ReadingRate · Best Books · 2026

The 100 best books from the United States

The 100 best books from the United States, ranked by literary regard. Difficulty and reading-time estimates where measured.

These 100 books are the highest-scoring eligible works currently in the catalogue for this selection. Ranked by literary regard, the best American books are led by Moby-Dick, Beloved, The Sound and the Fury, The Great Gatsby, and Huckleberry Finn. This list ranks the top American works in ReadingRate's catalogue, with difficulty scores and reading-time estimates for each.

These 100 books are the highest-scoring eligible works currently in the catalogue for this selection. This is a computed ranking ordered by literary regard, with a consistent order for equal scores. Membership follows authors and co-authors, not translators or editors. Catalogue coverage and the historical canon both limit what this list can represent.

About 851 hours for 100 of 100 books with measured lengths. Estimates use a 250-word-per-minute baseline adjusted for each book's difficulty. At two hours a day, about 426 days for those books.

1–10

1. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851, difficulty 7.1/10, 17 hours)
2. The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot (1922, difficulty 9.2/10, 51 min)
3. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929, difficulty 8.0/10, 10 hours)
4. Beloved by Toni Morrison (1988, difficulty 5.8/10, 6.9 hours)
5. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884, difficulty 5.2/10, 7.4 hours)
6. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925, difficulty 5.2/10, 3.4 hours)
7. The Sacred Wood by T. S. Eliot (1920, difficulty 6.7/10, 3.2 hours)
8. The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton (1788, difficulty 3.2/10, 11 hours)
9. The Cantos by Ezra Pound (1970, difficulty 8.7/10, 15 hours)
10. Life Studies by Robert Lowell (1959, difficulty 3.9/10, 3 hours)

11–20

11. A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams (1947, difficulty 6.7/10, 1.9 hours)
12. Collected Poems by Robert Frost (1930, difficulty 6.2/10, 4.7 hours)
13. Collected Poems of W.H. Auden by W.H. Auden (1976, difficulty 4.8/10, 2.3 hours)
14. The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe (1846, difficulty 5.2/10, 33 min)
15. The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe (1958, difficulty 5.1/10, 33 min)
16. Ariel by Sylvia Plath (1965, difficulty 7.6/10, 1.8 hours)
17. Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot (1943, difficulty 7.5/10, 37 min)
18. Self-Reliance and Other Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1841, difficulty 4.4/10, 8 hours)
19. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller (1949, difficulty 6.7/10, 3.2 hours)
20. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926, difficulty 5.6/10, 4.8 hours)

21–30

21. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (1855, difficulty 5.3/10, 8.5 hours)
22. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity by Judith Butler (1990, difficulty 7.8/10, 7.8 hours)
23. The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois (1903, difficulty 6.5/10, 5.3 hours)
24. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930, difficulty 6.7/10, 5 hours)
25. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Fredric Jameson (1991, difficulty 8.4/10, 18 hours)
26. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery (1975, difficulty 6.1/10, 1.1 hours)
27. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969, difficulty 6.3/10, 3.7 hours)
28. Long Day's Journey into Night by Eugene O'Neill (1956, difficulty 5.3/10, 5 hours)
29. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1974, difficulty 8.4/10, 34 hours)
30. The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor (1972, difficulty 5.8/10, 15 hours)

31–40

31. On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957, difficulty 5.4/10, 6.9 hours)
32. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850, difficulty 7.2/10, 7.1 hours)
33. Notes on 'Camp' by Susan Sontag (2018, difficulty 6.2/10, 45 min)
34. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner (1936, difficulty 7.9/10, 14 hours)
35. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (1937, difficulty 3.4/10, 1.6 hours)
36. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977, difficulty 6.8/10, 9.3 hours)
37. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams (1944, difficulty 5.8/10, 2.1 hours)
38. Essays: First and Second Series by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1844, difficulty 5.6/10, 10 hours)
39. A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor (1955, difficulty 4.2/10, 2.8 hours)
40. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1954, difficulty 5.8/10, 18 hours)

41–50

41. Harmonium by Wallace Stevens (1923, difficulty 8.3/10, 1.5 hours)
42. The Lottery by Shirley Jackson (1983, difficulty 5.2/10, 5.5 hours)
43. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt (1980, difficulty 5.5/10, 8.6 hours)
44. The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin (1963, difficulty 5.4/10, 1.6 hours)
45. Walden by Henry David Thoreau (1854, difficulty 5.8/10, 8.3 hours)
46. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (1969, difficulty 6.7/10, 6.4 hours)
47. Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville (1853, difficulty 5.0/10, 56 min)
48. Lilith's Brood by Octavia E. Butler (1989, difficulty 5.8/10, 15 hours)
49. The American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman by F.O. Matthiessen (1941, difficulty 5.7/10, 13 hours)
50. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1953, difficulty 4.2/10, 1.7 hours)

