While some children’s books have more or less faded into obscurity, others have become such an ingrained part of our cultural consciousness that it’s hard to imagine they could ever stop being popular—like A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, for example, or C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
It’s no surprise that both of those books made the top 10 on a new list of the top 100 greatest children’s books of all time, compiled by BBC Culture. But they didn’t crack the top five, which were, in order, Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Astrid Lundgren’s Pippi Longstocking, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit.
BBC Culture determined the breakdown by asking 177 “critics, authors, and publishing figures” across 56 countries “from Austria to Uzbekistan” to choose the 10 greatest children’s books. More than 1000 different titles were submitted in total, and the 100 top responses made the final list. Nearly three-fourths of those 100 books were originally published in English; and a majority hit shelves between the 1950s and 1970s, which, as BBC Culture points out, may be due to the fact that most of the voters “were born in the 1970s and 1980s.”
The top 25 had only two books published in the 21st century: Shaun Tan’s 2006 graphic novel The Arrival, and I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen (2011). And Roald Dahl was the only author to have more than one book in the top 25: Matilda in 10th place, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 18th. (He had six titles total in the top 100.)
Did your personal favorite kids’ book make the top 25 below? If not, see if it charted on the full list here.
- Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
- Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren
- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
- The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
- The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
- Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne, illustrated by E.H. Shepard
- Charlotte's Web by E.B. White, illustrated by Garth Williams
- Matilda by Roald Dahl, illustrated by Quentin Blake
- Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
- Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen
- Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling
- The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
- The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper
- The Arrival by Shaun Tan
- Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
- Heidi by Johanna Spyri
- Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Clement Hurd
- The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi
- A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
- Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson
- I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen
- The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
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