Top 10 Los Gatos Library Classic Books

Thanks to Los Gatos librarian Henry Bankhead for compiling this list of classic books for us. These are the most popular literary English-language masterpieces found at the library, according to Bankhead.

1. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for 16 weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century. The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood," and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be. 

2. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

Emily Bronte's only novel appeared to mixed reviews in 1847, a year before her death at the age of 30. In the relationship of Cathy and Heathcliff, and in the wild, bleak Yorkshire Moors of its setting, Wuthering Heights creates a world of its own, conceived with a disregard for convention, an instinct for poetry and for the dark depths of human psychology that make it one of the greatest novels of passion ever written.

 3. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte

A Victorian classic, Bronte's story about a strong yet poor woman forging her path through life in the English countryside is firmly established in the literary canon. Part romance, part mystery, part Gothic tale.

4. Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin

This is a heartwarming, ever-evolving story about a socially transplanted Caucasian brother and sister thrust by circumstance into life and love in the 'hood.

5. Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger 

A short story and a novella by J.D. Salinger, published together as a book in 1961; the short story and the novella originally appeared in The New Yorker in 1955 and 1957, respectively. Franny and Zooey (characters in the novella Zooey), a sister and brother both in their 20s, are the two youngest members of the Glass family, which was a frequent focus of Salinger's writings. The short story "Franny" serves as a prologue to the events of "Zooey."

6. Animal Farm, George Orwell

Published in England on Aug. 17, 1945, the book reflects events leading up to and during the Stalin era before World War II. Orwell, a democratic socialist, was a critic of Joseph Stalin and hostile to Moscow-directed Stalinism, especially after his experiences with the NKVD, and what he saw of the results of the influence of Communist policy ("ceaseless arrests, censored newspapers, prowling hordes of armed police"—"Communism is now a counter-revolutionary force"), during the Spanish Civil War. In a letter to Yvonne Davet, Orwell described Animal Farm as his novel "contre Stalin."   

7. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith

First published in 1943, the novel relates the coming-of-age story of its main character, Francie Nolan, and her Austrian/Irish-American family in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York City. The novel is set in the first and second decades of the 20th century. The book was an immense success, a nationwide best-seller that was distributed to servicemen overseas. It was also adapted into a popular motion picture, the first feature film directed by Elia Kazan.

8. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey

A novel published by Ken Kesey in 1962, it is set in an Oregon asylum and serves as a study of the institutional process and the human mind. The novel was written in 1959. It was adapted into a Broadway play by Dale Wasserman in 1963, as well as a 1975 film, which won five Academy Awards.

9. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

This novel is a unique example of social realism that portrays the inevitable tragedy of a willful woman, Anna Karenina, who transgresses the conventions of society and follows her own lead.

10. Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham

This novel written in 1915 by W. Somerset Maugham is generally agreed to be his masterpiece and to be strongly autobiographical in nature, although Maugham stated, "This is a novel, not an autobiography; though much in it is autobiographical, more is pure invention." Maugham, who had originally planned to call his novel "Beauty from Ashes," finally settled on a title taken from a section of Spinoza's Ethics.

The descriptions for these books came from Google eBooks and wikipedia.org.