It’ll Get ‘Em Talking, but Will It Get ‘Em Reading?

List Fever continues to spread. Hot on the heels of the American Film Institute’s 100 greatest American movies, the editorial board of the Modern Library, a division of Random House, has compiled its choices of the 100 finest English-language novels published in this century.

Executives at Random House say they hope this latest list will stimulate discussion of great works of fiction as well as stimulate sales. (Of the 100 novels selected, 59 are published by Random House or a division of its parent company, the Bertelsmann group of Germany.)

However, even before the list is announced officially (Friday at Radcliffe College, during a workshop for young publishers), it is being criticized for including too few women (eight) and only three works (all by James Joyce) by writers who live or lived outside the United States and Britain.

Here, the list is evaluated by Wanda Coleman, an author and poet who lives in Marina del Rey, and by Steve Wasserman, book editor of the Los Angeles Times.

The modern mania for list-making is seemingly insatiable. It is one of the ironies of our democratic age that, despite the impulse to include and honor every voice, no matter how marginal or mediocre, nostalgia for hierarchies of quality and authority finds its most vulgar expression in the concoction of lists and rankings of all kinds.

A striking example is the publication of a list of 100 novels that the editorial board of the Modern Library, an imprint of Random House, regards as the best books written in the English language in the 20th century. Even a cursory glance through the list raises multiple questions of the criteria used to select the lucky titles. Issues of merit, nationality, race and gender loom large.

Fifty-eight of the books are by Americans including William Faulkner, Nathanael West, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James and Ralph Ellison. Thirty-nine are by British writers including D.H. Lawrence, George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell. Only eight women made the cut including Elizabeth Bowen, Willa Cather and Virginia Woolf.

At a time when the so-called Culture Wars have coarsened the texture of American culture, such a list smacks of unabashed (and faintly disreputable) notions of tradition and merit. The Modern Library’s list of best novels of the century is sure to spur debate and, Random House hopes, sales. Ann Godoff, Random House’s president and editor in chief, has said that “it’s a way to bring the Modern Library to public attention. We want to grow the Modern Library and its stable of classics.” She may well be onto something: Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble report continued robust sales of the so-called backlist titles previously issued by publishers, which all too often languish on the shelves of warehouses and bookstores.

The list was chosen after considerable reflection and debate by Modern Library’s 10-member editorial board. With two exceptions, the members are all Random House authors: Christopher Cerf (son of Bennett Cerf, the firm’s co-founder), Daniel Boorstin (the former Librarian of Congress), Shelby Foote (the acclaimed Civil War historian), A.S. Byatt (the English novelist and author of “Possession”), Edmund Morris (the biographer of Theodore Roosevelt and author of a biography of Ronald Reagan to be published this fall by Random House), John Richardson (author of the multivolume “Picasso”) and William Styron (author of such novels as “Sophie’s Choice” and “The Confessions of Nat Turner”). The only board members not published by Random House are Vartan Gregorian, the former head of the New York Public Library, and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., chronicler of John F. Kennedy’s presidency.

Certain to arouse criticism as much for what it includes as for what it excludes, the list already has garnered attention as a marketing gimmick. Every reader will have his or her own complaints. V.S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie, for example, are the only writers on the list who were not born in the United States or the British Isles. Patrick White, the Australian writer who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1973, is a notable omission. As for women, the absence of such gifted and influential writers as Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes and Doris Lessing, to name only three, is striking. But Random House is confident that the list, whatever its critical merits, will revivify a remarkable and influential imprint.

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The Modern Library has been at the heart of Random House’s business since the firm was founded in 1925. It was in that year that Bennett Cerf, together with Donald Klopfer, paid the publisher Horace Liveright $215,000 for the rights to the existing 108 titles in the series. Cerf had admired the Modern Library, having studied many of the books while attending Columbia College. Established in 1917, the Modern Library was modeled after Everyman’s Library, begun in 1905 by publisher Joseph Malaby Dent in London. Intended to make available a library of the world’s literature that would appeal “to every kind of reader,” Everyman’s Library was affordably priced, but largely devoted to English literature. Cerf wanted to broaden the list to include more American authors.

