50 Fun Facts About Modern Library 100 Best Novels

Which novel set on a single June day in Dublin tops the Modern Library list of 100 best novels?

Ulysses follows Leopold Bloom and two other Dubliners through 16 June 1904, a date fans now celebrate every year as Bloomsday.

Which cartoon dad shares his name with an Iowa bookkeeper in Nathanael West's novel The Day of the Locust?

Homer Simpson is a former hotel accountant who moves to California for his health in the 1939 novel. Matt Groening, whose own father was called Homer, has said the character was an inspiration for the name.

Which Joseph Heller war satire about the bombardier Yossarian began life with the number 18 in its title?

Catch-22 started out as Catch-18, but the number was changed so that readers would not confuse it with Leon Uris's newly published war novel Mila 18.

Which English author placed both a farmyard fable and a dystopia about Big Brother on the Modern Library list?

George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, whose dystopia stands at No. 13 on the list and whose fable Animal Farm stands at No. 31.

Which Beat Generation writer typed On the Road on one continuous 120-foot scroll of paper?

Jack Kerouac cut and taped sheets of tracing paper into the roll, and the published novel later hid his real-life friends behind pseudonyms.

Which F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, second on the Modern Library list, was nearly titled Trimalchio in West Egg?

The Great Gatsby got its name after the editor Maxwell Perkins talked Fitzgerald out of Trimalchio, a nod to the crude upstart in the Roman satire the Satyricon.

Which teenage narrator roams New York after being expelled from Pencey Prep in The Catcher in the Rye?

Holden Caulfield was already the hero of a short story J. D. Salinger sold to The New Yorker in 1941, a decade before the novel made him an icon of teenage rebellion.

Which San Francisco private eye hunts a black bird statuette in Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon?

Sam Spade runs his detective agency with a partner, Miles Archer, and Humphrey Bogart played him in the 1941 film version.

Which object does Ralph blow to summon the stranded boys to meetings in William Golding's Lord of the Flies?

A conch shell found on the beach helps Ralph get elected chief, and it is smashed by the same boulder that kills Piggy.

Which John Steinbeck novel follows the Joad family from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to California?

The Grapes of Wrath takes its title from a line in The Battle Hymn of the Republic, and it won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

Which Irish writer holds both first and third place on the Modern Library list of 100 best novels?

James Joyce takes third place with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the story of his alter ego Stephen Dedalus, and appears again at No. 77 with Finnegans Wake.

Which pig drives out his rival Snowball and becomes the tyrant of Animal Farm?

Napoleon is an allegory of Joseph Stalin, and he seizes power by setting dogs he raised from puppies on his rival.

Which German city's firebombing does Billy Pilgrim survive as a prisoner of war in Slaughterhouse-Five?

Dresden was where Kurt Vonnegut himself lived through the 1945 raid as a captured American serviceman, an experience he turned into the novel.

Which Russian-born novelist and butterfly expert wrote both Lolita and Pale Fire in English?

Vladimir Nabokov was an expert lepidopterist and composer of chess problems who wrote his first nine novels in Russian before switching languages in the United States.

Which American novelist drew on his time as a Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy for A Farewell to Arms?

Ernest Hemingway was seriously wounded by shrapnel on the Italian Front in 1918, and the novel's narrator is likewise an American lieutenant in Italy's ambulance corps.

Which gold rush forms the backdrop to Jack London's sled-dog novel The Call of the Wild?

Klondike prospectors in Canada's Yukon needed strong sled dogs, which is why the dog Buck is stolen from a ranch in the Santa Clara Valley and sold north.

The title of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury comes from a soliloquy in which Shakespeare tragedy?

Macbeth speaks the soliloquy on hearing that his wife is dead, and Faulkner hands his first chapter to Benjy, a Compson brother with a mental disability.

Which novella on the Modern Library list follows Marlow up an African river to find the ivory trader Kurtz?

Heart of Darkness first ran as a three-part magazine serial in 1899, and only its 1902 publication in book form made it eligible for a list of twentieth-century novels.

Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea imagines the early life of the first Mrs Rochester from which Victorian novel?

Jane Eyre keeps Bertha Mason hidden as the madwoman in the attic, and Rhys reimagines her as Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress in 1830s Jamaica.

Which happiness-producing drug keeps citizens docile in the World State of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World?

Soma is handed out to the population, and late in the novel John the Savage tries to break up a distribution of it to lower-caste workers.

Which Polish-British author of Lord Jim and Nostromo has the most novels on the Modern Library list, with four?

Joseph Conrad was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in what is now Ukraine, and six other authors trail him on the list with three novels each.

Which novel about business leaders who vanish on strike won the Modern Library's online readers' poll?

Atlas Shrugged led a nonscientific online vote in which Ayn Rand took four of the top ten places, yet the board's own hundred has no room for any of her books.

Which Alabama courtroom novel came fifth in the Modern Library readers' poll but is absent from the board's list?

To Kill a Mockingbird finished just behind The Lord of the Rings in the public vote, and neither book appears among the hundred chosen by the board.

Which publisher owns the Modern Library imprint, whose board picked the 100 best novels in 1998?

Random House actually began in 1927 as a subsidiary of the Modern Library, then outgrew its parent and turned it into an imprint.

Which Bloomsbury novelist wrote To the Lighthouse, the top-ranked novel by a woman on the Modern Library list?

Virginia Woolf reaches No. 15 with her story of the Ramsay family's visits to the Isle of Skye, and every book ranked above it was written by a man.

