William Gass’ Fifty Literary Pillars
In 1991, William Gass prepared a pamphlet entitled A Temple of Texts: Fifty Literary Pillars. Many of the works, of course, were from before our period (Plato and Aristotle head up the list) but quite a few were more modern. Here are the 20th Century ones:
Virginia Woolf: Diaries
Ford Madox Ford: Parade’s End
James Joyce: Finnegan’s Wake
James Joyce: Ulysses
Flann O’Brien: At Swim-Two Birds
Samuel Beckett: How It Is
Samuel Beckett: Ping
José Lezama Lima: Paradiso
Julio Cortázar: Rayuela (Hopscotch)
Jorge Luis Borges: Labyrinths
Thomas Mann: Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain)
Franz Kafka: The Country Doctor and Other Stories
Hermann Broch: Die Schlafwandler (The Sleepwalkers)
Italo Svevo: Confessioni di Zeno (Confessions of Zeno)
Colette: Break of Day
Stéphane Mallarmé: Un Coup de Dés
Ezra Pound: Personae
W. B. Yeats: The Tower
Wallace Stevens: Harmonium
Henry James: The Golden Bowl
Henry James: Notebooks
William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury
Katherine Anne Porter: Pale Horse, Pale Rider
Gertrude Stein: Three Lives
William Gaddis: The Recognitions
John Hawkes: The Lime Twig
John Barth: The Sot-Weed Factor
Italo Calvino: Città invisibili (Invisible Cities)
Rainer Maria Rilke: Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge)
Rainer Maria Rilke: Duino Elegies
Rainer Maria Rilke: Sonnets to Orpheus
Rainer Maria Rilke: Letters