Anonymous | The Epic of Gilgamesh |
 |
c. 2000 BC |
Anonymous | The Egyptian Book of the Dead |
 |
c. 1650 BC |
Anonymous | The Bhagavad–Gita |
 |
c. 1500 BC |
Homer | The Iliad, The Odyssey |
 |
c. 700 BC |
Anonymous | The Old Testament |
 |
443 BC |
Eurypides (active c. 438 – 424 BC) | Alcestis |
 |
438 BC |
Sophocles | Oedipus Rex |
 |
429 BC |
Herodotus | The Histories |
 |
424 BC |
Aristophanes | The Birds |
 |
414 BC |
Plato | Dialogues |
 |
c. 400 BC |
Plato | The Republic |
 |
380 BC |
Aeschylus | Prometheus Bound |
 |
350 BC |
Virgil | The Aeneid |
 |
29 – 19 BC |
Aesop (lived c. 620 – 560 BC) | Fables (compiled by a rhetorician) |
 |
4 BC |
Ovid | Metamorphoses |
 |
2 – 8 AD |
Anonymous | The New Testament |
 |
60 AD |
St. Augustine | Confessions |
 |
398 |
Bede | The Ecclesiastical
History of the English People |
 |
731 |
Anonymous | The Thousand and One Nights |
 |
c. 850 |
Anonymous | Beowulf |
 |
c. 800 – 1000 |
Omar Khayyam | Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra |
 |
1070 |
Anonymous | The Nibelungen Lied |
 |
1200 |
Snorri Sturluson | The Prose Edda |
 |
1220 |
Dante Alighieri | The Divine Comedy |
 |
1321 |
Giovanni Boccaccio | The Decameron |
 |
1353 |
Anonymous | The Mabinogion (stories in Welsh, from oral tradition) |
 |
c. 1350–1410 |
William Langland | Piers Plowman |
 |
c. 1370 |
Geoffrey Chaucer | The Canterbury Tales |
 |
1390–1400 |
Thomas Malory | Le Morte d'Arthur |
 |
1485 |
Niccolo Machiavelli | The Prince |
 |
1513 |
John Calvin | Institutes of the Christian Religion (Latin original) |
 |
1536 |
Giorgio Vasari | Lives of the Painters |
 |
1550 |
Benvenuto Cellini | Autobiography |
 |
1558 |
Nostradamus | Centuries |
 |
1555–8 |
John Foxe | The Book of Martyrs |
 |
1563 |
Rabelais | Gargantua and Pantagruel |
 |
1532–64 |
Luis de Camoens | The Lusiads |
 |
1572 |
Cervantes | Don Quixote |
 |
1605, 1615 |
Thomas Hobbes | Leviathan |
 |
1651 |
Izaak Walton | The Compleat Angler |
 |
1653 |
Samuel Pepys | Diary (began) |
 |
1660 |
John Milton | Paradise Lost |
 |
1667 |
Samuel Pepys | Diary (ended) |
 |
1669 |
John Bunyan | Pilgrim's Progress |
 |
1678, 1684 |
Alexander Pope | The Rape of the Lock |
 |
1712 |
Daniel Defoe | Robinson Crusoe |
 |
1719 |
Jonathan Swift | Gulliver's Travels |
 |
1726 |
Henry Fielding | Tom Jones |
 |
1749 |
Samuel Richardson | Clarissa |
 |
1749 |
Tobias Smollett | Roderick Random |
 |
1749 |
John Cleland | Fanny Hill |
 |
1749 |
Samuel Johnson | Dictionary of the English Language |
 |
1755 |
Voltaire | Candide |
 |
1759 |
Oliver Goldsmith | The Vicar of Wakefield |
 |
1766 |
Lawrence Sterne | Tristram Shandy |
 |
1759–67 |
Goethe | The Sorrows of Young Werther |
 |
1774 |
Adam Smith | The Wealth of Nations |
 |
1776 |
Immanuel Kant | Critique of Pure Reason |
 |
1781 |
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos | Dangerous Liaisons |
 |
1782 |
Jean–Jacques Rousseau | Confessions |
 |
1782 |
Marquis de Sade | The 120 Days of Sodom |
 |
1785 |
Gilbert White | Natural History and Antiquities of Selbourne |
 |
1788 |
Edward Gibbon | The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire |
 |
1776–89 |
James Boswell | The Life of Doctor Samuel Johnson |
 |
1791 |
Thomas Paine | The Rights of Man |
 |
1791 |
Mary Wollstonecraft | A Vindication of the Rights of Women |
 |
1792 |
Thomas Malthus | Essays on the Principle of Population |
 |
1798 |
Jane Austen | Sense and Sensibility (her first novel) |
 |
1811 |
Jane Austen | Northanger Abbey, Persuasion (both posthumous) |
 |
1817 |
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley | Frankenstein |
 |
1818 |
Sir Walter Scott (active 1814–32) | Ivanhoe |
 |
1819 |
Thomas de Quincey | Confessions of an English Opium–Eater |
 |
1821 |
James Fennimore Cooper | The Last of the Mohicans |
 |
1826 |
Stendahl | The Red and the Black |
 |
1831 |
Victor Hugo | The Hunchback of Notre Dame |
 |
1831 |
Edward Bulwer–Lytton | The Last Days of Pompeii |
 |
1834 |
Charles Dickens | The Pickwick Papers (his first novel) |
 |
1836–7 |
Charles Darwin | Journal and Remarks (The Voyage of the Beagle) |
 |
1839 |
Edgar Allan Poe | The Fall of the House of Usher |
 |
1839 |
Edgar Allan Poe | The Murders in the Rue Morgue ("the first detective story") |
 |
1841 |
Gogol | Dead Souls |
 |
1842 |
John Ruskin | Modern Painters |
 |
1843 |
Alexandre Dumas | The Three Musketeers |
 |
1844 |
Friedrich Engels | The Condition of the Working Class in England in … |
 |
1844 |
William Makepeace Thackeray | Vanity Fair |
 |
1847 |
Charlotte Bronte | Jane Eyre |
 |
1847 |
Anne Bronte | Agnes Grey |
 |
1847 |
Emily Bronte | Wuthering Heights |
 |
1847 |
Mrs. Gaskell | Mary Barton |
 |
1848 |
Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels | The Communist Manifesto |
 |
1848 |
William Wordsworth | The Prelude (3 months posthumously) |
 |
1850 |
Herman Melville | Moby–Dick |
 |
1851 |
Harriet Beecher Stowe | Uncle Tom's Cabin |
 |
1852 |
Gustave Flaubert | Madame Bovary |
 |
1857 |
Mrs. Gaskell | The Life of Charlotte Brontë |
 |
1857 |
Charles Darwin | On the Origin of Species |
 |
1859 |
George Eliot | Adam Bede (her first novel) |
 |
1859 |
Wilkie Collins | The Woman in White |
 |
1860 |
Ivan Turgenev | Fathers and Sons |
 |
1862 |
Victor Hugo | Les Miserables |
 |
1862 |
Charles Kingsley | The Water Babies |
 |
1863 |
Lewis Carroll | Alice's Adventures in Wonderland |
 |
1865 |
Fyodor Dostoevsky | Crime and Punishment |
 |
1866 |
Jules Verne | Journey to the Centre of the Earth |
 |
1866 |
Emile Zola | Therese Raquin |
 |
1867 |
Louisa May Alcott | Little Women |
 |
1868 |
Wilkie Collins | The Moonstone ("the first English detective story") |
 |
1868 |
Fyodor Dostoevsky | The Idiot |
 |
1868–9 |
Leo Tolstoy | War and Peace |
 |
1865–9 |
Charles Dickens | The Mystery of Edwin Drood (unfinished) |
 |
1870 |
Lewis Carroll | Through the Looking Glass |
 |
1871 |
Thomas Hardy | Under the Greenwood Tree (his first novel) |
 |
1872 |
Jules Verne | Around the World in 80 Days |
 |
1873 |
George Eliot | Daniel Deronda (her last novel) |
 |
1876 |
Mark Twain | Tom Sawyer |
 |
1876 |
Leo Tolstoy | Anna Karenina |
 |
1878 |
Lew Wallace | Ben–Hur |
 |
1880 |
Henry James | The Portrait of a Lady |
 |
1881 |
Robert Louis Stevenson | Treasure Island |
 |
1883 |
Mark Twain | Huckleberry Finn |
 |
1885 |
H. Rider Haggard | King Solomon's Mines |
 |
1885 |
Rudyard Kipling | Plain Tales from the Hills (first major work) |
 |
1888 |
Sir James George Fraser | The Golden Bough |
 |
1890 |
Oscar Wilde | The Picture of Dorian Gray |
 |
1891 |
George & Weedon Grossmith | Diary of a Nobody |
 |
1892 |
Arthur Conan Doyle | Sherlock Holmes stories |
 |
1891–3 |
Emile Zola | Le Docteur Pascal (his last major novel) |
 |
1893 |
Thomas Hardy | Jude the Obscure (his last novel) |
 |
1895 |
H. G. Wells | The Time Machine |
 |
1895 |
Bram Stoker | Dracula |
 |
1897 |
Emile Zola | J'accuse (open letter to the French government) |
 |
1898 |
Joseph Conrad (first novel 1895) | Heart of Darkness |
 |
1899 |
Sigmund Freud | The Interpretation of Dreams |
 |
1900 |
Arnold Bennett | Anna of the Five Towns |
 |
1902 |
Samuel Butler | The Way of All Flesh |
 |
1903 |
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The Hound of the Baskervilles |
 |
1905 |