Which author of The Age of Innocence became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction?

Edith Wharton took the prize in 1921, and she has a second novel on the Modern Library list in The House of Mirth, ranked No. 69.

In The Sun Also Rises, which Spanish city's bull-running festival draws Jake Barnes and his expatriate friends?

Pamplona hosts the Festival of San Fermín, and the novel is a roman à clef based on a real trip its author made there in 1925.

In which Scottish city does Muriel Spark's Miss Jean Brodie groom her favourite schoolgirls in the 1930s?

Edinburgh is also where Spark went to school, and she based Miss Brodie in part on Christina Kay, a teacher of hers for two years.

In which Italian city does Lucy Honeychurch stay at the Pensione Bertolini in A Room with a View?

Florence is where Lucy and her chaperone were promised rooms overlooking the River Arno, the view that gives the novel its title.

Which Bombay-born Nobel laureate wrote Kim, the tale of an orphan drawn into the Great Game in India?

Rudyard Kipling won the prize in 1907 as its first English-language recipient, and his novel popularised the phrase Great Game for the rivalry between Russia and Britain.

Which science-fiction writer saw his Battlefield Earth voted third in the Modern Library readers' poll?

L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, also placed Mission Earth and Fear inside the top ten of the public vote, though the board's list ignores him.

Which English novelist has A Passage to India, Howards End and A Room with a View on the Modern Library list?

E. M. Forster was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 22 separate years but never won it; his top entry is A Passage to India at No. 25.

Which author won the National Book Award for Invisible Man, the only novel he completed in his lifetime?

Ralph Ellison wrote more than 2,000 pages of a second novel but never finished it, and he said a 1967 house fire cost him hundreds of pages of the manuscript.

Which writer drew on his Harlem boyhood as a preacher's stepson for Go Tell It on the Mountain?

James Baldwin made the semi-autobiographical story of the teenager John Grimes and his family's church his first published novel, in 1953.

Which Louisiana governor's life inspired the populist politician Willie Stark in All the King's Men?

Huey Long was assassinated in 1935, and like him the fictional Willie Stark is shot in the state capitol building by a physician.

Which Salman Rushdie novel is narrated by Saleem Sinai, born at the exact moment of India's independence?

Midnight's Children won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was later named the Booker of Bookers, the best winner of the prize's first 25 years.

Which Robert Graves novel on the Modern Library list poses as the memoirs of a stammering Roman emperor?

I, Claudius shows the emperor's family keeping him out of public life because of his stammer and limp, which leads his ambitious relatives to dismiss him as no threat.

On which Mexican holiday does Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano follow the last hours of an alcoholic consul?

Day of the Dead in November 1938 fills eleven of the novel's twelve chapters, from the morning return of the consul's wife to his violent death at the end of the day.

In which city did Henry Miller write and first publish Tropic of Cancer, long banned in the United States?

Paris saw the first edition in 1934, but American readers had to wait until 1961, when the Grove Press edition set off a run of obscenity trials.

Which Newark-born novelist wrote Portnoy's Complaint as one long monologue delivered to a psychoanalyst?

Philip Roth said the conventions of the analyst's couch let him bring in intimate, shameful detail that would have seemed pornographic in any other kind of novel.

Which William Kennedy novel about a drifter's return to Albany is the newest book on the Modern Library list?

Ironweed came out in 1983 and won the Pulitzer Prize the next year; its hero, Francis Phelan, comes home 22 years after accidentally killing his infant son.

Which member of the Modern Library's selection board saw his own novel Sophie's Choice ranked No. 96?

William Styron was one of the ten board members polled for the list; his novel won the National Book Award, and Meryl Streep won an Academy Award in the film.

Which top-ten novel on the Modern Library list of English-language fiction was actually written in German?

Darkness at Noon was known only through its English translation because Arthur Koestler's German manuscript had been lost; the original turned up in 2015.

Which Booth Tarkington novel, filmed by Orson Welles in 1942, holds the 100th and final place on the list?

The Magnificent Ambersons won the Pulitzer Prize in 1919, and the Welles film was released in a version edited against the director's wishes.

Which Southern writer was only 23 when her debut novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, was published?

Carson McCullers built the book around John Singer, a mute man in a 1930s mill town, and at No. 17 it is the second-highest novel by a woman on the list.

Which Trinidad-born Nobel laureate has both A House for Mr Biswas and A Bend in the River on the list?

V. S. Naipaul drew on the life of his own father, Seepersad, for Mr Biswas, and he went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001.

Which Indiana-born novelist placed both An American Tragedy and Sister Carrie on the Modern Library list?

Theodore Dreiser based An American Tragedy on the notorious 1906 murder of Grace Brown and the trial of her lover, Chester Gillette.

What name did Anthony Burgess give the Russian-influenced teen slang spoken by Alex in A Clockwork Orange?

Nadsat takes its name from the Russian suffix that works like the English -teen, and it supplies the gang's word droogs for friends.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night takes its title from an ode by which English Romantic poet?

John Keats used the phrase in his Ode to a Nightingale, and the novel follows the psychiatrist Dick Diver and his wife Nicole on the French Riviera.

Which Evelyn Waugh novel traces Charles Ryder's friendship with Sebastian Flyte and his aristocratic Catholic family?

Brideshead Revisited is named after the Flytes' palatial mansion, and at No. 80 it is the lowest-ranked of Waugh's three novels on the Modern Library list.