E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

I have been working with a brilliant group of MLitt creative writing students at the University of Glasgow, one of the world's leading universities.  It became clear to me that their touchstones were not always mine - but sometimes, they very much were: some books are perennial, are loved, despite, or even because of, their canonical status.  Setting aside a few gems like Brideshead Revisited , Fiesta , and The Great Gatsby , which are too well known, arguably too merely literary, to be just Cult classics, here are the 100 (or 101 since there are two Outsiders ) books of the last 100 years that every budding writer will want to read before they turn 21 - and are likely to read anyway, whether we like it or not. To have started earlier, with Against Nature , or Heart of Darkness , would be to miss the point that the cultural phenomenon of the Cult book basically starts with the emergence of the teenager in the 50s and 60s, which is why Catcher in the Rye remains the quintess...