Posts Tagged ‘best novels’
A Matter of Taste…
Sometime editor of the Illustrated London News and authority on the Brontës and Napoleon, Clement K. Shorter was in the middle of a flourishing career when his list of the “hundred best novels ever written” appeared in the monthly journal The Bookman. He doesn’t explain what exactly makes a book one of the “best”, only that he has deliberately limited himself to one novel per novelist. Living authors are excluded – although he cannot resist adding a rider of eight works by “writers whose reputations are too well established for their juniors to feel towards them any sentiments other than those of reverence and regard”…
Names and dates are as Shorter gives them:
1. Don Quixote – 1604 – Miguel de Cervantes
2. The Holy War – 1682 – John Bunyan
3. Gil Blas – 1715 – Alain René le Sage
4. Robinson Crusoe – 1719 – Daniel Defoe
5. Gulliver’s Travels – 1726 – Jonathan Swift
6. Roderick Random – 1748 – Tobias Smollett
7. Clarissa – 1749 – Samuel Richardson
8. Tom Jones – 1749 – Henry Fielding
9. Candide – 1756 – Françoise de Voltaire
10. Rasselas – 1759 – Samuel Johnson
11. The Castle of Otranto – 1764 – Horace Walpole
12. The Vicar of Wakefield – 1766 – Oliver Goldsmith
13. The Old English Baron – 1777 – Clara Reeve
14. Evelina – 1778 – Fanny Burney
15. Vathek – 1787 – William Beckford
…
And those lucky living eight:
An Egyptian Princess – 1864 – Georg Ebers
Rhoda Fleming – 1865 – George Meredith
Lorna Doone – 1869 – R. D. Blackmore
Anna Karenina – 1875 – Count Leo Tolstoi
The Return of the Native – 1878 – Thomas Hardy
Daisy Miller – 1878 – Henry James
Mark Rutherford – 1881 – W. Hale White
Le Rêve – 1889 – Emile Zola
Read the full story and see the whole list at the TLS: “Not the hundred best novels?”
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As we marvel at the power of perspective, we might recall that it was on this date in 1894 that the first multi-panel comic strip ran in a newspaper: “Origin of the Species, or the Evolution of the Crocodile Explained,” by Richard F. Outcault, appeared in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. Outcault went on to introduce the speech balloon in the wildly-popular The Yellow Kid, and later still, created Buster Brown.
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