While there is no “consensus” as to what the greatest novel(s) of the 20th century might be, almost all the leading contenders are to be found on this list:
http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/
(The Board’s list, not the readers’ list! The readers show appalling taste, and too much fondness for Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard!)
My favorite only made it to #61, alas.
I was thinking of that one two, weighed against A Dance to the Music of Time
Lonesome Dove - Larry McMurtry
The only book I finished and reread a week later.
So convenient for the compilers of that list that only those who write in English have ever produced something worth reading…
Two non-English contenders are The Master and Margarita (I see already mentioned upthread) and If on a winter’s night a traveller (Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore) by Italo Calvino.
Another great Italian is Primo Levy: The Periodic Table.
…and, for the most part, who have penises. I counted six women on the list, with no Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Doris Lessing, Barbara Kingsolver, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Atwood, Isabel Allende, etc., etc.
Maybe not all of them deserve to be on the list, but I would expect to find at least a few of them.
Maya Angelou was not a writer. She was a typist. But the others you name all belong on that list, and Isabel Allende belongs on it twice.
This is an example of what Rand called “the argument from intimidation.” And it’s obviously fallacious.
Ayn Rand thought Mickey Spillane was the greatest author of the 20th century. She had lousy taste, too.
She was critical of my paintings, because she could see the brush strokes. You win.
Lord of the Rings
I found Magic Mountain to be only OK for me.
I also think the Silver Chair by CS Lewis is a simply charming book that has almost no faults.
Since these are the greatest works ‘in our opinion’, I have to go with the titles that were the most meaningful to me personally.
Brave New World - Huxley - incredibly thought-provoking
LOTR trilogy - Tolkien - the sheer beauty of language and the power of mythology
The Once and Future King - T H White - taught me that a non-fiction master writer could put out a darn good novel, too
Centennial - Michener - inspired my lifelong love affair with the American West and taught me the value in impeccable research, even for a work of fiction
Cloudstreet - Tim Winton
Greatest Australian novel ever, a novel about finding one’s place in the world when everything you know is changed.
or as this audience has a large American contingent a runner up would be Catch 22.
LOTR, I prefer the saga he based it largely on “The Kalavala” but that’s not a novel.
To his credit, I doubt Joseph Heller would accept himself being rated a greater American novelist than (Canadian-born) Saul Bellow.
Journey To The End Of The Night, by Louis-Ferdinand Céline.
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. For describing feelings so well that you really experience them.
American: A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
Non American: Perfume - Patrick Suskind
Oh, I don’t know. His standard line when people would say that he never wrote another novel as good as Catch-22 was, “Who has?”
How ironic. “Argument from intimidation” is a far more common fallacy, in my experience, exhibited by Rand sycophants than by detractors.
Rand and Hubbard are not on that list for any reasons connected to literary quality, but rather because of the zealotry of their followers.