James says that trials of many kinds test what, producing perseverance?

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Last updated on: March 14, 2005 at 10:19 am by Barbara Nicolosi

2005-03-14T10:19:00-07:00 Barbara Nicolosi

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100 GREATEST LITERARY WORKS OF THE 20TH CENTURY

This list was published by Image Journal, which is a publication that looks atthe intersection of religious faith and creativity. But I wonder how much that perspective skews this list? I’d like to see a similar list from some pagans at Berkeley or Wesleyan. How many of our literary saints would make it on their list?

Some of the titles here are just, well, silly, and reflect the huge contingent of baby-boomer theologians and ex-nuns in Image’s community. You gotta love The Last Temptation of Christ and This I Know to Be True on the same list with The Diary of a Country Priest. It is a modern “trying to make a point” that would have made Chesterton gurgle and wink. (I met Wally Lamb once at a booksigning, and I found him, well, petulant. Maybe he was having a bad day. I could have forgiven him, if I didn’t also find his writing cloying and narcissistic…)

And clearly, the list is crippled by the fact that they only chose one book by each author. Graham Greene alone has about four others that are better than Kathleen Norris’ Dakota. (Dakota is a sweet book..but come on.) And I seriously doubt all the poets listed here deserve to be on the greatest books list. Sigh. When you have Emily as the standard, most other attempts at poetry are mostly embarrassing in their obviousness.

Still, the list is a useful thing to have. We give a similar list (of the greatest stories ever written) to our Act One writers and ask them to check of how many they have read. They generally average about 12. I logged 25 on this list.

Anything missing here? How about Steinbeck’s East of Eden? All Quiet of the Western Front? Orwell’s Animal Farm? Huxley’s Brave New World? Others?

W.H. Auden – Collected Poems
Georges Bernanos – The Diary of a Country Priest
Wendell Berry – Sabbaths
John Berryman – 77 Dream Songs
Doris Betts – Souls Raised from the Dead
Leon Bloy – The Woman Who Was Poor
Heinrich Boll – The Stories of Heinrich Boll
Robert Bolt – A Man for All Seasons
Ray Bradbury – Something Wicked This Way Comes
George Mackay Brown – Selected Poems
Frederic Buechner – Godric
Scott Cairns – Recovered Body
Willa Cather – Death Comes for the Archbishop
G.K. Chesterton – The Man Who Was Thursday
Paul Claudel – The Satin Slipper
Elizabeth Dewberry – Many Things Have Happened Since He Died
Annie Dillard – Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Andre Dubus – Selected Stories
T.S. Eliot – Four Quartets
Alice Thomas Ellis – The Sin Eater
Shusaku Endo – Silence
William Everson – Collected Poems (The Residual Years; The Veritable Years)
Horton Foote – The Trip to Bountiful
Christopher Fry – The Lady’s Not for Burning
Denise Giardina – Saints and Villains
Jose Maria Gironella – The Cypresses Believe in God
Julien Green – Diaries
Graham Greene – The Power and the Glory
Patricia Hampl – Virgin Time
Ron Hansen – Mariette in Ecstasy
Mark Helprin – A Soldier of the Great War
Oscar Hijuelos – Mr. Ives’ Christmas
Geoffrey Hill – The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy
Edward Hirsch – Earthly Measures
Paul Horgan – Great River
Andrew Hudgins – The Neverending
John Irving – A Prayer for Owen Meany
Josephine Jacobsen – In the Crevice of Time: New and Selected Poems
Mark Jarman – Questions for Ecclesiastes
Elizabeth Jennings – Collected Poems
David Jones – The Anathemata
Nikos Kazantzakis – The Last Temptation of Christ
Thomas Keneally – Three Cheers for the Paraclete
William Kennedy – Ironweed
Wally Lamb – I Know This Much is True
Anne Lamott – Traveling Mercies
Madeleine L’Engle – A Wrinkle in Time
Denise Levertov – The Stream and the Sapphire
Philip Levine – The Mercy
C.S. Lewis – Till We Have Faces
Torgny Lindgren – Light
Robert Lowell – Lord Weary’s Castle
Paul Mariani – Salvage Operations
Francois Mauriac – Viper’s Tangle
Alice McDermott – Charming Billy
Thomas Merton – Collected Poems
Vassar Miller – If I Had Wheels or Love: Collected Poems
Walter Miller – A Canticle for Leibowitz
Czeslaw Milosz – Collected Poems
Brian Moore – Black Robe
Robert Morgan – The Truest Pleasure
Malcolm Muggeridge – Chronicles of Wasted Time
Edwin Muir – Complete Poems
Les Murray – Collected Poems
Kathleen Norris – Dakota
Patrick O’Brian – The Aubrey/Maturin Novels
Flannery O’Connor – Short Stories
Virginia Stem Owens – If You Do Love Old Men
Katherine Paterson – Jacob Have I Loved
Charles Peguy – The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc
Walker Percy – The Moviegoer
David Plante – The Francoeur Trilogy
Chaim Potok – My Name is Asher Lev
J.F. Powers – The Presence of Grace
Reynolds Price – Three Gospels
Richard Rodriguez – Hunger of Memory
Dorothy Sayers – The Mind of the Maker
Ignazio Silone – Bread and Wine
Louis Simpson – New and Selected Poems
Isaac Bashevis Singer – Collected Stories
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Muriel Spark – Memento Mori
Tom Stoppard – Hapgood
John Heath Stubbs – Collected Poems
Allen Tate – Collected Poems
J.R.R. Tolkien – The Lord of the Rings
Anne Tyler – Saint Maybe
Sigrid Undset – Kristin Lavransdatter
John Updike – In the Beauty of the Lillies
Peter de Vries – The Blood of the Lamb
Dan Wakefield – Returning
Walter Wangerin, Jr. – The Book of the Dun Cow
Evelyn Waugh – Brideshead Revisited
Elie Wiesel – Night
Richard Wilbur – New and Collected Poems
Charles Williams – All Hallows’ Eve
A.N. Wilson – Wise Virgin
Tim Winton – Cloudstreet
Larry Woiwode – Beyond the Bedroom Wall
Tobias Wolff – In the Garden of the North American Martyrs

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