51–60

51. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams (1955, difficulty 6.7/10, 4.6 hours)
52. The New Journalism by Tom Wolfe (1973, difficulty 3.2/10, 4.9 hours)
53. House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday (1969, difficulty 6.1/10, 5 hours)
54. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter (1979, difficulty 7.5/10, 25 hours)
55. Collected Stories by William Faulkner (1951, difficulty 5.9/10, 20 hours)
56. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (1898, difficulty 7.7/10, 4 hours)
57. The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster (1987, difficulty 8.7/10, 11 hours)
58. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (1929, difficulty 4.9/10, 5.9 hours)
59. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1953, difficulty 7.5/10, 16 hours)
60. Joyce's Ulysses by Don Gifford (1974, difficulty 6.6/10, 11 hours)

61–70

61. Montage of a Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes (1951, difficulty 3.8/10, 18 min)
62. The Princeton Companion to Classical Japanese Literature by Earl Miner (1985, difficulty 6.7/10, 14 hours)
63. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939, difficulty 5.5/10, 11 hours)
64. In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway (1925, difficulty 5.8/10, 15 min)
65. The Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom (1973, difficulty 7.7/10, 5.1 hours)
66. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions by Fredric Jameson (2005, difficulty 7.7/10, 12 hours)
67. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951, difficulty 5.8/10, 5.1 hours)
68. This Bridge Called My Back by Cherrie Moraga (1981, difficulty 6.0/10, 18 hours)
69. The Novel of Formation by Jerome Hamilton Buckley (1987, difficulty 7.0/10, 6.5 hours)
70. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism by Vincent Leitch (2001, difficulty 8.3/10, 82 hours)

71–80

71. Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin (1955, difficulty 4.6/10, 3.1 hours)
72. The Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne C. Booth (1961, difficulty 5.9/10, 13 hours)
73. Bodies That Matter by Judith Butler (1993, difficulty 7.1/10, 8.9 hours)
74. Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe (1927, difficulty 4.0/10, 24 min)
75. The Poetry of Du Fu by Stephen Owen (2016, difficulty 3.9/10, 54 hours)
76. Where I Lived, and What I Lived for by Henry David Thoreau (2006, difficulty 6.2/10, 2.3 hours)
77. The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman (2003, difficulty 6.0/10, 2.5 hours)
78. Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg (1956, difficulty 6.9/10, 34 min)
79. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman (1956, difficulty 3.5/10, 5.1 hours)
80. Hiroshima by John Hersey (1946, difficulty 3.5/10, 2.6 hours)

81–90

81. The Hollow Men by T. S. Eliot (1925, difficulty 5.6/10, 8 min)
82. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature by Jonathan Culler (1975, difficulty 6.9/10, 6.5 hours)
83. The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra M. Gilbert (1979, difficulty 6.3/10, 17 hours)
84. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History by Jay Winter (1995, difficulty 5.9/10, 6.3 hours)
85. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (1881, difficulty 7.0/10, 17 hours)
86. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe by Hayden White (1973, difficulty 7.1/10, 10 hours)
87. Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold (1949, difficulty 4.5/10, 3.7 hours)
88. Light in August by William Faulkner (1932, difficulty 6.5/10, 12 hours)
89. Administrative behavior by Herbert Alexander Simon (1947, difficulty 5.5/10, 9.8 hours)
90. The Crucible by Arthur Miller (1953, difficulty 5.9/10, 2.8 hours)

91–100

91. Spatial Form in Modern Literature by Joseph Frank (1945, difficulty 6.6/10, 3.6 hours)
92. Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative by Will Eisner (1996, difficulty 3.7/10, 3.4 hours)
93. Paterson by William Carlos Williams (1963, difficulty 7.9/10, 5.7 hours)
94. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 by Michael McKeon (1987, difficulty 7.1/10, 15 hours)
95. Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric by Barbara Lewalski (1979, difficulty 6.3/10, 8.7 hours)
96. Personae by Ezra Pound (1926, difficulty 7.3/10, 49 min)
97. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937, difficulty 6.3/10, 4.5 hours)
98. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962, difficulty 4.0/10, 6.4 hours)
99. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963, difficulty 4.7/10, 9.1 hours)
100. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966, difficulty 6.5/10, 9.5 hours)