1. Lewis Carroll     刘易斯·卡罗尔 

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) is the pen name of Charles Dodgson. He was an English writer, priest,  mathematician who taught at Oxford University, photographer, humorist and writer of children’s literature. 

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) was immediately successful, a masterpiece which revolutionized children’s literature, giving coherence and logic through wit and humor to unlikely or impossible episodes in which imaginary creatures embody recognizable human characteristics. He is also known for Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1871) and poems, such as The Hunting of the Snark (1876).

2. William Cowper    威廉·柯珀 

William Cowper (1731–1800) was a notable English poet, writer of hymns and letter writer. He wrote gentle, pious, direct poems about everyday rural life and scenes of the countryside. He was one of the forerunners of the Romantic movement, and Coleridge called Cowper “the best modern poet”. He translated Homer’s Greek epics The Odyssey and Iliad into English.

The Grapes of Wrath  《愤怒的葡萄》（约翰·斯坦贝克的长篇小说）

The Grapes of Wrath is a novel published in 1939 and written by John Steinbeck, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.

Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on the Joads, a poor family of sharecroppers driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship, and changes in financial and agricultural industries.   

Due to their nearly hopeless situation, and in part because they were trapped in the Dust Bowl, the Joads set out for California. Along with thousands of other “Okies”, they sought jobs, land, dignity and a future. When preparing to write the novel, Steinbeck wrote: “I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this [the Great Depression and its effects].” He famously said, “I’ve done my damndest to rip a reader’s nerves to rags,” and this work won a large following among the working class due to Steinbeck’s sympathy to the workers’ movement and his accessible prose style.

The Grapes of Wrath is frequently read in American high school and college literature classes due to its historical context and enduring legacy. A celebrated Hollywood film version, starring Henry Fonda and directed by John Ford, was made in 1940.

3. John Steinbeck     约翰·斯坦贝克 

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) was a US novelist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is a well-known, long tragic novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into film in 1940. Other well-known novels include Of Mice and Men (1937), Cannery Row (1945), The Pearl (1947), East of Eden (1952) and an account of a personal rediscovery of America, Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962).

The Fourth Hand  《第四只手》 （约翰·欧文的小说）

The Fourth Hand (2001) is a comic-satirical novel about a TV journalist, Wallingford, whose left hand is seen by millions of viewers to be bitten off by a circus lion. A surgeon gives him a hand transplant (a third hand), but Doris, the wife of the dead donor, seduces Wallingford, who falls in love with her. 

She has his child who doesn’t love him. After a year, his body rejects the transplanted hand — it is removed. But Wallingford still feels the sensation of the missing hand (like a fourth hand). Finally, Doris agrees to marry him. The themes of hands, love and life and death carry the idea of a second chance and the will to change.

4. John Irving                 

约翰·欧文（美国当代作家） 

John Winslow Irving (1942– ) is a US novelist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter who taught English at university. Some of Irving’s novels, such as The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany, have been bestsellers and many have been made into movies. He won the Best Adapted Screenplay Academy Award for 1999 for his script of The Cider House Rules.

Cancer Ward《癌病房》（亚历山大·索尔仁尼琴的长篇小说）        

Cancer Ward is a semi-autobiographical novel by Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, first published in 1967, and banned in the Soviet Union in 1968.

The novel tells the story of a small group of cancer patients in Uzbekistan in 1955, in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union. It explores the moral responsibility — symbolized by the patients’ malignant tumors — of those implicated in the suffering of their fellow citizens during Stalin’s Great Purge, when millions were killed, sent to labour camps, or exiled.    

5. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn    亚历山大·索尔仁尼琴（俄罗斯作家）

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was a Russian writer who was imprisoned in Soviet labour camps in 1945; after eight years, he was exiled to Kazakhstan and not freed until 1956, when he became a teacher. In 1970 

he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His best-known novels were based on his experiences as a prisoner and include: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), Cancer Ward (1968), The Gulag Archipelago (1973). His later works were about Russian history and identity.

For Whom the Bell Tolls  《丧钟为谁而鸣》（欧内斯特·海明威的长篇小说）

For Whom the Bell Tolls is a novel by Ernest Hemingway published in 1940. It tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to a republican guerrilla unit during the Spanish Civil War. As an expert in the use of explosives, he is assigned to blow up a bridge during an attack on the city of Segovia. The novel is regarded as one of Hemingway’s best works, along with The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea, and A Farewell to Arms. 

