I have no idea. I found this list and it looked intriguing. I think he's a writer in New York, but you'll have to dig around yourself for that info. I liked his list and his rational for choosing the books. If you want more info, look at Tom Moran's site.
There are certain common flaws to many of the novel lists that have been floating around the Internet in the past year or so
1) They are all bottom-heavy, relying too much on novels published fairly recently (this being defined as post-1960), since those are the novels that people are most familiar with.
2) They don't have enough women writers on them.
3) The lists mostly share an Anglo-American bias: that is, they don't have enough writers on them from other predominantly Anglophone countries -- countries like Canada, Australia, India or South Africa, to name just a few .
4) The Modern Library list is weighted towards novels read by people who came of age in the Great Depression, and slights both the pre-1920 period and the post-1950 period.
My list attempts to redress these flaws.
Now, a lot of the novels on my list (as with the Modern Library's list) were published between 1920 and 1950. This is almost unavoidable: the years between 1920 and 1950 were the Golden Age of the Novel (or at least the American Novel). The novel was far more central to American culture in that era than it has been since (or will ever be again). You don't hear of anyone nowadays saying that they're going to write the Great American Novel (they're all too busy trying to write a screenplay).
I tried to include as many novels published before 1920 as I could (that weren't written by Henry James). And about a third of the novels on my list were published after 1950.
After about 1970, though, there are fewer novels on the list (although they comprise rather more than 10% of the whole). This is, in my opinion, as it should be. We have no idea which of the novels written in the last three decades people will be reading in 50 years. It is quite possible that, by the year 2050, Thomas Pynchon will be just as forgotten as James Branch Cabell (who was every bit as lauded by the highbrow critics of his time) is today.
There are more women novelists on my list than there are on the Modern Library list, and more people of color. There are also more novels from countries other than the United States or England.
I have also tried to avoid the rampant idiocies of, for example, the Radcliffe list and the Modern Library Readers list. You will look in vain on my list for a single title by Ayn Rand, for example. Robert Heinlein's oeuvre does not (Thank God!) make the cut.
I also don't make the mistake of thinking that "The Portrait of a Lady" is a 20th Century novel -- or that Gertrude Stein's "Three Lives" is a novel at all.
There are a number of interesting omissions from my list: "Finnegans Wake," for example, and "The Catcher in the Rye." I left off the former because, even if it qualifies as a novel, it does not qualify as a novel written in English (and I defy anyone to prove otherwise). I dropped the latter when I realized that it is very much a novel of its time (the late 40s) -- and is as dated in its way as "Studs Lonigan" (which is also not on my list).
Some authors aren't on the list at all. Norman Mailer isn't because I think his best work has been in nonfiction, and not the novel. Salinger's not there partly because I think his one novel is badly dated, but mostly because his best work has been in the short story ("Franny and Zooey" is not a novel, but two short stories published together for convenience). For the record, my favorite piece of Salinger's is "Seymour: An Introduction."
You'll also notice some books on my list you're sure not to have heard of: "The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft," for example, "The Late George Apley" or "The Pilgrim Hawk." This is one of the reasons why people make lists; to get you to consider the unfamiliar as well as the obvious. The fact that you've probably never heard of George Gissing's "The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft" (published in England in 1903) doesn't mean that his, admittedly unusual, book doesn't belong on a list such as this one. And you may be inspired to try and seek it out.
Sometimes a familiar author is represented by a less familiar book: why "Earthly Powers," for example, and not "A Clockwork Orange"? Why "The Ghost Writer" and not "Portnoy's Complaint"? Why "A Single Man"? In these cases I wanted to avoid the obvious in favor of a book that I frankly thought was better.
And there are some novels that aren't on the list because, well, I haven't gotten around to them yet. If you want to know why "The Recognitions" by William Gaddis isn't there, that's why. I'll get around to it one of these days.
I should also mention that this list is in a state of slow-moving flux. It's changed incrementally over the past year, and will probably change more over time, so don't think that these choices are cast in stone. They're not.
