A hundred years is a long time for a book to hold anyone’s attention, let alone millions of readers scattered across generations who never lived through the era that produced it. Yet 2026 marks a strange kind of literary anniversary, since a cluster of novels first printed in 1926 have refused to fade the way most books from that decade have. Some are studied in classrooms, some sit on nightstands as comfort reading, and a couple still show up on bestseller lists in new translations or reissues. Here is a look at eight of them, and why they have lasted.
1. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway’s debut novel was published in the United States in October 1926, by Charles Scribner’s Sons. It follows a group of expatriates drifting from Parisian cafes to the bullrings of Spain, and portrays American and British expatriates who travel from Paris to the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona and watch the running of the bulls and the bullfights. The reception at the time was not universally warm, since it received mixed reviews upon publication, but that judgment did not hold up.
Modern critics view it very differently. As one Hemingway biographer put it, the book is now “recognized as Hemingway’s greatest work”. It remains a staple of high school and college syllabi, and secondhand copies still circulate briskly a full century later, a rare feat for a novel this spare and this quietly bleak.
2. Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne
Few books from 1926 have penetrated popular culture as thoroughly as this one. The children’s classic first appears, published by Methuen in London on October 14 of that year. Written by Milne with illustrations by E.H. Shepard, the book follows the endearing and somewhat naive titular character, a teddy bear who resides in the Hundred Acre Wood with his companions Christopher Robin, Piglet, Eeyore, and more.
What keeps it alive isn’t nostalgia alone. The stories in Winnie-the-Pooh are simple, charming, and laced with gentle humor that can appeal to both children and adults, while an overarching narrative binds the stories, resulting in a sense of continuity throughout the book. The character entered the American public domain in 2022, which sparked a fresh wave of adaptations, merchandise, and even a horror-film parody, proof that a hundred-year-old bear still has cultural muscle.
3. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
Christie’s twist-ending mystery is widely considered one of her finest achievements, and it arrived in the same year as Hemingway’s and Milne’s landmark books. Literary critic Oliver Tearle has noted that Christie produced a masterpiece in this 1926 novel with a twist ending that has surprised many readers. It’s a Poirot case, though less famous than the Orient Express story, but no less cleverly built.
The plot itself is classic English village intrigue. The peaceful English village of King’s Abbot is stunned when the widow Ferrars dies from an overdose of Veronal, and not twenty-four hours later, Roger Ackroyd, the man she had planned to marry, is murdered, in a baffling case involving blackmail and death that taxes Hercule Poirot’s little grey cells before he reaches one of the most startling conclusions of his career. Nearly a century on, mystery writers still cite this book when discussing how far an author can push the rules of fair play in detective fiction.
4. The Castle by Franz Kafka
Kafka never lived to see this novel released. It was left unfinished by Kafka in 1922 and not published until 1926, two years after his death, thanks to his friend Max Brod, who defied Kafka’s wish to have his manuscripts destroyed. The story follows a man known only as K. as he tries, endlessly and fruitlessly, to gain access to a mysterious authority that governs a remote village.
It reads today as an eerie forecast of bureaucratic absurdity, and that quality has only grown more relevant with time, not less. University courses on modernism and existentialism still treat it as essential reading alongside The Trial. The unfinished, fragmentary nature of the book, once seen as a flaw, is now often praised as part of its unsettling power.
5. The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery
Best known for Anne of Green Gables, Montgomery published this quieter, more adult novel in the same year as her more famous contemporaries. It was L.M. Montgomery’s fifteenth book, published in September 1926 by McClelland & Stewart and Frederick A. Stokes Company. The story centers on a woman who breaks free from a suffocating family after a shocking medical diagnosis, Twenty-nine-year-old Valancy Stirling, who decides to finally break free and live on her own terms, scandalizing her relatives by moving out and eventually proposing marriage to the mysterious Barney Snaith, before building a new life on a remote island where secrets still linger.
For decades the book was overshadowed by Montgomery’s children’s fiction, but that changed. It has grown in popularity since being republished in 1990, and today it enjoys a devoted readership among adult fans of Montgomery’s work, many of whom discover it well after outgrowing Anne of Green Gables.
6. Soldiers’ Pay by William Faulkner
This was Faulkner’s first published novel, arriving early in the same year as several literary heavyweights. It was the first novel published by the American author William Faulkner, originally published by Boni & Liveright on February 25, 1926. The plot concerns a wounded aviator’s difficult homecoming, since it revolves around the return of a wounded aviator home to a small town in Georgia following the conclusion of the First World War, escorted by a veteran of the war and a widow, with the aviator suffering a traumatic brain injury and left in a state of perpetual silence and blindness.
It is not Faulkner’s best-known novel, and it lacks the Yoknapatawpha setting that defines his later masterpieces. Still, scholars return to it regularly as the starting point of one of American literature’s most influential careers, and it remains in print largely because of that historical weight.
7. Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Warner’s debut novel arrived in 1926 to considerable acclaim and has enjoyed a notable revival in recent decades through reissues from publishers specializing in rediscovered classics. The book follows an unmarried woman who, tired of being treated as a family fixture, moves to a small English village and eventually makes a pact with the devil, a plot twist that was unusually bold for its time. It has since become something of a touchstone in discussions of early feminist fiction, praised for its dry wit and quiet subversiveness.
Its lasting appeal owes a great deal to how modern its central character feels. Readers a hundred years later still recognize Lolly’s frustration with being expected to serve everyone else’s needs before her own, which is likely why the novel keeps finding new audiences through university courses and book clubs alike.
8. Clouds of Witness by Dorothy L. Sayers
Sayers followed her 1923 debut with this second Lord Peter Wimsey mystery in 1926, cementing her place alongside Christie as one of the era’s defining detective novelists. The plot involves Wimsey clearing his own brother of a murder charge, a premise that let Sayers blend courtroom drama with the country-house mystery format readers already loved. Her prose carried more literary ambition than much of the genre at the time, weaving in social commentary about class and gender that still reads sharply today.
Sayers eventually became a major figure in the so-called Golden Age of detective fiction, and this book is often pointed to as the moment her Wimsey series found its stride. Modern reprints keep appearing regularly, a sign that fans of classic British mystery fiction have not lost interest in her puzzles or her wit.
Taken together, these eight books show just how varied 1926 was as a publishing year, spanning modernist despair, English cottage mysteries, a bear in a hundred acre wood, and a woman who strikes a deal with the devil. None of them were guaranteed to last a century when they first appeared on shelves. That they did says something about the specific mix of craft and timing that lets certain stories outrun their own era.
