Grimmelshausen to García Márquez · Weimar, Petersburg, Dublin, Buenos Aires · the classic and the best-seller side by side
Three and a half centuries of imaginative writing, from the last baroque romances to the year Macondo was blown away. Novels, stories, poems and plays — the books that are read because they are great, and the books that were read because everybody was reading them. Every author comes with a life; every one of the eighteen hundred works with an account of what is actually in it. Open a name to read, and tick the works off as you go.
A thousand and fifty-three authors and a little under two thousand two hundred works, covering imaginative writing in the West from the tail of the baroque to the middle of the twentieth century. Only the major work of each author is listed. Nobody is here for one good book that nobody read and nobody remembered.
A book earns its place by one of two tests, and a good many pass both. The first is that it became a classic — read, taught, translated, argued with, and still in print. The second is that it was popular in its time — that it sold enormously, was serialised, pirated, dramatised and imitated, and tells us what people were actually reading. Melville is here on the first test and was a commercial failure; Booth Tarkington is here on the second and won two Pulitzers; Dickens, Hugo, Stevenson and Conan Doyle are here on both. The Standing filter separates the three groups, and running it against the period filter is the fastest way to see how differently the two canons behave.
Keeping the popular books in is a deliberate choice. A shelf made only of masterpieces gives a false picture of what a literate century was like: it removes Marie Corelli, who outsold Wilde and Kipling combined, and Ethel M. Dell and Zane Grey and Ouida and Ben-Hur, and with them any sense of the water the great books were swimming in.
One spine per author, with the works listed underneath. Where a writer's career divides cleanly — Kipling's tales against his novels, Wells's scientific romances against his social comedies, Lorca's poems against his plays, Brecht's and Schiller's theatre against their verse — the second body of work has its own entry, so that a reader looking for the plays is not made to hunt through the poems.
Everything imagined: novels, novellas, short fiction, poetry, narrative verse, fairy tale, and drama. Essays, history, memoir, philosophy, criticism, travel and science belong to the companion non-fiction shelf and are not repeated here — which is why there is no Ruskin except The King of the Golden River, no Emerson except the poems, and no Casanova at all.
Drama was missing from the source list and has been added. Four plays had survived on it by accident, attached to poets. A shelf of Western imaginative writing from 1600 to 1950 that leaves out Molière, Racine, Calderón, Goldoni, Sheridan, Beaumarchais, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov's theatre, Shaw, Wilde's comedies, Pirandello, Lorca, Brecht, O'Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller is not describing the same civilisation as the one that produced the novels. Forty-two entries are drama; if they are not wanted, the Kind filter removes them in one click.
It begins where the previous shelf stopped, in the second decade of the seventeenth century, and the first entries proper are Sorel's Francion and Marino's Adone in 1623. It ends in 1950, with a handful of books — The Martian Chronicles, I, Robot, Canto general, Gormenghast, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe — that were published in that year and would look absurd cut off a season early.
Fourteen entries on the source list are not Western and have been set aside rather than deleted: Sōseki, Tanizaki, Akutagawa, Kawabata, Dazai and Miyazawa; Ba Jin, Lao She and Shen Congwen; Tawfiq al-Hakim, Sadeq Hedayat, Halide Edib Adıvar and Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu. They are major writers and they deserve shelves of their own rather than a footnote on this one.
The source list carried the same author twice under two spellings in five places — Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fanny Burney, Charlotte Smith, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez and Sholokhov — and the same book twice under its original and its English title in nine more, including Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris, Manzoni's I promessi sposi, Unamuno's Niebla and Proust's Swann's Way. Corneille appeared with a volume of miscellaneous verse and none of his tragedies; Congreve with poems and none of his comedies; La Fontaine with the Contes and not the Fables; Quevedo with the Sueños and not the Buscón; Eça de Queirós without Os Maias; Smollett without Humphry Clinker; Kipling without Kim and the Jungle Book; Chekhov without a single play. All of these have been repaired.
The shelf originally stopped at 1950. It now runs to 1970, which adds a hundred and seventy-nine entries and three hundred and eighty-two works. Two decisions shaped what came in. The first is that the centre of gravity moves: the most consequential fiction of these twenty years was not written in London, Paris or New York but in Bogotá, Lima, Buenos Aires, Lagos, Nairobi, Port of Spain and the Soviet camps, and the shelf reflects that. The second is that the wider English-speaking world, which had been a thin category, becomes a substantial one — Achebe, Soyinka, Naipaul, White, Richler.
