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  About the List
» Managing Editor James Kelly talks about the list and shares his John Le Carre favorite (which didn't make
the cut).

» Richard Lacayo lays bare the process (and the pain) behind stacking up
100 novels.
  Reader's Choice
1:  
2:  Lolita
3:  A Passage to India
4:  A Death in the Family
5:  Ubik

    See the full list
  Best Graphic Novels
TIME's Andrew Arnold picks Watchmen and nine other comix masterpieces

  Archive Trivia
Who was the first author to appear on a TIME cover? Get the answer and much more on our trivia page
  Talk Back
Why isn't the Harry Potter series on there!!?? It definitely should be on there!!
—Robin; Seattle, Wash.

Where is Ayn Rand and John Irving? I checked your list twice, I can't believe you did not list either author.
—Susan Sayfan; Longwood, Fla.

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  From the TIME Archive
Ernest Hemingway
"Make no mistake, Ernest Hemingway is somebody; a new, honest, un-'literary' transcriber of life...."
Writer 1/18/26

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A Death in the Family (1958)
Author: James Agee
Agee was a poet, a penetrating film critic for TIME and other magazines, an intricate public conscience, and a man who carried all his life the burden of his father's death in a car accident when Agee was six. (Forty years later to the day Agee would die of a heart attack.) He brought all of that, both his gifts and his psychic injuries, to this grave and lyrical story of Rufus Follet, a boy whose world is upended by his father's sudden death in an auto accident. What this book lacks in form it more than makes up for in subtly delineated feeling. Agee's forgiving embrace of the deeply imperfect people he describes, a kind of Whitmanesque tenderness, stays with you a long time.—R.L.




Next: The Death of the Heart »


More From the Archive:
Great Books for Grown-Ups (6/10/46)
Dirty Book of the Month (4/22/66)
How and What to Read (10/2/72)
Dame Agatha: Queen of the Maze (1/26/76)
Rediscovering the Joy of Text (4/21/97)
Harry Potter Archive Collection
Writers in TIME Archive Collection





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