The Heath Top 100

by Paul Lauter

Here is the news for which you have all been waiting: the results of our own poll about the most significant twentieth-century books of fiction in English. As you may recall, many people were appalled by the Modern Library's singularly self-interested list of the 100 best. So we asked readers of the Heath Newsletter--which goes to about as large a constituency of college and university teachers of American literature as can be reached--to register their views on the subject, however silly the whole process may be. Many of you have done so, and this is what our handy-dandy, unscientific, and no doubt unrepresentative, poll shows.

The Top 25:

• Toni Morrison, Beloved
• Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
• William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
• William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom
• James Joyce, Ulysses
• John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
• Richard Wright, Native Son
• Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

(Up to this point, the results were well differentiated; as the list continues, there were more ties.)

• Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
• Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
• Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
• Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
• George Orwell, 1984
• Alice Walker, The Color Purple
• Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
• Willa Cather, My Ántonia
• Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
• William Faulkner, Light in August
• J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
• William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
• Joseph Heller, Catch-22
• Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
• James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

The Top 25 are followed by:

• E. M. Forster, A Passage to India
• Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
• Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
• Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
• Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
• Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
• Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
• Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine
• Henry James, The Ambassadors
• Jack Kerouac, On the Road
• D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
• D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love
• Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
• Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
• Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
• John Updike, Rabbit Run

A few reflections and details: 9 of our top 25 (and 15 of the first 40), very high proportions, were not on the Modern Library list. These included all the books by women of color--Morrison, Hurston, Silko, Walker, Kingston--but also Achebe's novel, and different books--Absalom, Absalom, My Ántonia, Mrs. Dalloway--by authors the lists share. In general, this list--no surprise coming from folks interested in the Heath Anthology--displays a far broader range not just of authors (far more women and writers of color), but of the kinds of experiences readers think are significant.

Another way of saying this: the difference between this poll and that published by the Modern Library measures a process of change, especially in the American literary canon. The Modern Library's board, dominated by traditional (primarily white and male and older) critics, can be seen as having produced a kind of earlier benchmark, what many of us were taught to see as defining literary value some 40 or 50 years ago. This poll, however skewed it may be (and I suspect it is far more representative), shows how that traditional canon has been modified. In part, that has happened by the displacement of certain texts, works like The Way of All Flesh, The Good Soldier, Studs Lonigan, The Call of the Wild, Point Counter Point, just to name a few among the 29 of the Modern Library's 100 not even mentioned once in our poll. In part, that has happened through the addition of works by writers like Morrison, Hurston, Silko, Walker, Kingston, Erdrich, O'Connor, and Atwood (all of whom were among our top 40) altogether unrecognized in the Modern Library poll.

The story, then, is one of permanence and change: Toni Morrison's Beloved was named by a remarkable 63 percent of our respondents (and her early novel, The Bluest Eye, was among the 26-40 group). But as the list of the first 25 indicates, Faulkner is the novelist mentioned the most: eight of his works are cited. Cather comes close with seven; Lessing, Morrison, Wharton, and Woolf have five works each mentioned, though not as frequently. In significant ways, this poll suggests, the racial and gender exclusivity of earlier American culture has successfully been challenged, and there are some meaningful steps toward redefining "British literature" to include writers of "colonial" origins as well. A total of 61 different books were named on at least four ballots, a total of 86 on three or more, and 337 by at least one respondent. All of this indicates that the comfort of a broadly agreed-upon "core" of texts is as frayed as our cat has left the sofa. Some will read this to mourn that the center has not, alas, held. For many of us, however, what this vivid diffusion of cultural authority offers is, on the contrary, challenging opportunities to build freshness and difference into our classrooms.