The Most Popular Books from the Year You Were Born

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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