Two writers already on the shelf have had their entries extended rather than duplicated: Pasternak, who appears at 1917 for the early lyrics and now carries Doctor Zhivago and the Zhivago poems; and Guimarães Rosa, whose Sagarana was joined by The Devil to Pay in the Backlands before both were later cut.
1970 is the year of Mishima’s suicide, which closes the Asian shelf, and the year after One Hundred Years of Solitude reached English. What lies immediately beyond it — Morrison, Rushdie, Kundera in exile, Sebald, the Latin American writers’ second acts — needs a shelf that can see its consequences.
An audit of the shelf against the size of each writer’s actual output found the major novelists thinly represented: Dickens carried five books of fifteen, Tolstoy three, the Brontës one apiece, Proust five volumes of seven. A hundred and one works have been added to forty-nine existing entries and placed in chronological position rather than appended, so that a writer’s entry now reads as a career — Dickens from Pickwick to Our Mutual Friend, Tolstoy from The Cossacks to Hadji Murad, James from Daisy Miller to The Golden Bowl.
The audit also turned up two entries — Hesse and Bulwer-Lytton — carrying a description for a work that was not in the list, which the app had been silently discarding. Both are fixed: Hesse gains Narcissus and Goldmund, and the stray Bulwer-Lytton remark has gone into his biography, where it belonged.
The date beside an author is now their life — birth to death, with c. where the birth is uncertain and b. for the living. Anonymous groupings and schools carry the span of the writers gathered under them, and a few collaborations carry the outer bounds of the pair. Every work now carries its own year as well, so an entry reads as a working life rather than a list.
The year given is publication, not composition, because that is what a reader can go and find. Where the two diverge sharply the gap is usually the point: Kafka’s novels are dated to the posthumous printings, Billy Budd to 1924 rather than the 1890s, The Master and Margarita to 1967 rather than 1940, The Third Policeman to 1967 rather than 1940. Long serials and multi-volume works carry a span.
Adding the years exposed forty-seven entries whose works were listed out of sequence. They have been sorted, and because a tick is stored against a work’s position in its list, the app carries saved progress across the reordering once, on first load.
An audit of the popular filter found it running out at about 1947: the shelf had Zane Grey, Edgar Wallace and Agatha Christie but almost nothing from the two decades when the mass-market paperback and the book club remade what reading was. Sixty-one writers and a hundred and six works have been added to close it — Michener, Clavell, Wouk, Uris, Robbins, Susann, Metalious, L’Amour, Heyer, Cartland, MacLean, Shute, Hailey, Puzo, John D. MacDonald and the rest.
They are here on the same terms as everyone else: because a very large number of people read them, which is a fact about the century worth recording. Several are also good, and the entries say which. Where a book’s politics are part of what it did — Uris on the Palestinian Arabs, Ruark on the Mau Mau, Sapper’s antisemitism, Wheatley’s reaction — the entry names it rather than quietly leaving the writer off.
The cut-off costs this section more than most: Forsyth, Benchley, Follett, King and the rest of the modern machine all begin in the 1970s, and Shogun is 1975.
The shelf had grown up with sixty-one authors split across two entries apiece — an early one and a later one, a legacy of extending the range twice. They are now folded together, works in date order, so that an entry reads as a career rather than as two instalments. Where the pair listed the same book twice the duplicate has gone: Kim, The Master and Margarita, The Iceman Cometh, Gabriela, and the Narnia and Akhmatova titles that one entry restated in a fuller form.
Three continental blocks have been halved on the same principle, keeping the earlier writers entire and thinning the later ones. The German and Austrian, Italian and Polish entries went from seventy-six after 1850 to thirty-eight; everything before 1850 stays, so Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Hoffmann, Hölderlin, Novalis, Leopardi, Manzoni, Mickiewicz and Krasicki are all untouched.
The cuts fall on the nineteenth-century realists and poets who are school reading at home and almost unread in English — Storm, Keller, Freytag, Meyer, Nievo, Carducci, Pascoli, De Amicis, Prus, Reymont — and on a middle rank of the twentieth century that has never quite crossed over: Hofmannsthal, Stefan George, Trakl, Heinrich Mann, Broch, Werfel, Feuchtwanger, Jünger, Ungaretti, Silone, Vittorini, Malaparte, Pavese, Buzzati, Bachmann, Sciascia, Uwe Johnson, Peter Weiss. Karl May, Salgari and Hans Dominik go with them — enormous sellers in their own languages, invisible in English.
