The books were chosen by five writers: Mary Moore Easter, Heid E. Erdrich, Bill Holm, David Mura, and George Rabasa, under the direction of Bart Schneider, editor of the Hungry Mind Review, and J. Otis Powell of The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis.
The Hungry Mind Review list provides a compelling alternative to the Modern Library's selection of "100 Best Novels published in the English language since 1900". Although the Modern Library list was criticized for including only six books by nonwhite writers, only nine books by women, and very few books published after 1960, it initiated a lively national discussion.
The Hungry Mind Review list reflects a far more realistic race and gender balance, and includes a good number of contemporary books. Our list is, however, limited to books written by Americans.
While the Modern Library list is restricted to novels, the Hungry Mind Review includes distinguished books of nonfiction and collections of short fiction. "Opening the list to nonfiction makes sense in a literary century that has witnessed the blurring of the line between fiction and nonfiction," according to Hungry Mind Review editor Bart Schneider. "It's thrilling to have James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, as well as the autobiographies of Malcolm X and Alice B. Toklas, on this list," Schneider adds. "Essential 20th-century writers like James Baldwin, Joan Didion, and Gore Vidal, who each have collections of nonfiction included on the list, are commonly thought to have done their best writing in the essay form."
Although the Hungry Mind Review panel did not consider poetry for this selection, three major American poets (Charles Olson, Adrienne Rich, and William Carlos Williams) landed on the list with important books of nonfiction.
Among individual writers, novelist and Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison, who does not appear on the Modern Library list, placed the most books (4) on the Hungry Mind Review list, followed by William Faulkner (3).
The Hungry Mind Review, a theme-based quarterly book review magazine now in its fourteenth year, is published in St. Paul, Minnesota.
AUTHOR,TITLE, YEAR OF PUBLICATION
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 1918
James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1941
Dorothy Allison, Bastard out of Carolina, 1992
Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me Ultima, 1972
Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio, 1919
Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 1970
Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 1987
James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain, 1953
James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1985
Edward Ball, Slaves in the Family, 1998
Saul Bellow, Herzog, 1964
Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky, 1948
William Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 1959
Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, 1966
Raymond Carver, Cathedral, 1983
Willa Cather, O Pioneers!, 1913
Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop, 1927
John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever, 1978
Sandra Cisneros, House on Mango Street, 1984
Don DeLillo, White Noise, 1985
Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968
Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins, 1983
John Dos Passos, U.S.A., 1930
Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy, 1925
W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 1952
Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine, 1984
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, 1926
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, 1930
William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses, 1940
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 1925
M.F.K. Fisher, The Art of Eating, 1954
Francisco Goldman, The Ordinary Seaman, 1997
Alex Haley, Roots, 1976
Joseph Heller, Catch-22, 1961
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 1926
Ernest Hemingway, The Short Stories, 1938
Michael Herr, Dispatches, 1984
Chester Himes, My Life of Absurdity: The Autobiography, 1976
Linda Hogan, Mean Spirit, 1990
bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, 1982
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937
Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, 1902
LeRoi Jones (Amira Baraka), Blues People: Negro Music in White America, 1963
Jack Kerouac, On the Road, 1957
Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, 1962
Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John, 1983
Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior, 1976
Jerzy Kosinski, The Painted Bird, 1976
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1960
Li-Young Lee, The Winged Seed, 1995
Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt, 1922
Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing, 1994
Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, 1940
Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead, 1948
Bernard Malamud, The Magic Barrel, 1958
Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 1965
Rollo May, Love and Will, 1969
Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, 1948
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 1934
N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn, 1968
Wright Morris, Field of Vision, 1956
Toni Morrison, Sula, 1973
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, 1977
Toni Morrison, Beloved, 1987
Toni Morrison, Jazz, 1992
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, 1958
John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks, 1932
Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find, 1955
Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael, 1947
Tillie Olson, Tell Me a Riddle, 1961
Jon Okada, No-No Boy, 1977
Grace Paley, Collected Stories, 1994
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer, 1961
Katherine Anne Porter, Flowering Judas and Other Stories, 1930
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, 1973
Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets and Silence, 1979
Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint, 1969
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, 1951
May Sarton, At Seventy, 1984
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony, 1977
Isaac B. Singer, The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1982
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1993
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1937
William Styron, Sophie's Choice, 1979
James Thurber, A Thurber Carnival, 1945
Jean Toomer, Cane, 1923
Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth, 1962*
John Updike, Rabbit, Run, 1960
Gore Vidal, The United States: Essays 1952-1992, 1993
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five, 1969
Alice Walker, The Color Purple, 1982
Robert Penn Warren, All the Kings Men, 1946
Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust, 1939
John Edgar Wideman, Philadelphia Fire, 1990
William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain, 1925
Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station, 1940
Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again, 1941
Richard Wright, Native Son, 1940
Wakako Yamauchi, Songs My Mother Taught Me, 1994* First date of publication
The Panel
Heid E. Erdrich grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where her parents taught at the Bureau of Indian Affairs Boarding School. She is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. She teaches literature and creative writing in the English Department at the University of St. Thomas. In 1995 she won a Minnesota Voices Award. Her collection of poetry, Fishing for Myth, was nominated for a 1997 Minnesota Book Award.
Mary Moore Easter, a contributing editor of Hungry Mind Review, is a poet/writer, a dance/choreographer, and professor of dance at Carleton College. Her writing appears in Water Stone and Sing Heavenly Muse! as well as in her live performances.
Bill Holm's books include the memoirs Coming Home Crazy: An Alphabet of China Essays and The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere: Minneota, Minnesota, and the poetry volume, Boxelder Bug Variations. He lives in Minneota, Minnesota, in a house that cost $5,000 in 1977 and has since steadily declined in value.
David Mura is a poet, creative nonficton writer, critic, and playwright. A Sansei or third-generation Japanese American, Mura has written two memoirs, Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei, and Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality, & Identity. Mura is also the author of two volumes of poetry: After We Lost Our Way and The Colors of Desire.
George Rabasa is the author of the story collection Glass Houses and the novel Floating Kingdom. He is a recipient of the Writer's Voice Capricorn Award for Excellence in Fiction, and Minnesota Book Awards for short stories in 1997 and for the novel in 1998. He was born in Maine of Spanish Catalan parents, was raised in Mexico, and has lived in Minnesota since 1981. As a result, his fiction has wandered across the urban Midwest, the U.S.-Mexico border, and most recently Spain during the 1936-1939 Civil War.
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