Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century is a list of books thought to be the 100 best of the 20th century. The list was made in 1999 by the French retail store Fnac and the Paris newspaper Le Monde.

Starting with a list of 200 titles made by bookshops and journalists, 17,000 French people answered the question, "Which books have stayed in your memory?"^[1] The list includes novels, poetry, theatre, and comic strips. Some received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

No.	Title	Author	Year	Language	Country
1	The Stranger (The Outsider)	Albert Camus	1942	French	French Algeria
2	In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past)	Marcel Proust	1913–1927	French	France
3	The Trial	Franz Kafka	1925	German	Austria-Hungary, Czechoslovakia
4	The Little Prince	Antoine de Saint-Exupéry	1943	French	France
5	Man's Fate	André Malraux	1933	French	France
6	Journey to the End of the Night	Louis-Ferdinand Céline	1932	French	France
7	The Grapes of Wrath	John Steinbeck	1939	English	USA
8	For Whom the Bell Tolls	Ernest Hemingway	1940	English	USA
9	Le Grand Meaulnes	Alain-Fournier	1913	French	France
10	Froth on the Daydream	Boris Vian	1947	French	France
11	The Second Sex	Simone de Beauvoir	1949	French	France
12	Waiting for Godot	Samuel Beckett	1952	French, English	Ireland, France
13	Being and Nothingness	Jean-Paul Sartre	1943	French	France
14	The Name of the Rose	Umberto Eco	1980	Italian	Italy
15	The Gulag Archipelago	Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn	1973	Russian	Soviet Union
16	Paroles	Jacques Prévert	1946	French	France
17	Alcools	Guillaume Apollinaire	1913	French	France
18	The Blue Lotus	Hergé	1936	French	Belgium
19	The Diary of a Young Girl	Anne Frank	1947	Dutch	Germany, Netherlands
20	Tristes Tropiques	Claude Lévi-Strauss	1955	French	France
21	Brave New World	Aldous Huxley	1932	English	UK
22	Nineteen Eighty-Four	George Orwell	1949	English	UK
23	Asterix the Gaul	René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo	1959	French	France
24	The Bald Soprano	Eugène Ionesco	1952	French, Romanian	Romania, France
25	Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality	Sigmund Freud	1905	German	Austria
26	The Abyss (Zeno of Bruges)	Marguerite Yourcenar	1968	French	France, Belgium
27	Lolita	Vladimir Nabokov	1955	English, Russian	Russia, USA
28	Ulysses	James Joyce	1922	English	Ireland
29	The Tartar Steppe	Dino Buzzati	1940	Italian	Italy
30	The Counterfeiters	André Gide	1925	French	France
31	The Horseman on the Roof	Jean Giono	1951	French	France
32	Belle du Seigneur	Albert Cohen	1968	French	Greece, Switzerland
33	One Hundred Years of Solitude	Gabriel García Márquez	1967	Spanish	Colombia
34	The Sound and the Fury	William Faulkner	1929	English	USA
35	Thérèse Desqueyroux	François Mauriac	1927	French	France
36	Zazie in the Metro	Raymond Queneau	1959	French	France
37	Confusion of Feelings	Stefan Zweig	1927	German	Austria
38	Gone with the Wind	Margaret Mitchell	1936	English	USA
39	Lady Chatterley's Lover	D. H. Lawrence	1928	English	UK
40	The Magic Mountain	Thomas Mann	1924	German	Germany
41	Bonjour Tristesse	Françoise Sagan	1954	French	France
42	Le Silence de la mer	Vercors	1942	French	France
43	Life: A User's Manual	Georges Perec	1978	French	France
44	The Hound of the Baskervilles	Arthur Conan Doyle	1901–1902	English	UK
45	Under the Sun of Satan	Georges Bernanos	1926	French	France
46	The Great Gatsby	F. Scott Fitzgerald	1925	English	USA
47	The Joke	Milan Kundera	1967	Czech	Czech Republic, France
48	A Ghost at Noon (Contempt)	Alberto Moravia	1954	French	France
49	The Murder of Roger Ackroyd	Agatha Christie	1926	English	UK
