Twentieth-Century Classics: Free EPUB Editions

The public-domain twentieth century on this site stops in 1929, which is why the list is shorter than the century suggests. Even so, sixty-nine titles appear between Sister Carrie and The Seven Dials Mystery: the Edwardian novel, the first detective series, the science fiction of the pulps, and the American novels of the 1920s.

This is also the shelf where the site’s own production is newest. Wells, Doyle, Christie, Burroughs, Baum and London were writing for magazines and cheap editions, and their books are the ones most often read on phones today, which is why the shelf carries the heaviest download traffic on the site.

Every twentieth-century title on this shelf

Sixty-nine titles published 1900–1929, oldest first.

Year	Title	Author	Form	Words	Reading time
1900	Sister Carrie	Theodore Dreiser	Novel	156,358	9 h
1900	The Wonderful Wizard of Oz	L. Frank Baum	Novel	39,409	2 h
1901	Up from Slavery	Booker T. Washington	Autobiography	73,000	4 h
1902	Just So Stories	Rudyard Kipling	Novel	34,000	2 h
1902	The Hound of the Baskervilles	Arthur Conan Doyle	Novel	59,000	3 h
1902	The Monkey’s Paw	W. W. Jacobs	Novel	4,033	1 h
1902	The Varieties of Religious Experience	William James	Lectures	154,000	9 h
1903	The Call of the Wild	Jack London	Novel	32,000	2 h
1903	The Souls of Black Folk	W. E. B. Du Bois	Essays	69,000	4 h
1903	The Story of My Life	Helen Keller	Autobiography	134,000	7 h
1904	The Food of the Gods	H. G. Wells	Novel	74,000	4 h
1904	The Sea-Wolf	Jack London	Novel	107,000	6 h
1905	A Little Princess	Frances Hodgson Burnett	Novel	67,000	4 h
1905	The Gift of the Magi	O. Henry	Novel	2,130	1 h
1905	The House of Mirth	Edith Wharton	Novel	129,036	7 h
1905	The Return of Sherlock Holmes	Arthur Conan Doyle	Novel	112,155	6 h
1905	The Scarlet Pimpernel	Baroness Orczy	Novel	86,000	5 h
1906	The Jungle	Upton Sinclair	Novel	149,277	8 h
1906	The Railway Children	E. Nesbit	Novel	60,000	3 h
1906	White Fang	Jack London	Novel	75,212	4 h
1907	Pragmatism	William James	Lectures	52,000	3 h
1907	The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar	Maurice Leblanc	Novel	54,000	3 h
1907	The Mystery of the Yellow Room	Gaston Leroux	Novel	73,826	4 h
1908	A Room with a View	E. M. Forster	Novel	65,000	4 h
1908	Anne of Green Gables	L. M. Montgomery	Novel	102,000	6 h
1908	The Green Mummy	Fergus Hume	Novel	88,400	5 h
1908	The Man Who Was Thursday	G. K. Chesterton	Novel	58,000	3 h
1908	The Wind in the Willows	Kenneth Grahame	Novel	61,472	3 h
1910	The Phantom of the Opera	Gaston Leroux	Novel	84,181	5 h
1911	Ethan Frome	Edith Wharton	Novel	34,619	2 h
1911	Peter and Wendy	J. M. Barrie	Novel	47,000	3 h
1911	The Innocence of Father Brown	G. K. Chesterton	Novel	78,220	4 h
1911	The Secret Garden	Frances Hodgson Burnett	Novel	81,000	5 h
1912	A Princess of Mars	Edgar Rice Burroughs	Novel	67,255	4 h
1912	Aesop’s Fables	Aesop	Novel	40,000	2 h
1912	The Lost World	Arthur Conan Doyle	Novel	80,000	4 h
1912	The Problems of Philosophy	Bertrand Russell	Treatise	45,900	3 h
1914	Dubliners	James Joyce	Novel	70,592	4 h
1914	The Wisdom of Father Brown	G. K. Chesterton	Novel	71,782	4 h
1915	Metamorphosis	Franz Kafka	Novel	21,982	1 h
