[RR] Radcliffe’s Rival 100 Best Novels List
Radcliffe’s Rival 100 Best Novels List [RR]
The Radcliffe “Rival” list was compiled to compliment the Modern Library’s “Board” list [MLB]. I imagine the Modern Library chose Radcliffe to make a counter-list because Radcliffe met the criteria of 1) not being a publishing house trying to shill its own product, 2) being academics whose credentials were not in question because Radcliffe is really Harvard, and 3) being (at least at the time of the list’s publishing) a women’s school, it would arguably be more likely to recognize women authors. (The Board had notoriously underrepresented women in its own list.)
What Radcliffe provided turned out to be a predictable high school and college core curriculum, devoid of challenging or experimental works widely praised elsewhere. Instead it tosses out some children’s fiction and early 20th century snoozers (the lesser manners dramas by Henry James, Fitzgerald, and Forster). Instead of being adventurous and diverse, the [RR] ends up being the most vanilla list of all. For example, there are ten [RR] picks that narrowly made the master list with only two votes. Four other selections didn’t make the list at all. Now you might think those fourteen books would be a little out there. Not on everyone’s radar. You would think that, given the inherent male bias of these other lists, these would be books by women, immigrants, or people of color. Not so. Of the fourteen Radcliffe entries that received just one or two votes, eleven were by white males. Most of these are works of short, unoffensive fiction ripe for high school English classes. Chances are that if you graduated high school but didn’t major in English in college, you have probably read more books on the Radcliffe list than any other here.
Click here to see the full Radcliffe list. Works listed in RED appear on the Master List.
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- The Color Purple by Alice Walker
- Ulysses by James Joyce
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- 1984 by George Orwell
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
- Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
- Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
- Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
- As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
- A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
- Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
- Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne
- Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
- Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
- Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
- Native Son by Richard Wright
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
- For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
- On the Road by Jack Kerouac
- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
- The Call of the Wild by Jack London
- To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
- Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
- Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
- The World According to Garp by John Irving
- All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
- A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
- The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
- Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally
- The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
- The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
- Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
- The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
- Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
- Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
- A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
- The Awakening by Kate Chopin
- My Antonia by Willa Cather
- Howards End by E.M. Forster
- In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
- Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
- The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
- Jazz by Toni Morrison
- Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
- Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
- A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
- Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
- A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor
- Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Orlando by Virginia Woolf
- Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
- Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
- Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
- A Separate Peace by John Knowles
- Light in August by William Faulkner
- The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
- Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
- A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
- Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
- Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
- Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
- Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
- In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
- The Autobiography of Alice B. Tokias by Gertrude Stein
- The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
- The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
- Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
- White Noise by Don DeLillo
- O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
- Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
- The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
- Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
- The Bostonians by Henry James
- An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
- Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
- The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
- This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
- The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles
- Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
- Kim by Rudyard Kipling
- The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Rabbit, Run by John Updike
- Where Angels Fear to Tread by E.M. Forster
- Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
- Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
This list is horrible. There are only four soft sci titles, no hard sci fi, and no mysteries. These people don’t have the science background to appreciate hard sci fi by Clarke, Asimov, or Pynchon. They don’t have the logical background to appreciate mystery by Chandler or Doyle.
As the article pointed out, they also included minor books by Scott Fitzgerald and EM Forster. Best of all they included a book of short stories by Ernest Hemingway (In Our Time) on a list of novels.
So where is a better list that really would be what women would prefer reading that is truly great literature?
This one. https://lettersrepublic.wordpress.com/2012/08/06/the-200-books-you-need-to-read/
That bring said, none of the lists that cover all lit have a strong women author representation. That’s a fault of history unfortunately.