50	Nadja	André Breton	1928	French	France
51	Aurélien	Louis Aragon	1944	French	France
52	The Satin Slipper	Paul Claudel	1929	French	France
53	Six Characters in Search of an Author	Luigi Pirandello	1921	Italian	Italy
54	The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui	Bertolt Brecht	1959	German	Germany
55	Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique	Michel Tournier	1967	French	France
56	The War of the Worlds	H. G. Wells	1898	English	UK
57	If This Is a Man Survival in Auschwitz	Primo Levi	1947	Italian	Italy
58	The Lord of the Rings	J. R. R. Tolkien	1954–1955	English	Orange Free State, UK
59	Les Vrilles de la vigne	Colette	1908	French	France
60	Capitale de la douleur	Paul Éluard	1926	French	France
61	Martin Eden	Jack London	1909	English	USA
62	Ballad of the Salt Sea	Hugo Pratt	1967	Italian	Italy
63	Writing Degree Zero	Roland Barthes	1953	French	France
64	The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum	Heinrich Böll	1974	German	Germany
65	The Opposing Shore	Julien Gracq	1951	French	France
66	The Order of Things	Michel Foucault	1966	French	France
67	On the Road	Jack Kerouac	1957	English	USA
68	The Wonderful Adventures of Nils	Selma Lagerlöf	1906–1907	Swedish	Sweden
69	A Room of One's Own	Virginia Woolf	1929	English	UK
70	The Martian Chronicles	Ray Bradbury	1950	English	USA
71	The Ravishing of Lol Stein	Marguerite Duras	1964	French	France
72	The Interrogation	J. M. G. Le Clézio	1963	French	France
73	Tropisms	Nathalie Sarraute	1939	French	Russia, France
74	Journal, 1887–1910	Jules Renard	1925	French	France
75	Lord Jim	Joseph Conrad	1900	English	Russian Empire, UK
76	Écrits	Jacques Lacan	1966	French	France
77	The Theatre and its Double	Antonin Artaud	1938	French	France
78	Manhattan Transfer	John Dos Passos	1925	English	USA
79	Ficciones	Jorge Luis Borges	1944	Spanish	Argentina
80	Moravagine	Blaise Cendrars	1926	French	France, Switzerland
81	The General of the Dead Army	Ismail Kadare	1963	Albanian, French	Albania
82	Sophie's Choice	William Styron	1979	English	USA
83	Gypsy Ballads	Federico García Lorca	1928	Spanish	Spain
84	The Strange Case of Peter the Lett	Georges Simenon	1931	French	Belgium
85	Our Lady of the Flowers	Jean Genet	1944	French	France
86	The Man Without Qualities	Robert Musil	1930–1932	German	Austria
87	Fureur et mystère	René Char	1948	French	France
88	The Catcher in the Rye	J. D. Salinger	1951	English	USA
89	No Orchids For Miss Blandish	James Hadley Chase	1939	English	UK
90	Blake and Mortimer	Edgar P. Jacobs	1950	French	Belgium
91	The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge	Rainer Maria Rilke	1910	German	Austria-Hungary, Switzerland
92	Second Thoughts	Michel Butor	1957	French	France
93	The Burden of Our Time The Origins of Totalitarianism	Hannah Arendt	1951	English, German	Germany, USA
94	The Master and Margarita	Mikhail Bulgakov	1967	Russian	Soviet Union
95	The Rosy Crucifixion	Henry Miller	1949–1960	English	USA
96	The Big Sleep	Raymond Chandler	1939	English	USA
97	Amers	Saint-John Perse	1957	French	France
98	Gaston (Gomer Goof)	André Franquin	1957	French	Belgium
99	Under the Volcano	Malcolm Lowry	1947	English	UK
100	Midnight's Children	Salman Rushdie	1981	English	India, UK

Note: Language and Country refer to the author's career generally, not to the book specifically.

• Nobel Prize in Literature - Camus, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Beckett, Sartre, Solzhenitsyn, Gide, García Márquez, Faulkner, Mauriac, Mann, Pirandello, Böll, Lagerlöf, Le Clézio, Perse
• Booker Prize - Kadare, Rushdie
• Pulitzer Prize for Fiction - Steinbeck, Hemingway, Faulkner, Mitchell, Styron