1915	The Thirty-Nine Steps	John Buchan	Novel	44,023	2 h
1915	The Valley of Fear	Arthur Conan Doyle	Novel	57,665	3 h
1916	A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man	James Joyce	Novel	86,000	5 h
1916	Democracy and Education	John Dewey	Treatise	135,000	8 h
1916	Pygmalion	George Bernard Shaw	Play	36,598	2 h
1920	The Age of Innocence	Edith Wharton	Novel	101,000	6 h
1920	The Mysterious Affair at Styles	Agatha Christie	Novel	59,580	3 h
1920	Thuvia, Maid of Mars	Edgar Rice Burroughs	Novel	46,000	3 h
1922	Myths and Legends of China	E. T. C. Werner	Mythology	135,969	8 h
1922	Siddhartha	Hermann Hesse	Novel	42,192	2 h
1922	The Enchanted April	Elizabeth von Arnim	Novel	78,345	4 h
1922	The Garden Party and Other Stories	Katherine Mansfield	Novel	57,000	3 h
1922	The Secret Adversary	Agatha Christie	Novel	78,347	4 h
1922	Ulysses	James Joyce	Novel	261,433	15 h
1923	The Murder on the Links	Agatha Christie	Novel	64,793	4 h
1923	The Prophet	Kahlil Gibran	Prose poems	12,447	1 h
1924	The House of the Arrow	A. E. W. Mason	Novel	95,071	5 h
1924	The Man in the Brown Suit	Agatha Christie	Novel	75,020	4 h
1925	Mrs. Dalloway	Virginia Woolf	Novel	64,000	4 h
1925	The Great Gatsby	F. Scott Fitzgerald	Novel	48,257	3 h
1925	The Secret of Chimneys	Agatha Christie	Novel	73,000	4 h
1925	The Trial	Franz Kafka	Novel	86,874	5 h
1926	The Blue Castle	L. M. Montgomery	Novel	69,000	4 h
1926	The Murder of Roger Ackroyd	Agatha Christie	Novel	70,248	4 h
1926	Winnie-the-Pooh	A. A. Milne	Novel	21,382	1 h
1927	The Big Four	Agatha Christie	Novel	55,601	3 h
1928	The Mystery of the Blue Train	Agatha Christie	Novel	70,132	4 h
1929	A Farewell to Arms	Ernest Hemingway	Novel	88,000	5 h
1929	The Seven Dials Mystery	Agatha Christie	Novel	65,307	4 h

How this list was made

A title is listed when its page records a publication year from 1900 to 1934. That upper bound is the public-domain line in the United States at the time of writing, so the shelf will grow each January.

Word counts are for the editions here, which for serial novels means the book version rather than the magazine text.

The shelf runs from Sister Carrie (1900) to The Seven Dials Mystery (1929), sixty-nine titles by forty-four authors and 5,072,123 words in total. fifty-nine of them are novels; the rest are plays, memoirs, lectures and treatises, which is roughly what the first third of the century looked like before the novel absorbed everything. The shortest is The Gift of the Magi at 2,130 words.

Questions readers ask

Why does it stop at 1934?

Because 2029’s public domain line covers works published in 1933, and the site’s editions lag a year behind that. The list is rebuilt when titles enter the public domain.

Where should I start?

The Great Gatsby, at 47,000 words, or The Time Machine at 32,000 if you want to go back to 1895. For a series, A Study in Scarlet is the beginning of Holmes.

Is this the science fiction shelf?

Partly. Wells and Burroughs are here, and the science fiction hub gathers them with Verne and the later novels.

Part of all themed reading lists. Nearby shelves: Russian Classics · French Classics · American Classics · authors A–Z · word counts and reading times.