Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century
Explore Penguin's Great Books of the 20th Century—a curated list of timeless literary masterpieces. Discover iconic novels and influential works that defined modern literature.
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The Adventures of Augie March
by Saul Bellow
Originally published in 1953, Saul Bellow's modern picaresque tale grandly illustrates twentieth-century man's restless pursuit of an elusive meaning. Augie March, a young man growing up in Chicago during the Great Depression, doesn't understand success on other people's terms. Fleeing to Mexico in search of something to fill his restless soul and soothe his hunger for adventure, Augie latches on to a wild succession of occupations until his journey brings him full circle. Yet beneath Augie's carefree nature lies a reflective person with a strong sense of responsibility to both himself and others, who in the end achieves a success of his own making. A modern-day Columbus, Augie March is a man searching not for land but for self and soul and, ultimately, for his place in the world.
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Gravity's Rainbow
by Thomas Pynchon
Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, GRAVITY'S RAINBOW is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the twentieth century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its complex and richly layered narrative begins a few months after the German's secret V-2 rocket bombs start falling on London. British intelligence discovers that a map of the city pinpointing the sexual conquests of one Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, U.S. Army, corresponds identically to a map showing the V-2 impact sites. The implications of this discovery will launch Slothrop on an amazing journey across war-torn Europe, fleeing an international cabal of military-industrial superpowers, in search of the mysterious Rocket 00000. The sprawling, encyclopedic narrative of Gravity's Rainbow -- with its countless subsidiary plots, more than 400 characters, shifting literary styles, and allusions ranging from classical music theory, literature, and military science to comic strips and film -- and the novel's penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.
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The Heart of the Matter
by Graham Greene
An assistant police commissioner in a West African coastal town lets passion overrule his honor.
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White Noise
by Don DeLillo
Jack Gladney, a professor of Nazi history at a Middle American liberal arts school, and his family try to handle normal family life as a black cloud of lethal gaseous fumes threatens their town. Reprint.
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Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad
Marlow sails down the Congo in search of Kurtz, a company agent who has, according to rumors, become insane in the jungle isolation.
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On the Road
by Jack Kerouac
Chronicles the way of life of the beat generation as Dean Moriarty speeds across America.
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Waiting for the Barbarians
by J. M. Coetzee
Allegory of the war between oppressor and oppressed.
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Lord of the Flies
by William Golding
Lord of the Flies remains as provocative today as when it was first published in 1954, igniting passionate debate with its startling, brutal portrait of human nature. Though critically acclaimed, it was largely ignored upon its initial publication. Yet soon it became a cult favorite among both students and literary critics who compared it to J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye in its influence on modern thought and literature. William Golding's compelling story about a group of very ordinary small boys marooned on a coral island has become a modern classic. At first it seems as though it is all going to be great fun; but the fun before long becomes furious and life on the island turns into a nightmare of panic and death. As ordinary standards of behaviour collapse, the whole world the boys know collapses with them—the world of cricket and homework and adventure stories—and another world is revealed beneath, primitive and terrible. Labeled a parable, an allegory, a myth, a morality tale, a parody, a political treatise, even a vision of the apocalypse, Lord of the Flies has established itself as a true classic. "Lord of the Flies is one of my favorite books. That was a big influence on me as a teenager, I still read it every couple of years." —Suzanne Collins, author of The Hunger Games "As exciting, relevant, and thought-provoking now as it was when Golding published it in 1954." —Stephen King