| Men's Milestone Fiction follows on from Lisa Jardine?s research into Women's Watershed Fiction in October 2004, which was commissioned by the Orange as part of the Orange Prize for Fiction and conducted on behalf of BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour.
"The men we interviewed had a tendency towards identifying themselves with angst-ridden books showing intellectual struggle, violence, personal vulnerability, catastrophe and the struggle to rise above circumstance," comments Lisa Jardine. "There was an overwhelming reluctance to place themselves within the domestic sphere, so soppy, indulgent books don't appear."
She continues, "Men were much more reluctant to admit to having a watershed moment and displayed a certain angst about revealing that fiction has any impact on their day-to-day lives."
The Top Five Men's Milestone Fiction Titles
(note: Marquez and Tolkien are in joint fourth place)
1. Albert Camus - The Outsider
2. J.D. Salinger - Catcher in the Rye
3. Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse Five
4e. Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude
4e. J.R.R. Tolkien - The Hobbit
The rest of the list is as follows:
Joseph Conrad – Heart of Darkness
Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment
F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby
Graham Greene – Brighton Rock
Joseph Heller – Catch 22
Nick Hornby – High Fidelity
James Joyce – Ulysees
Franz Kafka – Metamorphosis
Milan Kundera – The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Harper Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird
Vladimir Nabokov – Lolita
George Orwell – 1984
John Steinbeck – The Grapes of Wrath
J.R.R. Tolkien – The Lord of the Rings
Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
rwgray comments: Being "inspired" by Lolita puzzles me. The 400 interviewees all worked in academia, arts, publishing and literary criticism. Has the novel inspired them to write provocative fiction, or merely kept them out of trouble...? | 
