Hungry Mind Review's

100 BEST 20th-Century American Books of Fiction and Nonfiction

The Hungry Mind Review is proud to present its selection of the "100 Best 20th-Century American Books of Fiction and Nonfiction." The books were chosen by five writers: Mary Moore Easter, Heid E. Erdrich, Bill Holm, David Mura, and George Rabasa, under the direction of Bart Schneider, editor of the Hungry Mind Review and J. Otis Powell! of The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis.

The Hungry Mind Review list provides a compelling alternative to the Modern Library's selection of "100 Best Novels published in the English language since 1900," announced last July. Although the Modern Library list was criticized for including only six books by nonwhite writers, only nine books by women, and very few books published after 1960, it initiated a lively national discussion. The HMR list reflects a far more realistic race and gender balance, and includes a good number of contemporary books. Our list is however limited to books written by Americans.

While the Modern Library list is restricted to novels, the Hungry Mind Review includes distinguished books of nonfiction and collections of short fiction. "Opening the list to nonfiction makes sense in a literary century that has witnessed the blurring of the line between fiction and nonfiction," according to Hungry Mind Review editor Bart Schneider. "It's thrilling to have James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, as well as the autobiographies of Malcolm X and Alice B. Toklas, on this list," Schneider adds. "Essential 20th-century writers like James Baldwin, Joan Didion, and Gore Vidal, who each have collections of nonfiction included on the list, are commonly thought to have done their best writing in the essay form."

Although the Hungry Mind Review panel did not consider poetry for this selection, three major American poets (Charles Olson, Adrienne Rich, and William Carlos Williams) landed on the list with important books of nonficiton.

Among individual writers, novelist and Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison, who does not appear on the Modern Library list, placed the most books (4) on the Hungry Mind Review list, followed by William Faulkner (3).

The Hungry Mind Review, a theme-based quarterly book review magazine, now in its fourteenth year, is published in St. Paul, Minnesota.

1	Henry Adams	The Education of Henry Adams	1918
2	James Agee and Walker Evans	Let Us Now Praise Famous Men	1941
3	Dorothy Allison	Bastard out of Carolina	1992
4	Rudolfo Anaya	Bless Me Ultima	1972
5	Sherwood Anderson	Winesburg, Ohio	1919
6	Maya Angelou	I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings	1970
7	Gloria Anzaldúa	Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza	1987
8	James Baldwin	Go Tell It on the Mountain	1953
9	James Baldwin	The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction	1985
10	Edward Ball	Slaves in the Family	1998
11	Saul Bellow	Herzog	1964
12	Paul Bowles	The Sheltering Sky	1948
13	William Burroughs	Naked Lunch	1959
14	Truman Capote	In Cold Blood	1966
15	Raymond Carver	Cathedral	1983
16	Willa Cather	O Pioneers!	1913
17	Willa Cather	Death Comes for the Archbishop	1927
18	John Cheever	Collected Stories	1978
19	Sandra Cisneros	House on Mango Street	1984
20	Don DeLillo	White Noise	1985
21	Joan Didion	Slouching Towards Bethlehem	1968
22	Vine Deloria Jr.	Custer Died for Your Sins	1983
23	John Dos Passos	U.S.A.	1930
24	Theodore Dreiser	An American Tragedy	1925
25	W.E.B. DuBois	The Souls of Black Folk	1903
26	Ralph Ellison	Invisible Man	1952
27	Louise Erdrich	Love Medicine	1984
28	William Faulkner	The Sound and the Fury	1926
29	William Faulkner	As I Lay Dying	1930
30	William Faulkner	Go Down, Moses	1940
31	F. Scott Fitzgerald	The Great Gatsby	1925
32	M.F.K. Fisher	The Art of Eating	1954
33	Francisco Goldman	The Ordinary Seaman	1997
34	Alex Haley	Roots	1976
35	Joseph Heller	Catch-22	1961
36	Ernest Hemingway	The Sun Also Rises	1926
37	Ernest Hemingway	The Short Stories	1938
38	Michael Herr	Dispatches	1984
39	Chester Himes	My Life of Absurdity: The Autobiography	1976
40	Linda Hogan	Mean Spirit	1990
41	bell hooks	Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism	1982
42	Zora Neale Hurston	Their Eyes Were Watching God	1937
43	Henry James	The Wings of the Dove	1902
44	LeRoi Jones (Amira Baraka)	Blues People: Negro Music in White America	1963
45	Jack Kerouac	On the Road	1957
46	Ken Kesey	One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest	1962
47	Jamaica Kincaid	Annie John	1983
48	Maxine Hong Kingston	Woman Warrior	1976
49	Jerzy Kosinski	The Painted Bird	1976
50	Harper Lee	To Kill a Mockingbird	1960
51	Li-Young Lee	The Winged Seed	1995
52	Sinclair Lewis	Babbitt	1922
53	Cormac McCarthy	The Crossing	1994
54	Carson McCullers	The Heart is a Lonely Hunter	1940
55	Norman Mailer	The Naked and the Dead	1948
56	Bernard Malamud	The Magic Barrel	1958
57	Malcolm X and Alex Haley	The Autobiography of Malcolm X	1965
58	Rollo May	Love and Will	1969
59	Thomas Merton	The Seven Storey Mountain	1948
60	Henry Miller	Tropic of Cancer	1934
61	N. Scott Momaday	House Made of Dawn	1968
62	Wright Morris	Field of Vision	1956
63	Toni Morrison	Sula	1973
64	Toni Morrison	Song of Solomon	1977
65	Toni Morrison	Beloved	1987
66	Toni Morrison	Jazz	1992
67	Vladimir Nabokov	Lolita	1958
68	John G. Neihardt	Black Elk Speaks	1932
69	Flannery O'Connor	A Good Man is Hard to Find	1955
70	Charles Olson	Call Me Ishmael	1947
71	Tillie Olson	Tell Me a Riddle	1961
72	Jon Okada	No-No Boy	1977
73	Grace Paley	Collected Stories	1994
74	Walker Percy	The Moviegoer	1961
75	Katherine Anne Porter	Flowering Judas and Other Stories	1930
76	Thomas Pynchon	Gravity's Rainbow	1973
77	Adrienne Rich	On Lies, Secrets and Silence	1979
78	Philip Roth	Portnoy's Complaint	1969
79	J.D. Salinger	The Catcher in the Rye	1951
80	May Sarton	At Seventy	1984
81	Leslie Marmon Silko	Ceremony	1977
82	Isaac B. Singer	The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer	1982
83	Gertrude Stein	The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas	1993
84	John Steinbeck	The Grapes of Wrath	1937
85	William Styron	Sophie's Choice	1979
86	James Thurber	A Thurber Carnival	1945
87	Jean Toomer	Cane	1923
88	Mark Twain	Letters from the Earth	1962
89	John Updike	Rabbit, Run	1960
90	Gore Vidal	The United States: Essays 1952-1992	1993
91	Kurt Vonnegut	Slaughterhouse Five	1969
92	Alice Walker	The Color Purple	1982
93	Robert Penn Warren	All the Kings Men	1946
94	Nathaneal West	The Day of the Locust	1939
95	John Edgar Wideman	Philadelphia Fire	1990
96	William Carlos Williams	In the American Grain	1925
97	Edmund Wilson	To the Finland Station	1940
98	Thomas Wolfe	You Can't Go Home Again	1941
99	Richard Wright	Native Son	1940
100	Wakako Yamauchi	Songs My Mother Taught Me	1994