| Rank |
Author |
Novel and Year |
| 1 | Henry Adams | The Education of Henry Adams (1918) |
| 2 | James Agee and Walker Evans | Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) |
| 3 | Dorothy Allison | Bastard out of Carolina (1992) |
| 4 | Rudolfo Anaya | Bless Me Ultima (1972) |
| 5 | Sherwood Anderson | Winesburg, Ohio (1919) |
| 6 | Maya Angelou | I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970) |
| 7 | Gloria Anzaldúa | Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) |
| 8 | James Baldwin | Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) |
| 9 | James Baldwin | The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction (1985) |
| 10 | Edward Ball | Slaves in the Family (1998) |
| 11 | Saul Bellow | Herzog (1964) |
| 12 | Paul Bowles | The Sheltering Sky (1948) |
| 13 | William Burroughs | Naked Lunch (1959) |
| 14 | Truman Capote | In Cold Blood (1966) |
| 15 | Raymond Carver | Cathedral (1983) |
| 16 | Willa Cather | O Pioneers! (1913) |
| 17 | Willa Cather | Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) |
| 18 | John Cheever | Collected Stories (1978) |
| 19 | Sandra Cisneros | House on Mango Street (1984) |
| 20 | Don DeLillo | White Noise (1985) |
| 21 | Joan Didion | Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) |
| 22 | Vine Deloria Jr. | Custer Died for Your Sins (1983) |
| 23 | John Dos Passos | U.S.A. (1930) |
| 24 | Theodore Dreiser | An American Tragedy (1925) |
| 25 | W.E.B. DuBois | The Souls of Black Folk (1903) |
| 26 | Ralph Ellison | Invisible Man (1952) |
| 27 | Louise Erdrich | Love Medicine (1984) |
| 28 | William Faulkner | The Sound and the Fury (1926) |
| 29 | William Faulkner | As I Lay Dying (1930) |
| 30 | William Faulkner | Go Down, Moses (1940) |
| 31 | F. Scott Fitzgerald | The Great Gatsby (1925) |
| 32 | M.F.K. Fisher | The Art of Eating (1954) |
| 33 | Francisco Goldman | The Ordinary Seaman (1997) |
| 34 | Alex Haley | Roots (1976) |
| 35 | Joseph Heller | Catch-22 (1961) |
| 36 | Ernest Hemingway | The Sun Also Rises (1926) |
| 37 | Ernest Hemingway | The Short Stories (1938) |
| 38 | Michael Herr | Dispatches (1984) |
| 39 | Chester Himes | My Life of Absurdity: The Autobiography (1976) |
| 40 | Linda Hogan | Mean Spirit (1990) |
| 41 | bell hooks | Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1982) |
| 42 | Zora Neale Hurston | Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) |
| 43 | Henry James | The Wings of the Dove (1902) |
| 44 | LeRoi Jones (Amira Baraka) | Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963) |
| 45 | Jack Kerouac | On the Road (1957) |
| 46 | Ken Kesey | One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) |
| 47 | Jamaica Kincaid | Annie John (1983) |
| 48 | Maxine Hong Kingston | Woman Warrior (1976) |
| 49 | Jerzy Kosinski | The Painted Bird (1976) |
| 50 | Harper Lee | To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) |
| 51 | Li-Young Lee | The Winged Seed (1995) |
| 52 | Sinclair Lewis | Babbitt (1922) |
| 53 | Cormac McCarthy | The Crossing (1994) |
| 54 | Carson McCullers | The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) |
| 55 | Norman Mailer | The Naked and the Dead (1948) |
| 56 | Bernard Malamud | The Magic Barrel (1958) |
| 57 | Malcolm X and Alex Haley | The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) |
| 58 | Rollo May | Love and Will (1969) |
| 59 | Thomas Merton | The Seven Storey Mountain (1948) |
| 60 | Henry Miller | Tropic of Cancer (1934) |
| 61 | N. Scott Momaday | House Made of Dawn (1968) |
| 62 | Wright Morris | Field of Vision (1956) |
| 63 | Toni Morrison | Sula (1973) |
| 64 | Toni Morrison | Song of Solomon (1977) |
| 65 | Toni Morrison | Beloved (1987) |
| 66 | Toni Morrison | Jazz (1992) |
| 67 | Vladimir Nabokov | Lolita (1958) |
| 68 | John G. Neihardt | Black Elk Speaks (1932) |
| 69 | Flannery O'Connor | A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955) |
| 70 | Charles Olson | Call Me Ishmael (1947) |
| 71 | Tillie Olson | Tell Me a Riddle (1961) |
| 72 | Jon Okada | No-No Boy (1977) |
| 73 | Grace Paley | Collected Stories (1994) |
| 74 | Walker Percy | The Moviegoer (1961) |
| 75 | Katherine Anne Porter | Flowering Judas and Other Stories (1930) |
| 76 | Thomas Pynchon | Gravity's Rainbow (1973) |
| 77 | Adrienne Rich | On Lies, Secrets and Silence (1979) |
| 78 | Philip Roth | Portnoy's Complaint (1969) |
| 79 | J.D. Salinger | The Catcher in the Rye (1951) |
| 80 | May Sarton | At Seventy (1984) |
| 81 | Leslie Marmon Silko | Ceremony (1977) |
| 82 | Isaac B. Singer | The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer (1982) |
| 83 | Gertrude Stein | The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1993) |
| 84 | John Steinbeck | The Grapes of Wrath (1937) |
| 85 | William Styron | Sophie's Choice (1979) |
| 86 | James Thurber | A Thurber Carnival (1945) |
| 87 | Jean Toomer | Cane (1923) |
| 88 | Mark Twain | Letters from the Earth (1962) |
| 89 | John Updike | Rabbit, Run (1960) |
| 90 | Gore Vidal | The United States: Essays (1952-1992) |
| 91 | Kurt Vonnegut | Slaughterhouse Five (1969) |
| 92 | Alice Walker | The Color Purple (1982) |
| 93 | Robert Penn Warren | All the Kings Men (1946) |
| 94 | Nathanael West | The Day of the Locust (1939) |
| 95 | John Edgar Wideman | Philadelphia Fire (1990) |
| 96 | William Carlos Williams | In the American Grain (1925) |
| 97 | Edmund Wilson | To the Finland Station (1940) |
| 98 | Thomas Wolfe | You Can't Go Home Again (1941) |
| 99 | Richard Wright | Native Son (1940) |
| 100 | Wakako Yamauchi | Songs My Mother Taught Me (1994) |
Source: The Hungry Mind Review.