The 10 Best Books That Are Over 100 Years Old, Ranked
This article from Collider presents a ranked list of the ten best books that are more than 100 years old, spanning centuries of literature to highlight works the author considers to have stood the test of time. It aims to celebrate novels with lasting influence and relevance, noting that finding century-old books is considerably easier than finding equally old films, since the novel form long predates cinema.
The countdown includes Franz Kafka's *The Trial* (published 1925, written earlier), praised for its psychologically intense, dystopian portrayal of a man on trial without knowing his crime; Mary Shelley's *Frankenstein* (1818), credited as a foundational work of science fiction and horror; Fyodor Dostoevsky's *Crime and Punishment* (1860s), lauded as a proto-psychological thriller with philosophical depth; and F. Scott Fitzgerald's *The Great Gatsby*, noted for its vivid, era-defining portrait of the 1920s. The list mixes recent centenarians with older classics spanning multiple centuries, though the full ranking of all ten titles continues beyond the excerpt provided.
- Collider ranks the ten best books that are over a century old.
- List includes Kafka's *The Trial*, Shelley's *Frankenstein* and Dostoevsky's *Crime and Punishment*.
- Also features Fitzgerald's *The Great Gatsby*, noted for capturing the 1920s.
New here? Start with this
Books written more than a century ago come from very different periods, but some continue to shape how later writers tell stories. The novel had already been developing for centuries before cinema emerged, leaving a much longer history of books to draw from.
The works mentioned range from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, an early science fiction and horror novel, to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which explores a criminal’s thoughts and motives. Franz Kafka’s The Trial follows a man caught in a baffling legal process, while F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby depicts wealth and social life in 1920s America.
The article’s ranking reflects the author’s choices about which books have lasted in readers’ minds and influenced literature. These titles also show how older novels can address questions about power, guilt, ambition and society that remain familiar to modern readers.