Artful Dodgers from Oliver Twist and Richard Hannay to Jason Bourne.

21 great adventure novels of the Sixties!

A high-school campus novel, set in Boston in the 1970s.

She wrote the new millennium’s first perfect novel.

One of the first mutants! A forgotten 1927 classic.

A consciously anonymous persona yet a conspicuously anomalous presence.

Atavistic epics, from King Solomon’s Mines to King Kull!

Reluctant Badass adventures, from Achilles in his tent to Agent K.

Self-liberated avengers! From Captain Nemo to Leeloo.

Driven by a desire to create music that white bandleaders couldn’t play.

Secret identity adventure, from Scarlet Pimpernel to Banksy and Borat.

A teenage runaway who happened to be possessed of genius.

21 great adventure novels of the Fifties!

Theorist of the “temporary autonomous zone.”

A high-school campus novel, set in Boston in the 1970s.

She scaled mountains wearing forbidden trousers.

One of history’s great noticers.

One of the first mutants! A forgotten 1927 classic.

He fit emotive, supple stories into the short, rhythmic space that is a song.

The great striker of sentences between Joyce and Nabokov.

“A fool! A fool! Who’ll barter my reason for his folly?”

The picaresque: From Candide to The Thirty-Nine Steps.

Meet Fu Manchu, in the 1912 story that introduced him!

His antihero, Pechorin, would kill on reality TV.