• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1877)

• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf(1927)

Jane Smiley

• Clotel: or, The President's Daughter by Williams Wells Brown (1853)

• Felix Holt, the Radical by George Eliot (1866)

• Black Beauty by Anna Sewell (1877)

• Love Among the Chickens by P. G. Wodehouse (1906)

• L'Argent by Émile Zola (1891)

Monique Truong

• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1869)

• Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin (1956)

• Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume (1970)

• Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952)

• The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (1970)

De'Shawn Charles Winslow

• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

• Moby Dick by Herman Melville (1851)

• Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)

• Sula by Toni Morrison (1973)

• The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1982)