The parameters of Time Magazine's 100 Best Novels are: English language novels published anywhere in the world since 1923, the year that TIME Magazine began, which means that James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) isn't included. Irish writer Flann O'Brien's (pseudonym of Brian O'Nolan) 1938 novel At Swim Two Birds is included.
 |
| Time Magazine Cover: Ernest Hemingway - December 13, 1954 - Veteran out of the wars before he was twenty:/ Famous at twenty-five: thirty a master—/Whittled a style for his time from a walnut stick /In a carpenter's loft in a street of that April city. ---- Thus Poet Archibald MacLeish recalls one of the great American writers in his days of early glory, back in the 1920s, when it always seemed to be April in Paris. Last week Ernest Hemingway was a long way from Paris and a long way from April. He was 55, but he looked older. He cruised in a black and green fishing boat off the coast of Cuba, near where the Gulf Stream draws a dark line on the seascape. The grey-white hair escaping from beneath a visored cap was unkempt, and the Caribbean glare induced a sea-squint in his brown, curious eyes set behind steel-rimmed spectacles. Most of his ruddy face was retired behind a clipped, white, patriarchal beard that gave him a bristled, Neptunian look. His leg muscles could have been halves of a split 16-lb. shot, welded there by years of tramping in Michigan, skiing in Switzerland, bullfighting in Spain, walking battlefronts and hiking uncounted miles of African safari. On his lap he held a board, and he bent over it with a pencil in one hand. He was still whittling away at his walnut prose. Five thousand miles away in Stockholm, a white-starched, tail-coated assembly of the Nobel Foundation was about to bestow literature's most distinguished accolade on the products of his pencil. This week, "for his powerful, style-forming mastery of the art of modern narration," the Nobel Prize for Literature will be awarded to Ernest Miller Hemingway, originally of Oak Park, III, and later of most of the world's grand and adventurous places.... |
Time's Richard Lacayo says: "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)." We say Mrs. Dalloway. You say Mrs. Bridge. We say Naked Lunch. You say Breakfast at Tiffanys. Let's call the whole thing off? Just the opposite—bring it on. Sometimes judgment is best formed under fire. But please, no e-mails about Ulysses. Rules are rules."
Complete List
Read the Original Review of All the King's Men 
Robert Penn Warren's novel All the King's Men and the Oscar winning 1949 film adaptation and the release in December 2005, of a new movie on the book that immortalised the populist politician Huey Long of Louisiana, is also referred to here:
All the King's Men: The Ireland that Made Charles Haughey
