The 25 Best Children’s Books of All Time

2023-06-02 04:28

The best children’s books of all time include works by J.R.R. Tolkien, Maurice Sendak, Louisa May Alcott, and more.

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.