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Friday, June 19, 2026

Most Popular Books by Year, 1920 to 1999

From an article in Southern Living magazine

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

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