List :: 100 Best Novels by Modern Library

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  #51

  The Naked and the Dead

  by Norman Mailer

  (1 Review)

  Overall Rank: 254

  83 points

  "Nobody could sleep. When morning came, assult craft would be lowered and a first wave of troops would ride through the surf and charge ashore on he beach at Anopopei. All over the ship, all through..."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
• 

  #52

  Portnoy's Complaint

  by Philip Roth

  (4 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 299

  71 points

  "She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seemed to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
• 

  #53

  Pale Fire

  by Vladimir Nabokov

  (6 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 101

  185 points

  "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane.Pale Fire, a poem in heroic couplets, of nine hundred ninety-nine lines, divided into four cantos, was composed by John..."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
• 

  #54

  Light in August

  by William Faulkner

  (5 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 99

  188 points

  "Sitting beside the road, watching the wagon mount the hill toward her, Lena thinks, 'I have come from Alabama: a fur piece.'"

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
• 

  #55

  On the Road

  by Jack Kerouac

  (14 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 18

  543 points

  "I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
• 

  #56

  The Maltese Falcon

  by Dashiell Hammett

  (9 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 248

  85 points

  "Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
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  #57

  Parade's End

  by Ford Madox Ford

  (2 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 423

  44 points

  

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  #58

  The Age of Innocence

  by Edith Wharton

  (7 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 60

  292 points

  "On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
• 

  #59

  Zuleika Dobson

  by Max Beerbohm

  (2 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 435

  42 points

  "That old bell, presage of a train, had just sounded through Oxford station; and the undergraduates who were waiting there, gay figures in tweed or flannel, moved to the margin of the platform and..."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
• 

  #60

  The Moviegoer

  by Walker Percy

  (3 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 222

  91 points

  "This morning I got a note from my aunt asking me to come for lunch."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It