SOURCE: "Is It a List Made by and for the Silent Generation?" in U.S. News & World Report, www.usnews.com, August 3, 1998.

[In the following essay, Mulrine characterizes the Modern Library's list as somewhat dated.]

When Random House's Modern Library announced its list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century last week, it met with youthful protest. "They should have called it 'Writers from the first half of the century who are just like us,'" says Kiran Desai, the 26-year-old author of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard.

Modern Library's panel of one woman and nine men does tilt heavily toward the generation that came of age in the Great Depression or during World War II, such as Shelby Foote, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Gore Vidal. "You see the whiskey-and-typewriter realists of the '30s—like James Farrell's The Studs Lonigan Trilogy," says Michael Bérubé, director...