50 Classic Books Everyone Should Read in Their Lifetime
We’ve already recommended our picks for the 50 best books of the past 50 years, but now we’re diving deeper into our literary history, temporally speaking

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1984 by George Orwell
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A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul
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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
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Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
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Cane by Jean Toomer
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Emma by Jane Austen
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Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
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Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin
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Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
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Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
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Howards End by E.M. Forster
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Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
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Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
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Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
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Middlemarch by George Eliot
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Moby-Dick; or The Whale by Herman Melville
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My Antonia by Willa Cather
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Native Son by Richard Wright
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Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
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Night by Elie Wiesel
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Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
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Paradise Lost by John Milton
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Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
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Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
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Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
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The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
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The Awakening by Kate Chopin
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The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
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The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
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The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty by Eudora Welty
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The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare
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The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor
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The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
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The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
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The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
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The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
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The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
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Metamorphoses by Ovid
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The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
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The Odyssey by Homer
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The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
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The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
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The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
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Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
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Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
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To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
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To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
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Ulysses by James Joyce
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Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
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Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte