Building A Better List

How about three more authors: Thomas Hardy (Return of the Native, Tess, or Jude the Obscure); Sinclair Lewis (Main street or Babbitt); and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.

I noticed your introduction to the list says that The Color Purple, published in 1982, is the most recent book on the list. However the list itself shows that Beloved was published in 1987 and His Dark Materials was published in 1995.

This list shows that Americans, outside of academic and circles and the like, know nothing about the past. Antiquity, the middle ages, the Renaissance, forget it. The absurdity of including 2 (count them, two!) Greek writers and (unless I missed something) not one Roman, two books from all of the middle ages (Dante's Commedia and Chaucer's Tales), and a single item (The Prince) from the Renaissance shows how blank the American mind is when it comes to the past. There are of course great scholars in these areas in the US, but it seems that to the public mind the entire past, from 1776 back to the days when Alkman trained chorus of girls to sing in Sparta, the whole past history of European culture is one patriotic zero. But really, six or seven books to cover 2300 years, maybe another dozen up til 1800, and *then* literature comes into focus for the American mind? The truth is that even Flaubert is just window dressing here. Nobody cares what happened before 1900. Not even Oscar Wilde? The Portrait of Dorian Gray doesn't rank? A pain killer, quick.

With all due respect to the learned Mr Bernstein, Thucydides is not the oldest book on the list. For European literature, that would be Homer (who lived in Asia Minor, it would seem). The oldest overall would have to be the Bible, or portions of it, which date from a bit earlier. What is pathetic is that this list pretends to be very cosmopolitan and historical. Imagine, even Homer! But no Goethe. Imagine, Dante! But no Cervantes. Oy! Three plays of Shakespeare! What culture! But not Donne. So full of culture, this list, and so lacking in any real depth, breadth or scope. That means times, languages, kinds (genres, if we wanna be slick). What matters most here is that this list reflects the level not just of the average reader, but of the universities, where studies of anything older than 1800 are ancient history. In a land with a couple hundred million adult readers, how many can read Latin? A few thousand? And who will then judge whether Catullus is as good as some two-bit novelist with a pre-fab plot and factory made diction.

To leave off Charles Dickens is just a sin. I agree with other commentors that it is impossible to reduce the greatness of world literture and non fiction to 100 mere choices. Others have named phenomenal works that should not go unlauded.

100 Years of Solitude by Marquez, Collected Works by W.B. Yeats, Collected Works by Derek Wolcott, Heart of Darkness by Conrad, A Confedercy of Dunces by J. Toole, Hard Times by Dickens, Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad, Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, The Prince by Machiavelli, Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain, The White Goddess by Robert Graves, The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrel, Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence, The Federalist Papers and the Devil???s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce.