Modern Library 100 Best Novels 1998

In July 1998 the editorial board of the Modern Library, the Random House imprint founded in 1917 to publish the classics cheaply, ranked the hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century. Ulysses came first, The Great Gatsby second, and the list ran through Faulkner, Woolf, Orwell and Waugh to The Magnificent Ambersons at one hundred. It was argued over at once: nine of the hundred are by women, the board was mostly older American men, and the Reader's List that the public voted for at the same time put Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard at the top. But it has outlasted the argument, and for many readers it is still the twentieth-century canon to work through.

For a collector it is close to a map of the modern first-edition market. Ulysses was published in Paris by Shakespeare and Company in 1922 in an edition of 1,000 copies, the first hundred signed on Dutch handmade paper, and those are among the most expensive books of the century. The Great Gatsby (Scribner, 1925) is collected for its jacket, which can be worth many times the book; Lolita first appeared in two green paperback volumes from the Olympia Press in Paris in 1955; Brave New World came from Chatto and Windus in 1932 and Catch-22 from Simon and Schuster in 1961. Further down the list are books whose firsts are still affordable: The Moviegoer, The Ginger Man, Zuleika Dobson.

Each row links to the book's page, where the first edition is identified against two sources where we have them, its points are listed, and a value band appears once we hold recorded sales of that printing.