theLeftAhead Literary Canon

Fiction

(In Reverse Chronological Order):

Jane Anne Phillips - Night Watch (2023)

Gabrielle Zevin - Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (2022)

Charles Yu - Interior Chinatown (2020)

Madeline Miller - Circe (2018)

Andrew Sean Greer - Less (2017)

Colson Whitehead - The Underground Railroad (2016)

Harper Lee - Go Set a Watchman (2015)

Viet Thanh Nguyen - The Sympathizer (2015)

Phil Klay - Redeployment (2014)

Salman Rushdie - Joseph Anton: A Memoir (2012)

Gillian Flynn - Gone Girl (2012)

Stephen King - 11/22/63 (2011)

Jason Mott - The Returned (2011)

Jess Walter - The Financial Lives of the Poets (2009)

John Updike - Terrorist (2006)

Jeff Lindsay - Darkly Dreaming Dexter (2004)

Jen Banbury - Like a Hole in the Head (1998)

Norman Mailer - The Gospel According to the Son (1997)

Ethan Hawke - The Hottest State (1996)

Mona Simpson - A Regular Guy (1996)

David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest (1996)

John Updike - Rabbit at Rest (1990)

Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses (1988)

Toni Morrison - Beloved (1987)

Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale (1985)

Bret Easton Ellis - Less Than Zero (1985)

John Updike - Rabbit Is Rich (1981)

Norman Mailer - The Executioner's Song (1979)

Stephen King - The Shining (1977)

John Updike - Rabbit Redux (1971)

Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Norman Mailer - An American Dream (1965)

Jack Kerouac - Big Sur (1962)

Philip K. Dick - The Man in the High Castle (1962)

John Updike - Rabbit, Run (1960)

Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)

Jack Kerouac - On the Road (1957)

James Baldwin - Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

J. D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

Ernest Hemingway - For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)

James Joyce - Finnegans Wake (1939)

John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

J. R. R. Tolkien - The Hobbit (1937)

Zora Neale Hurston - Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Ernest Hemingway - A Farewell to Arms (1929)

Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse (1927)

Ernest Hemingway - The Sun Also Rises (1926)

F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby (1925)

James Joyce - Ulysses (1922)

James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

D.H. Lawrence - The Rainbow (1915)

Arthur Conan Doyle - The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)

Joseph Conrad - Lord Jim (1900)

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)

Mark Twain - Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace (1869)

Louisa May Alcott - Little Women (1868)

Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment (1866)

Charles Dickens - Great Expectations (1861)

Charles Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels (1726)

John Bunyan - The Pilgrim's Progress (1678)