swap_horiz Jean-Christophe Alternatives

1

Père Goriot

Père Goriot is a significant 19th-century French bildungsroman by Honoré Balzac. The novel follows Eugène de Rastignac’s...

French 19TH Century Ambition Social Class

9.1 Excellent

2

Black Boy

Richard Wright's 1945 autobiographical account of growing up Black under Jim Crow in the South and migrating north, a la...

American 20TH Century Race Autobiographical

9.0 Excellent

3

Ceremony

1977 novel by Leslie Marmon Silko, often cited as the first novel published by a Native American woman, about a Laguna P...

20TH Century Identity Native American Healing

9.0 Excellent

4

Green Henry

Gottfried Keller's Swiss novel (first version 1854–55, revised 1879–80), following a painter's failed ambitions and wide...

Realism 19TH Century Identity Swiss German

8.8 Great

5

The Woman Warrior

1976 memoir-fiction hybrid by Maxine Hong Kingston about growing up Chinese-American in California; won the National Boo...

20TH Century Identity Female Protagonist Kingston

8.8 Great

6

The House on Mango Street

Sandra Cisneros's 1984 American novel-in-vignettes following Chicana teenager Esperanza Cordero's coming-of-age in a Chi...

American 20TH Century Immigration Female Protagonist

8.7 Great

7

Émile

Rousseau's 1762 French philosophical treatise in novel form, outlining a theory of natural education that profoundly inf...

French Education Philosophical Enlightenment

8.6 Great

8

Tonio Kröger

Thomas Mann's 1903 German novella exploring the tension between artistic temperament and bourgeois life through a young...

German Modernist Identity Mann

8.6 Great

9

Lives of Girls and Women

1971 novel-in-stories by Alice Munro, her only full-length novel, following a girl named Del Jordan through adolescence...

Canadian 20TH Century Coming Of Age Female Protagonist

8.4 Great

10

The Way to Rainy Mountain

1969 work by N. Scott Momaday blending personal memoir with Kiowa oral tradition and history, tracing the tribe's migrat...

Heritage 20TH Century Identity Native American

8.4 Great

11

Childhood (Gorky)

First volume of Maxim Gorky's autobiographical trilogy (1913), depicting the author's harsh early years within a struggl...

Russian 20TH Century Autobiographical Poverty

8.3 Great

12

Goodbye, Columbus

1959 debut by Philip Roth comprising a novella and five stories examining Jewish-American identity in New Jersey; the co...

American 20TH Century Identity Jewish American

8.3 Great

13

The Song of the Lark

Willa Cather's 1915 American novel tracing singer Thea Kronborg's artistic coming-of-age from a small Colorado town to o...

American 20TH Century Female Protagonist Artistic Growth

8.2 Great

14

Obasan

1981 novel by Joy Kogawa tracing a Japanese-Canadian woman's memories of her family's forced relocation and internment d...

Canadian 20TH Century War Kogawa

8.2 Great

15

The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man

Thomas Mann's unfinished picaresque novel (published 1954), following the charming swindler Felix Krull's comic self-rei...

German 20TH Century Satirical Picaresque

8.1 Great

16

My Name Is Asher Lev

1972 novel by Chaim Potok following a Brooklyn Hasidic boy whose compulsion to become a painter creates an irreconcilabl...

American 20TH Century Religion Artistic Growth

8.1 Great

17

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

1959 novel by Mordecai Richler about an ambitious young Jewish man in Montreal who pursues wealth and land by any means...

Canadian 20TH Century Identity Ambition

8.1 Great

18

In the World

Second volume of Gorky's autobiographical trilogy (1916), following young Alexei through a series of menial jobs as he s...

Russian 20TH Century Autobiographical Poverty

8.0 Great

19

Studs Lonigan

Naturalist trilogy (1932–35) by James T. Farrell tracing an Irish-American youth's moral deterioration on Chicago's Sout...

American 20TH Century Urban Irish American

8.0 Great

20

Bread and Wine

Ignazio Silone's 1936 Italian novel following a socialist exile who returns to fascist rural Italy disguised as a priest...

Italian 20TH Century Identity Political

7.9 Good