E. M. Forster | Where Angels Fear to Tread (his first novel) |
 |
1905 |
Oscar Wilde | De Profundis (posthumous) |
 |
1905 |
Rudyard Kipling | Puck of Pook's Hill (last major work) |
 |
1906 |
John Galsworthy | The Man of Property |
 |
1906 |
Kenneth Grahame | The Wind in the Willows |
 |
1908 |
Ambrose Bierce | The Devil's Dictionary |
 |
1911 |
D. H. Lawrence | The White Peacock (first novel) |
 |
1911 |
Thomas Mann (active 1896–1954) | Death in Venice |
 |
1912 |
Robert Tressell | The Ragged–Trousered Philanthropists |
 |
1914 |
Edgar Rice Burroughs | Tarzan of the Apes |
 |
1914 |
James Joyce | Dubliners |
 |
1914 |
John Buchan (active 1898–1941) | The Thirty–Nine Steps |
 |
1915 |
Virginia Woolf | The Voyage Out (her first novel) |
 |
1915 |
James Joyce | A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man |
 |
1916 |
James Joyce | Ulysses |
 |
1922 |
Herman Hesse | Siddhartha |
 |
1922 |
T. E. Lawrence | The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (private edition) |
 |
1922 |
Joseph Conrad | The Rover (his last finished novel) |
 |
1923 |
E. M. Forster | A Passage to India (last novel pub. in his lifetime) |
 |
1924 |
Arnold Bennett | The Clayhanger trilogy (compiled as such) |
 |
1925 |
Franz Kafka | The Trial (posthumously) |
 |
1925 |
F. Scott Fitzgerald | The Great Gatsby |
 |
1925 |
Adolf Hitler | Mein Kampf (German edition) |
 |
1925–6 |
A. A. Milne | Winnie–the–Pooh |
 |
1926 |
T. E. Lawrence | The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (subscribers' edition) |
 |
1922 |
Marcel Proust | In Search of Lost Time |
 |
1913–27 |
Herman Hesse (active 1904–43) | Steppenwolf |
 |
1927 |
Henry Williamson | Tarka the Otter |
 |
1927 |
D. H. Lawrence | Lady Chatterley's Lover |
 |
1928 |
Evelyn Waugh | Decline and Fall (his first novel) |
 |
1928 |
John Galsworthy | The Forsyte Saga compiled as such |
 |
1929 |
William Faulkner (active 1926–62) | The Sound and the Fury |
 |
1929 |
Ernest Hemingway (active 1926–61) | A Farewell to Arms |
 |
1929 |
D. H. Lawrence | The Virgin and the Gypsy (last novel) |
 |
1930 |
Dashiell Hammett | The Maltese Falcon |
 |
1930 |
Sellars and Yeatman | 1066 and All That (first published in book form) |
 |
1930 |
Aldous Huxley (active 1921–62) | Brave New World |
 |
1932 |
Adolf Hitler | Mein Kampf: first English edition (abridged) |
 |
1933 |
T. E. Lawrence | The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (posth. Public edition) |
 |
1935 |
Dale Carnegie | How to Win Friends and Influence People |
 |
1936 |
John Maynard Keynes | The General Theory of Employment, Interest … |
 |
1936 |
Margaret Mitchell | Gone with the Wind |
 |
1936 |
J. R. R. Tolkien | The Hobbit |
 |
1937 |
Izak Dinesen | Out of Africa |
 |
1937 |
Daphne du Maurier (active 1931–72) | Rebecca |
 |
1938 |
James Joyce | Finnegan's Wake |
 |
1939 |
John Steinbeck (active 1927–66) | The Grapes of Wrath |
 |
1939 |
Adolf Hitler | Mein Kampf: first unabridged edition |
 |
1939 |
Virginia Woolf | Between the Acts (her last novel) |
 |
1941 |
Albert Camus | The Outsider (The Stranger) |
 |
1942 |
Jean–Paul Sartre | Being and Nothingness |
 |
1943 |
George Orwell | Animal Farm |
 |
1945 |
Evelyn Waugh | Brideshead Revisited |
 |
1945 |
Dr. Benjamin Spock | The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care |
 |
1946 |
Alfred Kinsey | Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male / Female |
 |
1948, 1953 |
Simone de Beauvoir | The Second Sex |
 |
1949 |
George Orwell | Nineteen Eighty–Four |
 |
1949 |
Isaac Asimov | I, Robot (short story collection) |
 |
1950 |
Thor Heyerdahl | The Kon–Tiki Expedition |
 |
1950 |
J. D. Salinger | The Catcher in the Rye |
 |
1951 |
Stephen Potter | Gamesmanship, Lifemanship, One–Upmanship |
 |
1947–52 |
William Golding | Lord of the Flies |
 |
1954 |
(Ross & Norris McWhirter) | The Guinness Book of Records (first edition) |
 |
1955 |
Vladimir Nabokov | Lolita |
 |
1955 |
J. R. R. Tolkien | Lord of the Rings |
 |
1955 |
C. S. Lewis | The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe |
 |
1955 |
J. P. Donleavy | The Ginger Man |
 |
1955 |
Gerald Durrell | My Family and Other Animals |
 |
1956 |
Jack Kerouac | On the Road |
 |
1957 |
Chinua Achebe | Things Fall Apart |
 |
1958 |
Winston Churchill | A History of the English–Speaking Peoples |
 |
1956–8 |
Laurie Lee | Cider with Rosie |
 |
1959 |
Joy Adamson | Born Free |
 |
1960 |
Truman Capote | In Cold Blood |
 |
1960 |
Harper Lee | To Kill a Mockingbird |
 |
1960 |
Gavin Maxwell | A Ring of Bright Water |
 |
1960 |
William Shirer | The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich |
 |
1960 |
Joseph Heller | Catch–22 |
 |
1961 |
Anthony Burgess | A Clockwork Orange |
 |
1962 |
Ken Kesey | One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest |
 |
1962 |
Muriel Spark | The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie |
 |
1962 |
Sylvia Plath | The Bell Jar |
 |
1963 |
Frank Herbert | Dune |
 |
1965 |
John Lennon | A Spaniard in the Works |
 |
1965 |
Ralph Nader | Unsafe at Any Cost |
 |
1965 |
Jean Rhys | Wide Sargasso Sea |
 |
1966 |
John Fowles | The Magus |
 |
1966 |
Gabriel Garcia Marquez | One Hundred Years of Solitude |
 |
1967 |
Desmond Morris | The Naked Ape |
 |
1967 |
Quentin Crisp | The Naked Civil Servant |
 |
1968 |
Erich Von Daniken | Chariots of the Gods |
 |
1968 |
John Fowles | The French Lieutenant's Woman |
 |
1969 |
Lady Antonia Fraser | Mary, Queen of Scots |
 |
1969 |
Philip Roth | Portnoy's Complaint |
 |
1969 |
Kurt Vonnegut | Slaughterhouse–5 |
 |
1969 |
Germaine Greer | The Female Eunuch |
 |
1970 |
Richard Adams | Watership Down |
 |
1972 |
Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward | All the President's Men |
 |
1974 |
Stephen King | Carrie (his first novel) |
 |
1974 |
Anthony Powell | A Dance to the Music of Time |
 |
1975 |
Richard Dawkins | The Selfish Gene |
 |
1976 |
Edith Holden | The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady |
 |
1977 |
Douglas Adams | The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy |
 |
1978 |
John Irving (active 1968–) | The World According to Garp |
 |
1978 |
V. S. Naipaul | A Bend in the River |
 |
1979 |
Salman Rushdie | Midnight's Children |
 |
1981 |
Alice Walker | The Color Purple |
 |
1982 |
Milan Kundera | The Book of Laughter and Forgetting |
 |
1982 |
Terry Pratchett | The Colour of Magic |
 |
1983 |
Margaret Atwood | The Handmaid's Tale |
 |
1985 |
Gabriel Garcia Marquez | Love in the Time of Cholera |
 |
1985 |
Toni Morrison | Beloved |
 |
1987 |
Peter Wright | Spycatcher |
 |
1987 |
Stephen Hawking | A Brief History of Time |
 |
1988 |
Bill Bryson | The Lost Continent (his first book) |
 |
1989 |
Peter Mayle | A Year in Provence |
 |
1989 |
Joe Simpson | Touching the Void |
 |
1989 |
Jung Chang | Wild Swans |
 |
1991 |
John Grey | Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus |
 |
1992 |
Nick Hornby | Fever Pitch |
 |
1992 |
George R. R. Martin | A Game of Thrones (first in the series A Song of Ice and Fire) |
 |
1996 |
J. K. Rowling | Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone |
 |
1997 |
Lady Antonia Fraser | The Six Wives of Henry VIII |
 |
1999 |
J. K. Rowling | Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows |
 |
2007 |