50 Classic Books Everyone Should Read in Their Lifetime

By Caroline Rogers
September 17, 2018
Credit: Anthia Cumming/Getty Images
We’ve already recommended our picks for the 50 best books of the past 50 years, but now we’re diving deeper into our literary history, temporally speaking. These are our picks for the 50 most essential classic books. You know, the ones that everyone should get around to reading sooner, rather than later. These books have meant a great deal to readers throughout the centuries, and they distinguish themselves as firsts and bests, sure, but also unexpected, astonishing, and boundary-breaking additions to the canon. That’s why we’re still reading them. Everyone has his or her own definition of a literary classic, and our choices span the centuries, from the 8th century B.C. to the English Renaissance to the mid-20th century. (We’ve even included a book from the 1990s, as we’re convinced it’s going to go down in history as a classic.) No matter your definition of classic literature, you'll see that these books have stood—and are standing—the test of time, which is why we think they should be on your must-read list. We’re betting a few of them already are.
Start Slideshow

1 of 51

Add These to Your Bookshelf—And Your Reading List

Advertisement
Advertisement

2 of 51

1984 by George Orwell

Credit: amazon.com

Buy it: amazon.com

George Orwell’s dystopian classic blends political and science fiction into a chilling panorama of high-level surveillance and manipulation.

3 of 51

A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul

Credit: amazon.com

Buy it: amazon.com

A struggle for independence is at the heart of V.S. Naipaul’s darkly comic and very moving 1961 novel.

Advertisement

4 of 51

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

Credit: amazon.com

Buy it: amazon.com

Betty Smith’s 1943 classic is a coming-of-age tale about a second-generation Irish-American girl named Francie who lives in Williamsburg with her family.

5 of 51

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Credit: amazon.com

Buy it: amazon.com

Leo Tolstoy’s masterful epic—or one of them, at least—is about one woman’s scandals, passions, and ultimate tragedy, all set amid the tumult of late-19th century Russia.

6 of 51

Cane by Jean Toomer

Credit: amazon.com

Buy it: amazon.com

Jean Toomer’s hard-to-categorize work emerged in 1923 as an astonishing blend of genres, a brilliant composite of vignettes giving voice to facets of African-American life in the United States.

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

7 of 51

Emma by Jane Austen

Credit: amazon.com

Buy it: amazon.com

Emma Woodhouse entertains herself by meddling in the romantic affairs of her neighbors. As with so many of Jane Austen’s classic comedies of manners, Emma is as relevant as ever.

8 of 51

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Credit: amazon.com

Buy it: amazon.com

Dr. Frankenstein and his monster embark on an unearthly, and ultimately tragic game of creation and rejection in Mary Shelley’s haunting story.

9 of 51

Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin

Credit: amazon.com

Buy it: amazon.com

Rooted in raw reality but told through poetic fiction, James Baldwin’s masterwork attends a day in the life of 14-year-old John Grimes and the awakenings, histories, and stories that shape his life.

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

10 of 51

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Credit: amazon.com

Buy it: amazon.com

You may have skipped this one in high school, but it’s never too late to read Charles Dickens’ classic about a young boy called Pip coming of age in 19th-century England.

11 of 51

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Credit: amazon.com

Buy it: amazon.com

Narrated by Charles Marlow,Heart of Darkness follows Marlow’s journey up the Congo River, captaining a ship into the heart of the African continent while searching for a trader called Kurtz.

12 of 51

Howards End by E.M. Forster

Credit: amazon.com

Buy it: amazon.com

Set in England at the turn of the century,Howards End immortalizes the pursuits, missteps, encounters, and conflicts of three families—the Wilcoxes, the Schlegels, and the Basts.

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

13 of 51

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Credit: amazon.com

Buy it: amazon.com

Racism as an erasing force, a force that renders human beings invisible to society and to themselves, is at the center of this powerful bildungsroman by Ralph Ellison.

14 of 51

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Credit: amazon.com

Buy it: amazon.com

Charlotte Bronte brings to life Jane Eyre’s titular heroine through a vivid internal world, one as dynamic as the wild English landscape, but one often at odds with the social strictures of the novel's early-19th century setting.

15 of 51

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Credit: amazon.com

Buy it: amazon.com

The bonds of the four March sisters and their mother are at the heart of this classic novel, which unfolds the courses of their lives and imaginations across Civil War-era Massachusetts.

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

16 of 51

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Credit: amazon.com

Buy it: amazon.com

George Eliot’s unconventional Victorian novel upends expectations while crafting a complex portrait of family and individual life in fictional Middlemarch, North Loamshire.

17 of 51

Moby-Dick; or The Whale by Herman Melville

Credit: amazon.com

Buy it: amazon.com

Herman Melville’s oceanic epic begins “Call me Ishmael,” and is based on the true story of the whaler Essex and its tragic encounter with a whale.

18 of 51

My Antonia by Willa Cather

Credit: amazon.com

Buy it: amazon.com

The last installment in Willa Cather’s Prairie Trilogy,My Antonia immortalizes the American Midwest and the lives of neighbors settling on the frontier.

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

19 of 51

Native Son by Richard Wright

Credit: amazon.com

Buy it: amazon.com

Richard Wright’s powerful novel of race, racism, poverty, and despair is set in 1930s Chicago, where a man named Bigger Thomas struggles against the dangerous expectations thrust on him.

20 of 51

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass

Credit: amazon.com

Buy it: amazon.com

Frederick Douglass tells his life story in this work, from the years he was enslaved in the pre-Civil War South to his escape, his freedom, his work, and his dedication to the abolitionist movement.

21 of 51

Night by Elie Wiesel

Credit: amazon.com

Buy it: amazon.com

Elie Wiesel’s memoir chronicles the harrowing period he spent in Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust, the inhumanity he encountered there, and his ultimate survival.

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

22 of 51

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

Credit: amazon.com

Buy it: amazon.com

This novel comes to readers in the form of a poem—one written by a fictional poet and accompanied by annotations from the poet’s (also fictional) colleague. The story, non-linear as it is, emerges line by line and note by note, however differently it's read each time.

23 of 51

Paradise Lost by John Milton

Credit: amazon.com

Buy it: amazon.com

Milton’s 17th-century biblical epic traces the story of the Fall of Man and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.

24 of 51

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Credit: amazon.com

Buy it: amazon.com

In Gothic style as haunting as it is thrilling, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca conjures secrets and suspense from the landscape, the architecture, even the air in which the story exists.

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

25 of 51

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

Credit: amazon.com

Buy it: amazon.com

At the heart of this novel, which is told in simple, sincere prose, is the spiritual journey of a man named Siddhartha who searches for self-discovery throughout the years of his life.

26 of 51

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

Credit: amazon.com

Buy it: amazon.com

Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon is a transformative bildungsroman of one Milkman Dead, who spends his life captivated by the possibility of flight in all its many forms.

27 of 51

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Credit: amazon.com

Buy it: amazon.com

Gilded Age New York plays host to this lauded work, a novel published in 1920 that concerns itself with family strife and social scandal amid looming nuptials.

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

28 of 51

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

Credit: amazon.com

Buy it: amazon.com

Set on the Louisiana Gulf coast at the turn of the century, The Awakening plunges into the life of Edna Pontellier and the dissonance she feels between the era’s social expectations and her own emerging beliefs.

29 of 51

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Credit: amazon.com

Buy it: amazon.com

Tracing the tangle of a new job in New York City and the simultaneous onrush of clinical depression, The Bell Jar brings the interior world of central character Esther Greenwood into stunning relief.

30 of 51

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Credit: amazon.com

Buy it: amazon.com

Dostoevsky’s final novel is also one of his most beloved. The Brothers Karamazov unfurls drama, philosophy, and morality against a vision of 19th-century Russia.

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

31 of 51