The Best Novels Compendium (Featuring The Great Gatsby, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Sound and the Fury, and A Farewell to Arms)

These four novels remain classics 100 years after they were published. They not only shaped the literature of the 20th century, but they altered our views of life and reality—and what can and cannot be written about. When people talk about the Great American Novel, The Great Gatsby often comes to mind. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic brings us back to the Jazz Age of the 1920s, which combined wealth, frivolity, and happiness wrung from pleasure and self-indulgence. Gatsby, the enigmatic hero, is incredibly rich yet pines away for the one thing he cannot have: the love of the frivolous Daisy Buchanan. In 1928—only 10 years after the end of World War I—Erich Maria Remarque’s classic war novel All Quiet on the Western Front was published in Germany. The book, which went on to sell millions of copies in over 22 languages, centers on the experience of young Paul Baümer, who is coaxed into joining the German army. We follow him as the years of the war wear on—with horror, tragedy, and boredom,