Burt holds a Ph.D from New York University with a specialty in Victorian fiction and was for nine years a dean at Wesleyan University, where he has also taught literature courses since 1989. He is also the author of The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time.

Note that in compiling the list of novels that was the basis for this book, Burt had to impose a number of constraints about what should be considered a novel. Although some works recognized as classics of science fiction (or, more broadly, speculative fiction) are on the list (e.g., Frankenstein; Dracula; Nineteen Eighty-Four), Burt specifically excluded works that seemed to veer too much from primarily naturalistic and contemporary-oriented narratives, thus excluding from consideration most science fiction and fantasy. Books such as Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Card's Ender's Game, Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz and Frank Herbert's Dune were excluded from consideration as "novels." Burt's functional definition of "novel" used here (i.e., books belonging to the "novel genre" or, in most cases, the "literary novel genre") is thus narrower than how the word is used by the general public. From the book's introduction, pages ix-x:

What makes a listing of the greatest novels even more problematic is the lack of any consensus about which works rightfully constitute the genre... the novel is such a hybrid and adaptive genre, assimilating other prose and verse forms... A standard definition of the novel--an extended prose narrative--is so broad that it fails to limit the field usefully... I have been influenced in this regard, like many, by literary critic Ian Watt's groundbreaking 1957 study, The Rise of the Novel, which contends that the novel as a distinctive genre emerged in 18th-century England through the shifting of the emphasis of previous prose romances and their generalized and idealized characters, settings, and situations to a particularity of individual experience. In other words, the novel replaced the romance's interest in the general and the ideal with a concern for the particular. The here and now substituted for the romance's interest in the long ago and far away. As 18th-century novelist Clara Reece observed, "The Novel is a picture of real life and manners, and of the times in which it was written. The Romance, in lofty and elevated language, describes what has never happened nor is likely to." Novelists began to represent the actual world accurately, governed by the laws of probability.

...It would be far too reductive and misleading, however, to define the novel only by its realism or accurate representation of ordinary life... It would be far more accurate to say that the novel as a distinct genre attempts a synthesis between romance and realism, between a poetic, imaginative alternative to actuality and a more authentic representation. For purposes of my listing, I have narrowed the field by categorizing as novels works that engage in that synthesis. Some narrative works judged too far in the direction of fantasy--Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Carroll's Alice in Wonderland--have been excluded. I have also made judgment calls on the question of the required length of a novel and have ruled out of contention such important fictional works as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis as falling short of the amplitude expected when confronting a novel.

TIME Critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo pick the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present.

Listed alphabetically by title.

Multiple Listings:
9 authors wrote two of the books listed on TIME Magazine's list of the best English-language novels published since 1923:

• Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited; A Handful of Dust)
• George Orwell (1984; Animal Farm)
• Graham Greene (The Heart of the Matter; The Power and the Glory)
• Philip Roth (American Pastoral; Portnoy's Complaint)
• Saul Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March; Herzog)
• Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49; Gravity's Rainbow)
• Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway; To the Lighthouse)
• Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita; Pale Fire)
• William Faulkner (Light in August; The Sound and the Fury)

• J.R.R. Tolkien: author of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which was adapted to film)
• Philip K. Dick: author of Ubik on the "100 Best Novels" list; author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, adapted as Blade Runner on "100 Best Movies" list
• Raymond Chandler: author of Raymond Chandler on "100 Best Novels" list; screenwriter of Double Indemnity (adapted from James M. Cain's novel) on the "100 Best Movies" list

Notes about how the list was created
Excerpts from: Richard Lacayo, "How We Picked the List" (http://www.time.com/time/2005/100books/0,24459,our_choices,00.html; viewed 31 October 2005):

...The parameters: English language novels published anywhere in the world since 1923, the year that TIME Magazine began, which, before you ask, means that Ulysses (1922) doesn't make the cut... This [list] is chosen by me, Richard Lacayo, and my colleague Lev Grossman... Grossman and I each began by drawing up inventories of our nominees. Once we traded notes, it turned out that more than 80 of our separately chosen titles matched. (Even some of the less well-known ones, like At-Swim Two Birds.) We decided then that we would more or less divide the remaining slots between us. That would allow each of us to include books that the other might not have chosen. Or might not even have read... And that would extend the list into places where mere agreement wouldn't take it.

