An Alternative 20th Century Literary Canon

The triumph of modernism has slightly skewed literary history. In addition to sometimes ignoring minority writers or marginal voices, we have also ignored some exciting inheritors of Flaubert and Turgenev, Tolstoy, Eliot and Chekhov: the high realists, for want of a better phrase.

In short we have privileged the avant-garde, the mischief makers.

The ego of the novel has also slightly skewed matters – the order of forms was not handed down by Moses and many other genres such as essays, letters, and short stories deserve greater attention.

This is an alternative canon of 20^th century literature, complete with prejudices of taste, personal preferences, and all the pettiness that these lists engender. Let me know what I’ve missed!

I will update semi-frequently

1. The Leopard- Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa 

2. The Chateau – William Maxwell 

3. Short stories – Salinger 

4. Travel writing (Sea and Sardinia) – DH Lawrence 

5. Essays – DH Lawrence 

6. Letters – DH Lawrence 

7. The Portrait of Mr WH – Oscar Wilde 

8. The Renaissance – Walter Pater 

9. The Jolly Corner – Henry James 

10. What Maisie Knew – Henry James 

11. The Golden Bowl – Henry James 

12. A Passage to India – EM Forster 

13. Bouvard et Pecuchet, Three Stories – Flaubert 

14. Mrs Warren’s Profession – George Bernard Shaw 

15. Country Girl – Edna O’Brien 

16. The Dark – John McGaren 

17. Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann 

18. Private Lives – Noel Coward 

19. Deep Blue Sea – Rattigan 

20. Leopoldstadt – Tom Stoppard 

21. Short Stories – Rudyard Kipling 

22. Father and Son – Edmund Gosse 

23. Hotel du Lac- Anita Brookner 

24. Excellent Women – Barbara Pym 

25. The Blue Flower – Penelope Fitzgerald 

26. Memoirs of Montparnasse – John Glassco 

27. The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene 

28. The Untouchable – John Banville 

29. Mimesis – Auerbach 

30. The Black Prince – Iris Murdoch 

31. The Inheritors – William Golding 

32. The Gift – Nabokov 

33. Speak, Memory – Nabokov 

34. In a Free State – VS Naipaul 

35. The House for Mr Biswas – Naipaul 

36. The Pillars of Hercules – Paul Theroux 

37. The Information – Martin Amis 

38. Essays – George Orwell 

39. Stories – VS Pritchett 

40. The Flaneur – Edmund White 

41. Trieste, The Meaning of Nowhere – Jan Morris 

42. The Book of Disquiet – Pessoa 

43. Sabbath’s Theatre – Roth 

44. The Adventures of Augie March, Humbolt’s Gift – Saul Bellow 

45. Memoirs, letters, essays – Joseph Roth 

46. The Driver’s Seat – Muriel Spark 

47. The Line of Beauty – Alan Hollinghurst 

48. The Life and Times of Michael K, Waiting for the Barbarians – JM Coetzee 

49. Ways of Seeing – John Berger 

50. The Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz – WG Sebald 

51. The Complete Works of Elizabeth David 

52. Short stories, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion – Yukio Mishima 

53. House of Mirth, Morocco – Edith Wharton