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  3. The Most Popular Books from the Year You Were Born

The Most Popular Books from the Year You Were Born

By Caroline Rogers
March 12, 2019
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Here they are, the most popular books published during the decade you were born. While there have been plenty of great books published this century, in this list each year has just one selection—an impossible choice, sure, but we love a challenge. With that in mind, this compilation focuses almost exclusively on fiction. It’s not all novels, though. Some of the decades’ favorite short story collections made their way into the catalog too.This list is sprawling, so to navigate, click through to the decade you were born, and then look for the book published during your birth year. Taking into account prize winners, New York Times best-selling books, Publisher’s Weekly best-selling titles, and the books we’re still talking about today, here are the most popular books from the decade you were born. For more book recommendations, check out 50 Classic Books Everyone Should Read in Their Lifetime and 50 Books from the Past 50 Years Everyone Should Read at Least Once.
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1920s

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1920: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
1921: Rilla of Ingleside by L.M. Montgomery
1922: Ulysses by James Joyce
1923: Cane by Jean Toomer
1924: A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
1925: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
1926: The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
1927: To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
1928: All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
1929: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

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1930s

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1930: As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
1931: The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
1932: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
1933: Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain
1934: Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
1935: Blandings Castle and Elsewhere by P.G. Wodehouse
1936: Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
1937: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
1938: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
1939: The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

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1940s

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1940: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
1941: Mildred Pierce by James M. Cain
1942: The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
1943: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
1944: Dragonwyck by Anya Seton
1945: Black Boy by Richard Wright
1946: Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty
1947: The Pearl by John Steinbeck
1948: Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote
1949: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

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1950s

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1950: Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith
1951: The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
1952: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
1953: Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
1954: The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
1955: A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories by Flannery O’Connor
1956: Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
1957: Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
1958: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
1959: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

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1960s

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1960: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
1961: The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
1962: Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
1963: The Group by Mary McCarthy
1964: Herzog by Saul Bellow
1965: Dune by Frank Herbert
1966: Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann
1967: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Márquez
1968: The High King by Lloyd Alexander
1969: The Godfather by Mario Puzo

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1970s

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1970: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
1971: Grendel by John Gardner
1972: Watership Down by Richard Adams
1973: The Princess Bride by William Goldman
1974: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
1975: Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
1976: Roots by Alex Haley
1977: Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
1978: A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeline L’Engle
1979: Kindred by Octavia Butler

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1980s

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1980: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
1981: Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
1982: The Color Purple by Alice Walker
1983: A Gathering of Old Men by Ernest J. Gaines
1984: The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
1985: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
1986: The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
1987: Beloved by Toni Morrison
1988: The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
1989: The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

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1990s

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1990: The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
1991: A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
1992: The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
1993: The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
1994: The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
1995: High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
1996: CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders
1997: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
1998: The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
1999: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

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2000s

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2000: White Teeth by Zadie Smith
2001: Atonement by Ian McEwan
2002: Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
2003: The Kite Runner By Khaled Hosseini
2004: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
2005: March by Geraldine Brooks
2006: The Road by Cormac McCarthy
2007: The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
2008: The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff
2009: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

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2010s

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2010: A Visit from the Good Squad by Jennifer Egan
2011: Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
2012: Dear Life by Alice Munro
2013: The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
2014: A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
2015: The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
2016: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
2017: Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
2018: The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

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1 of 10 1920s
2 of 10 1930s
3 of 10 1940s
4 of 10 1950s
5 of 10 1960s
6 of 10 1970s
7 of 10 1980s
8 of 10 1990s
9 of 10 2000s
10 of 10 2010s

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The Most Popular Books from the Year You Were Born
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