But some people will want to know why I didn't put certain authors on the list: Thomas Pynchon, Alice Walker, Jack Kerouac, Toni Morrison, Charles Bukowski, Robert Heinlein, William Burroughs and the ever-popular Ayn Rand.
Why not? Because it's my list, that's why. If you think they belong, make up your own damn list.
The 100 Best English-Language Novels of the 20th Century
1) Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe*
2) A Death in the Family by James Agee*
3) The Rector of Justin by Louis Auchincloss*
4) Nightwood by Djuna Barnes*
5) Augustus Carp, Esq. by Himself (Henry Howarth Bashford)*
6) Murphy by Samuel Beckett*
7) Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm
8) The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
9) Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow*
10) The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett
11) The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen
12) Lucinda Brayford by Martin Boyd*
13) Through the Wheat by Thomas Boyd*
14) Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess*
15) The Gallery by John Horne Burns*
16) The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
17) My Antonia by Willa Cather*
18) The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton*
19) Elders and Betters by Ivy Compton-Burnett*
20) The Public Burning by Robert Coover*
21) Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
22) Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos*
23) South Wind by Norman Douglas*
24) Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
25) An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
26) Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
27) The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
28) As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
29) The Flower Beneath the Foot by Ronald Firbank*
30) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
31) Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
32) The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
33) Howards End by E. M. Forster
34) A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
35) The Magus by John Fowles
36) Daniel Martin by John Fowles*
37) The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft by George Gissing*
38) Loving by Henry Green
39) The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
40) I, Claudius by Robert Graves
41) Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
42) The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
43) A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
44) A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood*
45) The Ambassadors by Henry James
46) The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
47) The Golden Bowl by Henry James
48) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
49) Ulysses by James Joyce
50) Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
51) Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
52) The Late George Apley by John P. Marquand*
53) Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
54) Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham*
55) Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
56) The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford*
57) Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
58) Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
59) Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
60) A Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul
61) The English Teacher by R. K. Narayan*
62) At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien*
63) The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien*
64) Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor*
65) Animal Farm by George Orwell
66) 1984 by George Orwell
67) The Golden Spur by Dawn Powell*
68) A Glastonbury Romance by John Cowper Powys*
69) Excellent Women by Barbara Pym*
70) The King Must Die by Mary Renault*
71) Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
72) Call It Sleep by Henry Roth*
73) The Ghost Writer by Phillip Roth*
74) Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
75) The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
76) The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead*
77) The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
78) Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
79) A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole*
80) The Bridge in the Jungle by B. Traven*
81) Julian by Gore Vidal*
82) Lincoln by Gore Vidal*
83) Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh*
84) Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh*
85) A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
86) Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
87) The Pilgrim Hawk by Glenway Wescott*
88) Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West*
89) The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
90) The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
91) The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
92) Forgetting Elena by Edmund White*
93) Voss by Patrick White*
94) No Laughing Matter by Angus Wilson*
95) The Code of the Woosters by P. G. Wodehouse*
96) Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe*
97) Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf*
98) The Winds of War by Herman Wouk*
99) War and Remembrance by Herman Wouk*
100) Native Son by Richard Wright
Appendix: Multi-Volume Novels
1) Mapp and Lucia by E. F. Benson*
2) The Complete Enderby by Anthony Burgess*
3) U.S.A. by John Dos Passos
4) Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford
5) The Gormenghast Novels by Mervyn Peake*
6) A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
7) Strangers and Brothers by C. P. Snow*
8) Rabbit Angstrom by John Updike*
The Ten Greatest Novels of the 20th Century
1) Ulysses by James Joyce
2) In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
3) Kokoro by Natsume Soseki
4) The Trial by Franz Kafka
5) The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
6) The Ambassadors by Henry James
7) Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann
8) The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
9) The Quiet Don by Mikhail Sholokhov
10) The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Ten Greatest Novels of All Time
1) The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki
2) Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
3) Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
4) The Dream of the Red Chamber (a.k.a. The Story of the Stone) by Ts’ao Hsueh-ch’in
5) Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
6) War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
7) Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert
8) The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
9) In Search of Lost Time (a.k.a. Remembrance of Things Past) by Marcel Proust
10) Ulysses by James Joyce
