France Chooses the 12 Best World Novels of a Century

Fifteen French writers met recently to choose the best twelve foreign (non-French) novels published between 1850 and 1950, and the result was as follows: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (which won 15 votes); War and Peace by Tolstoy and Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (14 votes each); The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky and The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne (13 votes each); Hunger by Hamsun and The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (12 votes); and The Ball by Katherine Mansfield, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, Kim by Rudyard Kipling, and A Dreary Story and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov (8 votes each).

These are the winning novels in the opinion of the committee of fifteen; we list after them the other novels the committee commended: Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman by Stefan Zweig (7 votes); The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (6 votes); Sons and Lovers by Lawrence (5 votes); Moby Dick by Melville (4 votes); Dedalus by James Joyce and Fathers and Sons by Turgenev (3 votes); The Flame by Gabriele D'Annunzio, Gösta Berling by Selma Lagerlöf, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, and Treasure Island by Stevenson (2 votes); The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck, The Dwarf by Lagerkvist, Green Henry by Keller, and Sanctuary by Faulkner (one vote).

After these results were announced, many regretted the absence of ringing, resounding names in the world of the novel — the likes of Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Virginia Woolf, Sigrid Undset, and Ladislas Reymont — and wished that this jury, in classifying the novels, had chosen 12 novels from the latter half of the nineteenth century and 12 novels from the first half of the twentieth; its choice would then have been nearer to fairness and to reality.