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American Book Review's "100 Best First Lines from Novels"

The American Book Review, founded in 1977, is "an internationally circulated bimonthly print journal that specializes in reviews of frequently neglected published works of fiction, poetry, and literary criticism." In 2006, they chose what they thought were the 100 best first lines from novels. This is a list of those novels.

(found at: http://www.litline.org/ABR/100bestfirstlines.html)

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1. Moby-Dick: or, The Whale
by Herman Melville
  
2. Pride and Prejudice (Bantam Classics)
by Jane Austen
  
3. Gravity's Rainbow
by Thomas Pynchon
  
4. One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  
5. Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
  
6. Anna Karenina (Oprah's Book Club)
by Leo Tolstoy
  
7. Finnegans Wake (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
by James Joyce
  
8. Nineteen Eighty-four (Penguin Modern Classics)
by George Orwell
  
9. A Tale of Two Cities (Penguin Classics)
by Charles Dickens
  
10. Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
  
11.
?
 Miss Lonelyhearts
by Nathanael West
  
12. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain Library)
by Mark Twain
  
13. The Trial
by Franz Kafka
  
14. If on a winter's night a traveler
by Italo Calvino
  
15. Murphy (Beckett, Samuel)
by Samuel Beckett
  
16. The Catcher in the Rye
by J.D. Salinger
  
17. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Classics)
by James Joyce
  
18. The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion (Oxford World's Classics)
by Ford Madox Ford
  
19. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Everyman's Library)
by Laurence Sterne
  
20. David Copperfield (Modern Library Classics)
by Charles Dickens
  
21. Ulysses (Vintage International)
by James Joyce
  
22. Paul Clifford
by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
  
23. The Crying of Lot 49
by Thomas Pynchon
  
24. City of Glass (The New York Trilogy, Vol 1)
by Paul Auster
  
25. The Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner
  
26. Beloved
by Toni Morrison
  
27. Don Quixote (P.S.)
by Miguel de Cervantes
  
28. The Stranger
by Albert Camus
  
29.
?
 Waiting
by Ha Jin
  
30. Neuromancer
by William Gibson
  
31. Notes from Underground
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  
32. The Unnamable (Modern Classics)
by Samuel Beckett
  
33. The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family's Progress (American Literature Series)
by Gertrude Stein
  
34. The End of the Road
by John Barth
  
35. Galatea 2.2: A Novel
by Richard Powers
  
36.
?
 J.R.
by William Gaddis
  
37. Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf
  
38. Slaughterhouse-Five
by KURT VONNEGUT
  
39. Paradise (Oprah's Book Club)
by Toni Morrison
  
40. Swann's Way: In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
by Marcel Proust
  
41.
?
 Chromos
by Felipe Alfau
  
42. The Debut
by Anita Brookner
  
43. Pale Fire
by Vladimir Nabokov
  
44. Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
  
45. Ethan Frome (Signet Classics)
by Edith Wharton
  
46. Alphabetical Africa (New Directions Book)
by Walter Abish
  
47. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Narnia)
by C. S. Lewis
  
48. The Old Man and the Sea
by Ernest Hemingway
  
49. The Crow Road
by Iain Banks
  
50. Middlesex: A Novel
by Jeffrey Eugenides
  
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Created by The Subjected Reader on May 02, 2007.