Verga is the loss that stings: he is verismo’s master and Visconti filmed him, though the movement’s theory and its first novel belong to his friend Luigi Capuana, who is now on the shelf beside him. Broch and Pavese have real defenders, and Sciascia is the reason anyone writes Mafia novels. What survives is what an English-speaking reader is likely to meet anyway — Kafka, Mann, Musil, Roth, Zweig, Brecht, Grass, Böll; Pirandello, Svevo, Calvino, Lampedusa, Primo Levi; Schulz, Gombrowicz, Miłosz, Lem.
The same test was then applied to the Scandinavian, Swiss, Yiddish, Hungarian, Greek, Yugoslav and Hebrew entries, which went from thirty-three after 1850 to seventeen. Holberg, Lönnrot, Andersen, Wyss, Petőfi and Njegoš are all before the line and untouched. Andrić, who was carrying two entries, is down to one as a result.
Three Nobel laureates went in this round, which is worth saying plainly: Bjørnson, Pontoppidan and Lagerkvist, none of whom is now read outside Scandinavia. Others went indirectly, inside group entries that were cut: Kertész, Danilo Kiš, Magda Szabó, and later Elytis and Ritsos with the Greek entry. Verga, Karl May and Jünger have been restored from the previous round.
The Hispanic and Lusophone side of the shelf ran to eighty-two entries, which was out of proportion for a list read mostly in English. Everything before 1800 stays — the Golden Age is not negotiable, and Cervantes, Lope, Calderón, Tirso, Góngora, Quevedo, Sor Juana and Camões are all still here. After 1800 the count has been halved, from sixty-seven to thirty-three.
What went was of two kinds: the nineteenth-century national romantics whose reputation has never travelled — Espronceda, Alencar, Blest Gana, Isaacs, Palma, Valera, Bécquer, Pardo Bazán — and the criollismo and indigenismo novels that were once compulsory across Latin America and are now largely a classroom matter: Don Segundo Sombra, Doña Bárbara, La vorágine, Huasipungo. A handful of twentieth-century figures who remain major at home but thin in translation went with them — Baroja, Valle-Inclán, Alberti, Miguel Hernández, Delibes, Goytisolo, Arguedas, Sabato.
These are losses, and some are arguable. Valle-Inclán invented the esperpento; Arlt is read more now than he was; Pardo Bazán and Laforet have both been recovered by recent criticism. The test applied was whether a reader in English is likely to meet the writer outside a Spanish department, and it is a test that would have failed Rulfo in 1960.
A last pass removed thirty-eight more entries, most of them post-war poets and the group entries built around them. That structure is why the losses run wider than the names suggest: cutting the Charles Olson entry also removed Creeley, the Wilbur entry removed Jarrell, the O’Hara entry removed Ashbery, the Hill entry removed Bunting, the Kavanagh entry removed MacNeice, the Walcott entry removed Brathwaite, the Selvon entry removed Lamming, the Robbe-Grillet entry removed Sarraute and Butor, the Hermans entry removed Mulisch, the Stow entry removed Judith Wright, and the Greek entry removed Elytis and Ritsos. Six Nobel laureates went in this round — Szymborska, Agnon, Seferis, Elytis, Walcott and Ngũgĩ’s near-perennial candidacy aside — and so did Celan, who has a serious claim to be the greatest European poet after 1945.
Two writers came on: Hedin Brú, whose The Old Man and His Sons was voted the Faroese book of the century and is the only novel on this shelf written in a language with fifty thousand speakers; and Robertson Davies, whose Fifth Business is the strongest claim Canada has on the twentieth-century novel. Mór Jókai, cut in the previous round, is back.
A further twenty-one entries have gone, and the weight of them falls on modernist poetry: Rilke, Montale, Pessoa, Cavafy, Apollinaire, Tsvetaeva, Saint-John Perse, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, H.D., Roethke, Millay, Gabriela Mistral, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer. Cutting the Wilfred Owen entry took Sassoon, Rosenberg and Edward Thomas with it, so the poetry of the First World War is no longer represented at all. Five Nobel laureates are among them — Montale, Mistral, Cela, Perse and, in the previous round, several more.
