My wife stumbled upon a marvellous feature buried in theTimesarchives " “ the Top 100 novels , withlinks to their original reviews(where available ) . I love stuff like this . So here are a few more excerption .
The Great Gatsby(Reviewed by Edwin Clark , April 19 , 1925)“The philosopher of the flapper has escaped the mordant , but he has turned grave . A queer book , a mystical , glamourous story of today . It takes a deeper cut at biography than hitherto has been essayed by Mr. Fitzgerald . He writes well – he always has – for he writes naturally , and his sensation of chassis is becoming perfected . "
1984(Reviewed by Mark Schorer , June 12 , 1949 )
" It has always seemed to the present writer that the fourth book ofGulliver ’s Travelsis a great work of static art ; no less , it would seem to him that George Orwell ’s novel novel , Nineteen Eighty - four , is a great work of kinetic art . This may mean that its illustriousness is only prompt , its powerfulness for us alone , now , in this generation , this decennary , this year , that it is destine to be the instrument of prison term . Nevertheless it is probable that no other work of this genesis has made us trust freedom more earnestly or loathe tyranny with such fullness . "
The Grapes of Wrath(Reviewed by Peter Monro Jack , April 16 , 1939 )
" There are a few novelists pen as well as Steinbeck and perhaps a very few who write better ; but it is most interesting to note how very much alike they are all write : Hemingway , Caldwell , Faulkner , Dos Passos in the novel , and MacLeish in poetry are those whom we easily think of in their law of similarity of theme and panache . Each is writing stories and scenarios of America with a curious and sudden intensity , almost as if they had never seen or understood it before . They are appear at it again with rotatory eyes . Stirred like every other man in the street with newsworthiness of foreign persecution , they turn to their own land to find seeded player of the same destructive hatred . Their theme of pity and anger , their vogue of sentimental lament and scarifying denouncement may fare to seem representative of our metre . "
research the othershere .