For the first two years of Random House’s existence, Cerf and Klopfer devoted themselves exclusively to selling the series into as many bookstores as they could convince to carry the titles. They also rejuvenated the appearance and design of the books by hiring the talented Lucien Bernhardt, a German designer, who drew the logo of the silhouette of the galloping woman with a torch held aloft. Rockwell Kent designed the distinctive endpapers and would go on to draw the Random House colophon, which made its first appearance in February 1927. The Modern Library was a “roaring success,” Cerf would later recall.

That was then, however, and this is now. The landscape of American publishing is altered almost unrecognizably from the halcyon days of Random House’s early glory years. The infotainment industry--with its many competing claims for people’s attention, time and dollars--has put severe pressure on the more genteel traditions of book publishing. The stakes are ever higher, the money tighter, the profit margins slim. The financial merry-go-round is dizzying. Even keeping track of who owns what becomes exhausting. Random House, for example, was sold by Cerf and Klopfer to RCA for $40 million. Then, in 1980, RCA sold it to S.I. Newhouse’s Advance Publications for nearly $70 million. Earlier this year, Newhouse sold America’s largest trade-book publisher for an estimated $1.3 billion to Bertellsman, the giant German media conglomerate, which owns, among other far-flung companies, the publishing firm of Bantam Doubleday Dell.

Strategies for grabbing the public’s attention abound. The creation of Modern Library’s list of best English-language novels of the 20th century is one such strategy. It is not new. Seven years ago, Alfred A. Knopf, a subsidiary of Random House Inc., relaunched the Everyman’s Library of world classics. Three years ago, the (London) Times Literary Supplement printed a list of the 100 most influential books, largely nonfiction, published since World War II. Such lists provide 15 minutes of book chat for the chattering classes, but one wonders whether they prod a significant number of readers actually to purchase and to read the books whose synopses they likely gleaned from the digests provided by Cliffs Notes.

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But one mustn’t be churlish. If even a single reader stumbles upon even a single one of these excellent books, it would be reason enough to rejoice. After all, there are many writers who owe much to such series. Susan Sontag, for one, still treasures the volumes of Modern Library she bought and read while a pupil at Hollywood High School in the late 1940s. As for the Everyman volumes, with their distinctive gilt design and lettering on their spines, the late critic Alfred Kazin observed that “Without Everyman’s, I would have had no proper education at all. . . . I have kept for decades and decades every Everyman’s I bought as a boy.”

One slightly suspects that in today’s world a classic is a book no one any longer reads, except to the degree that it is assigned reading in college. As for what, in the end, makes a book endure, I am reminded of a story Arthur Koestler, the author most famously of “Darkness at Noon” (No. 8 on the Modern Library list), was fond of telling. Asked once whether given a choice between having 100 readers today or 10 readers a hundred years from now, Koestler said unhesitatingly, “Why, 10 readers 100 years from now, of course.” He then paused, and added, “Though I don’t suppose that sentiment gives much comfort to my publisher, who hopes still to be in business in a hundred years.”

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What’s Your Favorite Novel

of the Century?

So you’re asking, “Hey, where’s ‘Valley of the Dolls’ on that list of the century’s 100 best novels?” If your fave novel has been overlooked by the editorial board of the Modern Library, we want to hear about it. Fax to (213) 237-4888. Results will appear in Life & Style later this week.

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The Modern Library’s Choices

1. “Ulysses,” James Joyce

2. “The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald

3. “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” James Joyce

4. “Lolita,” Vladimir Nabokov

5. “Brave New World,” Aldous Huxley

6. “The Sound and the Fury,” William Faulkner

7. “Catch-22,” Joseph Heller

8. “Darkness at Noon,” Arthur Koestler

9. “Sons and Lovers,” D.H. Lawrence

10. “The Grapes of Wrath,” John Steinbeck

11. “Under the Volcano,” Malcolm Lowry

12. “The Way of All Flesh,” Samuel Butler

13. “1984,” George Orwell

14. “I, Claudius,” Robert Graves

15. “To the Lighthouse,” Virginia Woolf

16. “An American Tragedy,” Theodore Dreiser

17. “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” Carson McCullers

18. “Slaughterhouse Five,” Kurt Vonnegut

19. “Invisible Man,” Ralph Ellison

20. “Native Son,” Richard Wright

21. “Henderson the Rain King,” Saul Bellow

22. “Appointment in Samarra,” John O’Hara

23. “U.S.A.” (trilogy), John Dos Passos

24. “Winesburg, Ohio,” Sherwood Anderson

25. “A Passage to India,” E.M. Forster

26. “The Wings of the Dove,” Henry James

27. “The Ambassadors,” Henry James

28. “Tender Is the Night,” F. Scott Fitzgerald

29. The “Studs Lonigan” trilogy, James T. Farrell

30. “The Good Soldier,” Ford Madox Ford

31. “Animal Farm,” George Orwell

32. “The Golden Bowl,” Henry James

33. “Sister Carrie,” Theodore Dreiser

34. “A Handful of Dust,” Evelyn Waugh

35. “As I Lay Dying,” William Faulkner

36. “All the King’s Men,” Robert Penn Warren

37. “The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” Thornton Wilder

38. “Howards End,” E.M. Forster

39. “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” James Baldwin

40. “The Heart of the Matter,” Graham Greene

41. “Lord of the Flies,” William Golding

42. “Deliverance,” James Dickey

43. “A Dance to the Music of Time” (series), Anthony Powell

44. “Point Counter Point,” Aldous Huxley

45. “The Sun Also Rises,” Ernest Hemingway

46. “The Secret Agent,” Joseph Conrad

47. “Nostromo,” Joseph Conrad

48. “The Rainbow,” D.H. Lawrence

49. “Women in Love,” D.H. Lawrence

50. “Tropic of Cancer,” Henry Miller

51. “The Naked and the Dead,” Norman Mailer

52. “Portnoy’s Complaint,” Philip Roth

53. “Pale Fire,” Vladimir Nabokov

54. “Light in August,” William Faulkner

55. “On the Road,” Jack Kerouac

56. “The Maltese Falcon,” Dashiell Hammett

57. “Parade’s End,” Ford Madox Ford

58. “The Age of Innocence,” Edith Wharton

59. “Zuleika Dobson,” Max Beerbohm

60. “The Moviegoer,” Walker Percy

61. “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” Willa Cather

62. “From Here to Eternity,” James Jones

63. “The Wapshot Chronicle,” John Cheever

64. “The Catcher in the Rye,” J.D. Salinger

65. “A Clockwork Orange,” Anthony Burgess

66. “Of Human Bondage,” W. Somerset Maugham

67. “Heart of Darkness,” Joseph Conrad

68. “Main Street,” Sinclair Lewis

69. “The House of Mirth,” Edith Wharton

70. “The Alexandria Quartet,” Lawrence Durrell

71. “A High Wind in Jamaica,” Richard Hughes

72. “A House for Mr. Biswas,” V.S. Naipaul

73. “The Day of the Locust,” Nathanael West

74. “A Farewell to Arms,” Ernest Hemingway

75. “Scoop,” Evelyn Waugh

76. “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” Muriel Spark

77. “Finnegans Wake,” James Joyce

78. “Kim,” Rudyard Kipling

79. “A Room With a View,” E.M. Forster

80. “Brideshead Revisited,” Evelyn Waugh

81. “The Adventures of Augie March,” Saul Bellow

82. “Angle of Repose,” Wallace Stegner

83. “A Bend in the River,” V.S. Naipaul

84. “The Death of the Heart,” Elizabeth Bowen

85. “Lord Jim,” Joseph Conrad

86. “Ragtime,” E.L. Doctorow

87. “The Old Wives’ Tale,” Arnold Bennett

88. “The Call of the Wild,” Jack London

89. “Loving,” Henry Green

90. “Midnight’s Children,” Salman Rushdie

91. “Tobacco Road,” Erskine Caldwell

92. “Ironweed,” William Kennedy

93. “The Magus,” John Fowles

94. “Wide Sargasso Sea,” Jean Rhys

95. “Under the Net,” Iris Murdoch

96. “Sophie’s Choice,” William Styron

97. “The Sheltering Sky,” Paul Bowles

98. “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” James M. Cain

99. “The Ginger Man,” J.P. Donleavy

100. “The Magnificent Ambersons,” Booth Tarkington.

Selected by the editorial board of the Modern Library, a division of Random House. The board members are Christopher Cerf, Gore Vidal, Daniel J. Boorstin, Shelby Foote, Vartan Gregorian, A.S. Byatt, Edmund Morris, John Richardson, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and William Styron.