...There were writers we had to admit we love more for their short stories than their novels -- Donald Barthelme, Annie Proulx, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty. We could agree that some of Gore Vidal's novels are an essential pleasure, but it's his non-fiction that's essential period. Then there was the intellectual massif of Norman Mailer, indisputably one of the great writers of our time, but his supreme achievements are his headlong reconfigurations of the whole idea of non-fiction, books like Armies of the Night; The Executioner's Song...

This project, which got underway in January, was not just a reading effort. It was a re-reading effort. It meant revisiting a lot of novels both of us had not looked into for some time. A few titles that seemed indispensable some years ago turned out on a second tasting to be, well, dispensable... Lists like this one have two purposes. One is to instruct. The other of course is to enrage. We're bracing ourselves for the e-mails that start out: "You moron! You pathetic bourgeoise insect! How could you have left off...(insert title here)."

The books in the list below are NOT ranked by their relative influence. They are listed chronologically.

Epic of Gilgamesh (C. 2700-1500 B.C.)
The Egyptian Book of the Dead (C. 2400-1420 B.C.)
Iliad (C. 800 B.C.)
Aesop's Fables (C. 600-560 B.C.)
Hippocratic Corpus (C. 5th Century B.C.)
The History of Herodotus (C. 440 B.C.)
The Analects of Confucius (429 B.C.)
Republic (C. 378 B.C.)
Nicomachean Ethics (C. 330 B.C.)
On the Republic (51 B.C.)
Koran (C. A.D. 652)
The Tale of Genji (C. 1010)
The Travels of Marco Polo (C. 1300)
The Divine Comedy (C. 1320)
Gutenberg Bible (1455)
The Prince (1513)
Utopia (1516)
Ninety-Five Theses (1517)
The Fabric of the Human Body (1543)
On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres (1543)
Romeo and Juliet (1594)
Don Quixote De La Mancha (1605)
Treatise on Painting (1651)
The Pilgrim's Progress (1678; 1684)
Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1689)
Two Treatises of Government (1690)
Robinson Crusoe (1719)
Poor Richard's Almanack (1732-1757)
The Social Contract (1762)
Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776)
Common Sense (1776)
The Federalist Papers (1787-1788)
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
Cartagena Manifesto (1812)
Pride and Prejudice (1813)
The Last of the Mohicans (1826)
Nature (1836)
A Christmas Carol (1843)
Tales (1845)
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)
Wuthering Heights (1847)
Civil Disobedience (1849)
David Copperfield (1849-1850)
The Scarlet Letter (1850)
Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851-1852)
Moby Dick (1851)
On the Origin of Species (1859)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
Das Kapital (1867)
Little Women (1868)
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870)
The Brothers Karamazov (1879-1880)
Treasure Island (1883)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
War and Peace (1886)
A Study in Scarlet (1887)
The Jewish State (1896)
The War of the Worlds (1898)
The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
Up From Slavery (1901)
The Story of my Life (1902)
The Call of the Wild (1903)
The Jungle (1906)
Riders of the Purple Sage (1912)
O Pioneers! (1913)
Sons and Lovers (1913)
Relativity: The Special and General Theory (1916)
Siddhartha (1922)
Ulysses (1922)
The Great Gatsby (1925)
Mein Kampf (1925; 1927)
The Sun also Rises (1926)
The Oxford English Dictionary (1928)
All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)
The Sound and the Fury (1929)
The Maltese Falcon (1930)
The Good Earth (1931)
Brave New World (1932)
Story of Civilization (1935-1975)
Gone with the Wind (1936)
The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
Native Son (1940)
The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946)
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (1947)
Cry, The Beloved Country (1948)
The Second World War (1948-1954)
The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
Lord of the Flies (1954)
To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
Catch-22 (1961)
Silent Spring (1962)
The Feminine Mystique (1963)
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964)
Unsafe at any Speed (1965)
Quotations of Chairman Mao (1966)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee (1971)
The Gulag Archipelago (1973-1975)
Beloved (1987)
A Brief History of Time, Updated and Expanded (1998)