Open Syllabus Top 500 - Literature

The 500 most-assigned literary works across university syllabi worldwide.

• Deliverance (1970) by James Dickey
• Them (1970) by Joyce Carol Oates
• Arrowsmith (1925) by Sinclair Lewis
• Sophie's Choice (1980) by William Styron
• Froth on the Daydream (1947) by Boris Vian
• The Sheltering Sky (1949) by Paul Bowles
• Paroles (1946) by Jacques Prévert
• Lord of the Flies (1954) by William Golding
• The Winter of Our Discontent (1961) by John Steinbeck
• Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley
• The Tartar Steppe (1940) by Dino Buzzati
• Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) by Luigi Pirandello
• A Clockwork Orange (1962) by Anthony Burgess
• Life A User's Manual (1978) by Georges Perec
• The Executioner's Song (1980) by Norman Mailer
• Mr. Sammler's Planet (1971) by Saul Bellow
• Darkness at Noon (1940) by Arthur Koestler
• Sons and Lovers (1913) by D.H. Lawrence
• Goodbye, Columbus (1960) by Philip Roth
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) by Muriel Spark
• Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) by Sigmund Freud
• The Recognitions (1955) by William Gaddis
• Moby-Dick (1851) by Herman Melville
• Gravity's Rainbow (1974) by Thomas Pynchon
• As I Lay Dying (1930) by William Faulkner
• War and Peace (1869) by Leo Tolstoy
• The Waters of Kronos (1961) by Conrad Richter
• No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939) by James Hadley Chase
• The Keepers of the House (1965) by Shirley Ann Grau
• Finnegans Wake (1939) by James Joyce
• Écrits (1966) by Jacques Lacan
• Babbitt (1922) by Sinclair Lewis
• Asterix the Gaul (1961) by René Goscinny
• Lolita (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov
• The Blue Lotus (1936) by Hergé
• Zazie in the Metro (1959) by Raymond Queneau
• 1984 (1949) by George Orwell
• The Painted Bird (1965) by Jerzy Kosinski
• Henderson the Rain King (1959) by Saul Bellow
• Light in August (1932) by William Faulkner
• Pale Fire (1962) by Vladimir Nabokov
• The Old Man and the Sea (1953) by Ernest Hemingway
• The War of the Worlds (1898) by H.G. Wells
• Murder in the Cathedral (1935) by T. S. Eliot
• Friday, or, The Other Island (1967) by Michel Tournier
• Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) by D.H. Lawrence
• Tristes Tropiques (1955) by Claude Lévi-Strauss
• Tropic of Cancer (1934) by Henry Miller
• The Iceman Cometh (1946) by Eugene O'Neill
• The Grapes of Wrath (1939) by John Steinbeck
• The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) by John Barth
• Play It as It Lays (1970) by Joan Didion
• The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (1966) by Katherine Anne Porter
• Naked Lunch (1959) by William S. Burroughs
• The Theatre and Its Double (1938) by Antonin Artaud
• Loving (1945) by Henry Green
• I, Claudius (1934) by Robert Graves
• Seize the Day (1956) by Saul Bellow
• Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) by James Baldwin
• A Bend in the River (1979) by V.S. Naipaul
• Gaston (1957) by André Franquin
• Sanctuary (1931) by William Faulkner
• The Stories of John Cheever (1979) by John Cheever
• The Bald Soprano (1950) by Eugène Ionesco
• The Trial (1925) by Franz Kafka
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) by Ken Kesey
• Moravagine (1926) by Blaise Cendrars
• The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (1959) by Robert Lewis Taylor
• Enemies, A Love Story (1966) by Isaac Bashevis Singer
• The Berlin Stories (1945) by Christopher Isherwood
• Manhattan Transfer (1925) by John Dos Passos
• The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966) by Michel Foucault
• Absalom, Absalom! (1936) by William Faulkner
• Tropisms (1939) by Nathalie Sarraute
• The Edge of Sadness (1962) by Edwin O'Connor
• The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) by Thornton Wilder
• The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford (1970) by Jean Stafford
• Man's Fate (1933) by André Malraux
• Seamarks (1957) by Saint-John Perse
• Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927) by François Mauriac
• Dubliners (1914) by James Joyce
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) by James Joyce
• On the Road (1957) by Jack Kerouac
• To Kill a Mockingbird (1961) by Harper Lee
• The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) by John le Carré
• American Pastoral (1998) by Philip Roth
• The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J.D. Salinger
• The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) by Arthur Conan Doyle
• Native Son (1940) by Richard Wright
• Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce
• House Made of Dawn (1969) by N. Scott Momaday
• Brideshead Revisited (1945) by Evelyn Waugh
• Beloved (1988) by Toni Morrison
• The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1974) by Heinrich Böll
• The Blind Assassin (2000) by Margaret Atwood
• The Sun Also Rises (1926) by Ernest Hemingway