6. Ernest Hemingway 欧内斯特·海明威

Ernest Miller Hemingway (1899–1961) was an American author and journalist. His distinctive writing style, characterized by economy and understatement, influenced 20th-century fiction, as did his life of adventure and public image. He produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Hemingway’s fiction was successful because the characters he presented exhibited authenticity that resonated with his audience. Many of his works are classics of American literature. 

7. Henry Graham Greene (1904—1991) was a British novelist, short-story writer, playwright, travel writer and essayist. He wrote a number of thrillers (he called them “entertainments”) which dramatize an ambiguous moral dilemma, often revealing guilt, treachery, failure and a theme of pursuit. Greene was also a film critic and all of the following novels have been made into films: Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), The Third Man (1949), The Quiet American (1955), and Our Man in Havana (1958).

Our Man in Havana   《哈瓦那特派员》（格雷厄姆·格林的作品）

Our Man In Havana (1958) is a novel by British author Graham Greene. Certain aspects of the plot, in particular secret military constructions, anticipate the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

The Time Traveler’s Wife 《时间旅行者的妻子》（奥黛丽·尼芬格的小说）

The Time Traveler’s Wife is the debut novel of American author Audrey Niffenegger, published in 2003 – filmed in 2009. It is science fiction and romance best-seller about a man who travels uncontrollably in time to his own history and visits his wife in her childhood, youth and old age. His wife needs to cope with his absences and dangerous experiences while he travels. The story is a metaphor for distance and miscommunication in failed relationships.

The novel won the Exclusive Books Boeke Prize and a British Book Award. 

7. Audrey Niffenegger      奥黛丽·尼芬格         

Audrey Niffenegger (1963– ) is a US writer, artist and academic, who teaches writing to visual artists and shows students how to make books by hand. The Time Traveller’s Wife was her first novel.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen    《到也门钓鲑鱼》（保罗·托迪的小说）

It is a novel by British writer Paul Torday, which is a political satire and comedy about a dull civil servant who becomes involved in a plan to populate the desert with Scottish salmon. Politicians manage the media to spin this as a plan they support in order to divert attention from problems in the Middle East. There are themes of cynicism and belief, and East-West culture clashes.

The book was the winner of the 2007 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic writing and was serialised on BBC Radio 4. It won the Waverton Good Read Award in 2008. 

8. Paul Torday     保罗·托迪

Paul Torday (1946—2013) is a British writer and educated at Pembroke College, Oxford and his first novel, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, was published at the age of 59. Prior to that he was a successful businessman living in Northumberland. The inspiration for the novel stemmed from Torday’s interest in both fly fishing and the Middle East. In 2008 he was nominated for Best Newcomer at the Galaxy British Book Awards.

9. E. M. Forster               E. M.福斯特

Edward Morgan Forster (1879–1970) was a British novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He lived at different periods in Italy, Egypt and India and taught at Cambridge University. His best-known novels include A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910), A Passage to India (1924) which have all been made into films. His writing about reading and writing includes a book of lectures, Aspects of the Novel (1927).

10. Thomas Merton     托马斯·默顿（美国作家、天主教 特拉普派修道士） 

Thomas Merton (1915–1968) was a US Catholic   writer, who was a Trappist monk in Kentucky. He wrote over 70 books, including many essays about Buddhism. His most famous work was his autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain (1948). He had a great deal to say about the meeting of Eastern and Western cultures and wrote many letters 

to writers, poets, scholars and thinkers. He read a lot in English, Latin, French and Spanish and said he always had at least three books which he was reading at any one time.

11.William Blake               威廉·布莱克（英国浪漫主义诗人） 

William Blake (1757–1827) was a British poet, artist and mystic, who was acknowledged as one of the first leading figures of Romantic movement. He made many engravings to illustrate the work of such writers as Virgil, Dante and Chaucer, as well as his own poems. He stressed that imagination was more important than rationalism and materialism of the 18th century and criticized the effects of the industrial revolution in England, but his work was largely disregarded by his peers. He is best known for his poetry in Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794). 

His belief in the oneness of all created things is shown in his much-quoted verse, “To see the world in a grain of sand, / And a heaven in a wild flower; / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, / And eternity in an hour”.

12. Clifton Fadiman    克里夫顿·费迪曼（美国作家、评论家、广播和电视节目主持人）

Clifton Fadiman (1904–1999) was a US writer, radio and TV broadcaster and editor of anthologies. For over 50 years he was an editor and judge for the Book-of-the-Month Club. In 1960 he co-wrote a popular guide to great books for American readers, The Lifetime Reading Plan, which discusses many great authors and their major work.