[Illbay]

Okay, here's a list, in no particular order, of books that I'd rank highly:

Moby Dick (Melville)
For Whom The Bell Tolls (Hemingway)
Watership Down (Adams)
The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
A Study in Scarlet (Conan Doyle)
The Turn of the Screw (James)
The Yearling (Rawlings)
Brave New World (Huxley)
1984 (Orwell)
Slaughterhouse Five (Vonnegut)
USA Trilogy (Dos Pasos)
Lord of the Flies (Golding)
The Age of Innocence (Wharton)
Heart of Darkness (Conrad)
Scoop (Waugh)
The Jungle Book (Kipling)
The Man Who Would Be King (Kipling)
The Call of the Wild (London)
The French Lieutenant's Woman (Fowles)
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (McCullers)
Something Wicked This Way Comes (Bradbury)
I, Claudius (Graves)
Q.B. VII (Uris)

NOTE: This list is by no means exhaustive, and I might be able to think for awhile longer and come up with more. Some I might like better than others, and then next day come back and rearrange the order all over again.

Guess it comes from being "attention deficit," but really, this is a choice the kind of which I can never make.

[PJ-Comix]

I'm not a big Hemingway fan but I did enter a Hemingway writing contest. I lost but I think it is because the folks didn't like to see Hemingway's style parodied as brutally as I did. I wish I could find that entry. It would make you laugh. Basically I substituted a standup comedian facing a nightclub audience for a matador facing the bull.

[luvbach1]

wouldn't argue with most of your picks, and I know you said list was not exhaustive, but to exclude Huck Finn from a list this long must have been an oversight.

[elbucko]

Finally, someone mentioned "Call of the Wild".

Though some moderns think that Jack London is passe`, I don't think so.
One of Americas truly immortal writers.

I even forgive his socialism, for at the time there was no income tax. I don't think he would have liked to pay taxes on book royalties.