James Joyce stands as one of the leading modernist writers, creating stream-of-conscious novels that tell mundane stories in inventive ways. Joyce's most famous work is Ulysses, published fully in 1922. The story covers one day in the life of Leopold Bloom, while making comparisons to the Greek epic The Odyssey with a variety of verbal and literary flourishes.

Toni Morrison's Beloved opens by discussing the house of the former slave Margaret Garner, saying it was haunted. The novel reveals through flashbacks that Garner killed her child born into slavery before the Civil War instead of having her grow up in bondage. Morrison's book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988.

The Chronicles of Narnia, seven novels published between 1950 and 1956, were an attempt by their author C.S. Lewis to write a fantasy series with an explicitly religious message after he read his friend J.R.R. Tolkien's work The Lord of the Rings. The Chronicles of Narnia follow the Pevensie children, four siblings who find a magical realm in the wardrobe of the house in which they are staying to avoid the German blitz of World War II.

Edith Wharton was one of the premier novelists of the early twentieth century, whose incisive and witty novels described and poked fun at upper class manners. Her 1911 novel Ethan Frome details the inner desires of a prominent New England farmer. Wharton's 1920 novel The Age of Innocence mocks New York's high society, and made Wharton the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize.

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is a roman à clef, in that it's main character Atticus Finch is based on Lee's father and the narrator Scout Finch is based on Harper Lee herself. The book tells the story of the wrongly-accused black laborer Tom Robinson, whose trial forms the crux of the book. Remarkably, the book is Harper Lee's only published novel, but won the Pulitzer Price for Fiction in 1960.

Philip Roth's career spanned the full second half of the twentieth century, and won him numerous awards. Roth's particular style, full of humor, reflections on Jewish life in America, and autobiographical inspiration, singled him out and made him one of America's most successful and critically acclaimed authors. While similar to Roth, John Updike, who wrote Rabbit, Run, found his inspiration in his own Pennsylvanian, Protestant upbringing.

Bernard Malamud's 1952 novel The Natural appears on its surface to be a straightforward novel about a talented baseball player who attempts a comeback after he was shot on the verge of his major league breakthrough at the age of nineteen. The novel, though, deals with themes of morality, mythology, and celebrity. The novel is one of the author's most famous, and was made into a successful film.

Vladimir Nabokov was born in Russia in 1899 in Russia, and was trilingual from an early age. Nabokov had to leave Russia after the Russian Revolution in 1917, and began his literary career in the 1920s writing in Russian in Berlin. He began writing primarily in English with his ninth novel, which he wrote while living in America in 1941. Throughout his life he would write and translate between Russian, English, and French throughout his work.

Sinclair Lewis' novels were usually criticisms of American customs and values, particularly about his native Midwest. Lewis used the fictional state of "Winnemac" as a composite to be able to use a variety of rich characters detached from real people, but clearly reflecting them. Winnemac features in Lewis' Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1926), and Elmer Gantry (1927). Lewis won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930.

Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea is a straightforward narrative about an aging fisherman named Santiago as he attempts to catch a giant marlin in the Florida gulf stream. Hemingway's sparse prose and psychological probings lend a depth to the story that made it immensely successful. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953, and was cited by the committee when Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature.