Time's All-Time 100 Novels 2005

In October 2005 Time's critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo chose the hundred best novels published in English since 1923, the year the magazine was founded. The list is unranked and deliberately broad: beside Faulkner, Woolf and Nabokov it admits a children's novel (Judy Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret), a graphic novel (Watchmen), science fiction (Neuromancer, Snow Crash, Ubik) and crime (The Big Sleep, Red Harvest). Its starting date keeps Ulysses out, which is why it reads differently from the Modern Library's list of 1998, with which it shares about forty titles.

Because so much of it is post-war American fiction, it is also a list of books whose first editions can still be found in jackets at every price. To Kill a Mockingbird (Lippincott, 1960) and The Catcher in the Rye (Little, Brown, 1951) are the four- and five-figure firsts; Neuromancer was a paperback original from Ace in 1984, so its first edition costs less than a hardback reprint; Watchmen was twelve comics from DC in 1986 and 1987 before it was a book. Beloved, White Teeth, The Corrections and Atonement are modern firsts whose prices move with each prize and adaptation.

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.