• The Family Moskat (1950) by Isaac Bashevis Singer
• A Room of One's Own (1929) by Virginia Woolf
• A Fable (1955) by William Faulkner
• The Tendrils of the Vine (1908) by Colette
• Of Mice and Men (1937) by John Steinbeck
• The Abyss (1968) by Marguerite Yourcenar
• Alcools (1913) by Guillaume Apollinaire
• Song of Solomon (1977) by Toni Morrison
• The Death of the Heart (1938) by Elizabeth Bowen
• Main Street (1920) by Sinclair Lewis
• East of Eden (1952) by John Steinbeck
• Madame Bovary (1857) by Gustave Flaubert
• A Dance to the Music of Time (1951) by Anthony Powell
• Elmer Gantry (1927) by Sinclair Lewis
• The Man Who Loved Children (1940) by Christina Stead
• The Corrections (2001) by Jonathan Franzen
• A Death in the Family (1958) by James Agee
• The Confessions of Nat Turner (1968) by William Styron
• Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) by Willa Cather
• Contempt (1954) by Alberto Moravia
• Revolutionary Road (1961) by Richard Yates
• Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) by Zora Neale Hurston
• The Joke (1967) by Milan Kundera
• Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys
• The Fixer (1967) by Bernard Malamud
• Under the Volcano (1947) by Malcolm Lowry
• The Counterfeiters (1925) by André Gide
• Saville (1976) by David Storey
• Aurélien (1944) by Louis Aragon
• Pasmore (1972) by David Storey
• The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) by Hannah Arendt
• The Ravishing of Lol Stein (1964) by Marguerite Duras
• Going After Cacciato (1979) by Tim O'Brien
• The Silence of the Sea (1942) by Vercors
• The Gulag Archipelago (1973) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• Elbow Room (1978) by James Alan McPherson
• Guard of Honor (1949) by James Gould Cozzens
• Appointment in Samarra (1934) by John O'Hara
• The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (1906) by Selma Lagerlöf
• The Day of the Locust (1939) by Nathanael West
• A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944) by Joseph Campbell
• A Handful of Dust (1934) by Evelyn Waugh
• The Horseman on the Roof (1951) by Jean Giono
• For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) by Ernest Hemingway
• The Sound and the Fury (1929) by William Faulkner
• Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) by Eugene O'Neill
• Cannery Row (1945) by John Steinbeck
• Martin Eden (1909) by Jack London
• Blake and Mortimer (1946) by Edgar P. Jacobs
• Ubik (1969) by Philip K. Dick
• Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut
• The Heart of the Matter (1948) by Graham Greene
• Call It Sleep (1934) by Henry Roth
• The Good Earth (1931) by Pearl S. Buck
• Housekeeping (1980) by Marilynne Robinson
• All the King's Men (1946) by Robert Penn Warren
• Animal Farm (1945) by George Orwell
• Blood Meridian (1985) by Cormac McCarthy
• The Name of the Rose (1980) by Umberto Eco
• An American Tragedy (1925) by Theodore Dreiser
• The Golden Notebook (1962) by Doris Lessing
• The Rosy Crucifixion (1949) by Henry Miller
• The Assistant (1957) by Bernard Malamud
• Suttree (1979) by Cormac McCarthy
• The Second Sex (1949) by Simone de Beauvoir
• The Complete Stories (1972) by Flannery O'Connor
• The Adventures of Augie March (1954) by Saul Bellow
• Pride and Prejudice (1813) by Jane Austen
• Angle of Repose (1972) by Wallace Stegner
• The Centaur (1964) by John Updike
• Lucky Jim (1954) by Kingsley Amis
• The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) by Agatha Christie
• Belle du Seigneur (1968) by Albert Cohen
• The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) by C.S. Lewis
• Under the Sun of Satan (1926) by Georges Bernanos
• Mrs. Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf
• A Passage to India (1924) by E.M. Forster
• Rabbit, Run (1960) by John Updike
• The Opposing Shore (1951) by Julien Gracq
• Red Harvest (1929) by Dashiell Hammett
• Tortilla Flat (1935) by John Steinbeck
• Portnoy's Complaint (1969) by Philip Roth
• Journey to the End of the Night (1932) by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
• Tarantula (1971) by Bob Dylan
• The Stranger (1942) by Albert Camus
• The Town (1951) by Conrad Richter
• Under the Net (1954) by Iris Murdoch
• Sula (1973) by Toni Morrison
• Catch-22 (1961) by Joseph Heller
• The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) by John Fowles
• Survival in Auschwitz (1947) by Primo Levi
• Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë
• One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by Gabriel García Márquez
• Rebecca (1938) by Daphne du Maurier
• Ficciones (1944) by Jorge Luis Borges
• Falconer (1977) by John Cheever
• To the Lighthouse (1927) by Virginia Woolf
• Nadja (1928) by André Breton
• Midnight's Children (1981) by Salman Rushdie
• Dog Soldiers (1975) by Robert Stone
• Waiting for Godot (1953) by Samuel Beckett
• The Big Sleep (1939) by Raymond Chandler
• A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) by V.S. Naipaul
• Herzog (1965) by Saul Bellow