To see this list as published in the San Francisco Chronicle on November 21, 1999, click here.

1.   Angle of repose by Wallace Stegner
2.   The grapes of wrath by John Steinbeck
3.   Sometimes a great notion by Ken Kesey
4.   The call of the wild by Jack London
5.   The big sleep by Raymond Chandler
6.   Animal dreams : a novel by Barbara Kingsolver
7.   Death comes for the archbishop by Willa Cather
8.   The day of the locust by Nathanael West (or here, in ASCII format)
9.   Blood meridian, or, The evening redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy
10. The Maltese falcon by Dashiell Hammett
11. The Ox-Bow incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
12. English creek by Ivan Doig
13. Even cowgirls get the blues by Tom Robbins
14. Snow falling on cedars by David Guterson
15. On the road by Jack Kerouac
16. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
17. Lonesome Dove : a novel by Larry McMurtry
18. McTeague : a story of San Francisco by Frank Norris
19. My name is Aram by William Saroyan
20. A river runs through it by Norman Maclean
21. The left hand of darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
22. Coyote waits by Tony Hillerman
23. Play it as it lays, a novel by Joan Didion
24. The monkey wrench gang by Edward Abbey
25. Vineland by Thomas Pynchon
26. Earth abides by George K. Stewart
27. Crooked little heart by Anne Lamott
28. The underground man by Ross Macdonald
29. Where I'm calling from : new and selected stories by Raymond Carver
30. The woman warrior : memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston
31. L. A. confidential by James Ellroy
32. The house of the spirits by Isabel Allende
33. Women in their beds : new and selected stories by Gina Berriault
34. Rumors of peace by Ella Leffland
35. The river why by David James Duncan
36. Riders of the purple sage, a novel by Zane Grey
37. Shane by Jack Schaefer
38. Stones for Ibarra by Harriet Doerr
39. The big sky by A. B. Guthrie
40. Trout fishing in America : a novel by Richard Brautigan
41. House made of dawn by N. Scott Momaday
42. The Milagro beanfield war by John Nichols
43. The last tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald
44. Oil! by Upton Sinclair
45. Mariette in ecstasy by Ron Hansen
46. The Virginian, a horseman of the plains by Owen Wister
47. A yellow raft in blue water by Michael Dorris
48. Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
49. Hawaii by James Michener
50. The postman always rings twice by James M. Cain
51. Mrs. Bridge : a novel by Evan S. Connell
52. The Golden Gate : a novel in verse by Vikram Seth
53. Stones from the river by Ursula Hegi
54. Tell me a riddle by Tillie Olsen
55. Rabbit boss by Thomas Sanchez
56. Bless me, Ultima; a novel by Rudolfo A. Anaya
57. The man in the high castle, a novel by Philip K. Dick
58. Laughing Boy by Oliver Lafarge
59. Corpus of Joe Bailey, a novel by Oakley Hall
60. Rose by Martin Cruz Smith
61. Fat city by Leonard Gardner
62. Montana 1948 : a novel by Larry Watson
63. Yellow back radio broke-down by Ishmael Reed
64. Tattoo the wicked cross by Floyd Salas
65. The autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
66. Lying low by Diane Johnson
67. Tales of the city by Armistead Maupin
68. Superior women by Alice Adams
69. The field of vision by Wright Morris
70. Nobody's angel by Thomas McGuane
71. Little big man : a novel by Thomas Berger
72. Budding prospects : a pastoral by T. C. Boyle
73. The Lone Ranger and Tonto fistfight in heaven by Sherman Alexie
74. Angel fire : a novel by Ron Franscell
75. Cowboys are my weakness : stories by Pam Houston
76. Love medicine : a novel by Louise Erdrich
77. Hondo by Louis L'Amour
78. Fools Crow by James Welch
79. The vineyard by Idwal Jones
80. Fathers; a novel in the form of a memoir by Herb Gold
81. The loved ones, an Anglo-American tragedy by Evelyn Waugh
82. Pasó por aquí by Eugene Manlove Rhodes
83. The mistress of spices by Chitra Divakaruni
84. Close range : Wyoming stories by Annie Proulx
85. The color purple : a novel by Alice Walker
86. Rock Springs : stories by Richard Ford
87. A distant trumpet by Paul Horgan
88. Tapping the source by Kem Nunn
89. Ask the dust by John Fante
90. Fup by Jim Dodge
91. The friendly persuasion by Jessamyn West
92. The splendid idle forties; stories of old California by Gertude Atherton
93. The Carmen Miranda memorial flagpole : a novel by Gerald Rosen
94. Dune by Frank Herbert
95. The palace thief by Ethan Canin
96. Confessions of Madame Psyche : memoirs and letters of Mei-li Murrow : a novel by Dorothy Bryant
97. Making history by Carolyn See
98. The living : a novel by Annie Dillard
99. After many a summer dies the swan by Aldous Huxley
100. Johnny got his gun by Dalton Trumbo