What this means in practice is that the shelf is now a shelf of prose with poetry attached, rather than the two in balance. That is a defensible thing for a reading list aimed at English-speaking readers, who mostly come to foreign poetry late if at all. It is worth knowing that it happened, because no single decision made it happen.
Roughly two hundred and ninety entries have been added to the source list. The largest single gaps were whole literatures: there was no Russian writing before Pushkin, no Polish at all after Krasicki, almost no Scandinavian before Hamsun, and no Latin American canon to speak of — no Machado de Assis, no Martín Fierro, no Darío, no Neruda, no Vallejo. The Grimms, Andersen and Perrault's successors were missing, and so was the entire tradition of the fairy tale that runs behind nineteenth-century fiction. Among individual absences the most surprising were Manon Lescaut, Rasselas, Vathek, Mickiewicz, Heine, Mérimée, Nerval, Gautier, Lautréamont, Longfellow, Ibsen, Strindberg, Undset, Laxness, Sienkiewicz, Chesterton, Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, Alain-Fournier, Simenon, Lovecraft, Sartre, Camus, Lowry and Beckett's contemporaries.
A check of the continental lists turned up writers who had never been on the source list at all, which is a different thing from being cut: Palacio Valdés, Fogazzaro, Capuana, Fleuriot and Jovine among them. Two hundred and five entries have come on. About a hundred are from four sources: writers who pass this shelf’s own test of whether an English-speaking reader is likely to meet them (Gide above all, then D’Annunzio, Schnitzler, Hauptmann, Anouilh, Cocteau, Molnár, Waltari); writers before 1850 whom the weighting rounds said would stay but who had never been added; Nobel laureates missing without explanation; and the continental bestsellers of 1850 to 1940, from Marlitt and Ohnet to Verbitskaya, which the audit of the popular filter had not reached.
The other hundred and five are children’s writers. The shelf had forty-six children’s and fairy-tale entries, thirty-three of them in English, and almost nothing from the Continent: no Heidi, no Babar, no Maya the Bee, no Cuore, no Korczak. The English side was thinner than it looked, with no Mary Poppins, Paddington, Andrew Lang or Nancy Drew. Eight entries already here also gained the children’s book they were missing, from Pushkin’s verse tales to Calvino’s Italian Folktales, and the American picture book now has an entry of its own, which takes in Sendak.
Some of this reverses earlier decisions. De Amicis was cut in the German, Italian and Polish round and returns for Cuore alone. Lope de Vega, whom these notes said was still here, turned out to be missing, and is back with his late work; his best-known plays were printed before 1620 and belong to the previous shelf.
A review against Roy Glashan’s Library, the online collection of public-domain genre fiction, showed that the shelf had the great names of each popular form and very little of the second rank around them: Holmes but not Thorndyke, Trent or the Thinking Machine; Lovecraft but not Machen, Blackwood or Dunsany; Rider Haggard but not The Sheik, The Blue Lagoon or Hall Caine. Fifty-six entries have come on: seventeen in crime and detection, from The Leavenworth Case and The Mystery of a Hansom Cab to Carr and Crispin; eleven in weird fiction; nine in science fiction, from Griffith’s airships to Simak’s City; and the bestsellers and thrillers of 1880 to 1920. Ernest Bramah, whose Kai Lung and Max Carrados prompted the review, is among them.
The line was drawn at the same place as before: a book is here because it became a classic or because a very large number of people read it. The deep pulp that fills much of that library, prolific and often enjoyable, passes neither test and has been left out.
A new kind, Young adult, gathers the novels read by older children and teenagers, most of them in school: some written for that age, like The Outsiders and The Pigman, and some written for adults and long since claimed by it, like The Yearling, Shane and A Separate Peace. Forty entries came on with it, thirty-two under the new kind and eight younger books under Written for children, and seven entries already here moved across, from Johnny Tremain and A Wrinkle in Time to Sutcliff, Garfield and Garner. Steinbeck gained The Red Pony and The Pearl, and Wyndham The Chrysalids, the school texts their entries lacked.
A few of these books are later than 1970, as with other writers who belong to the period and went on writing after it. Robert Cormier, whose novels all come after 1970, was left off for that reason, and Sterling North’s Rascal is memoir and belongs to the other shelf.
Nothing here is settled. Argue with it; the list is meant to be argued with.
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