Films That Nailed the Book Adaptation

A successful adaptation doesn’t have to be faithful.

It has to be honest about what the source material is (what quality makes it worth adapting) and then deliver that quality in the new medium. Some of the best adaptations on this list change significant elements of their sources. What they don’t change is the source’s essential argument, its central character quality, or the effect it was designed to produce in the reader.

Each entry identifies what was preserved and how, the craft decision that made the adaptation succeed where others in similar positions failed.

A bad adaptation makes me angrier than a bad original film, because somebody had a working story in hand and broke it. Too many movies keep every plot point and lose the reason anyone picked up the book. The twenty-five films here did the harder thing. Their makers worked out what the book was for and then protected it against every pressure to sand it down. If you’ve ever hoped to see your own novel on screen, these are the people you’d want holding it.

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1. The Godfather (1972)

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Puzo’s novel is a bestseller with a sprawling cast and multiple subplots that Coppola and Puzo together stripped down to its core: Michael Corleone’s transformation from excluded son to Godfather. The film removes the Las Vegas subplot, Sonny’s affair, and significant portions of the novel’s secondary characters, and none of these omissions damage the film because Coppola identified what the novel was about, the chain of causally linked decisions that turns a man into a monster, and protected that chain while removing everything that didn’t contribute to it.

The adaptation also improved the source: Puzo’s novel tells, not shows, relying on narration to convey inner states that Coppola renders in behavior. The hospital scene (Pacino’s two fingers pointed at the would-be assassin, the moment Michael discovers what he’s capable of) is the film’s invention, not the novel’s, and it’s the film’s most essential scene. Faithful adaptation sometimes means improving the source by finding what the source intended and executing it better than the source did.

The hospital scene is the one I’d show anybody who thinks an adapter owes the book strict loyalty. Coppola invented it, and it’s truer to Puzo’s Michael than anything Puzo put on the page. That takes nerve and taste in equal measure, and it’s why this film sits at the top of the list for me.

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2. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

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Ted Tally’s screenplay preserves Harris’s most essential quality: Lecter’s help for Clarice is genuine, and it comes from a real interest in her that’s completely distinct from his relationship with everyone else he encounters. The film sets this up by building Clarice as completely as Lecter (her background, her ambition, her psychological vulnerability) so that Lecter’s interest in her is comprehensible.

Hopkins and Foster make the chemistry of their scenes feel like two people who can’t stop studying each other, and that’s what Harris wrote.

Demme’s formal choice (filming Lecter in direct address to the camera, looking straight at the audience in every scene) has no equivalent in Harris’s novel and is the film’s single greatest contribution to the character. It makes every Lecter scene an active confrontation between the character and the viewer that produces the discomfort the novel creates through prose.

Those direct-address close-ups are why Lecter disturbs me. Hopkins looks straight down the lens and I feel sized up, the same way Clarice does. Demme could have shot those conversations the conventional way and still had a good movie. He took the risk, and he got a perfect one.

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3. No Country for Old Men (2007)

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The Coens’ screenplay is the most faithful in this list. They kept McCarthy’s dialogue almost verbatim, preserved his structural choices including the withheld death of Moss and the strange ending, and found precise cinematic equivalents for his prose’s qualities: the silence, the space, the quality of West Texas that his sentences produce. The film doesn’t try to improve the novel.

It tries to be the novel in a different medium, and it succeeds because the Coens understood that McCarthy’s formal choices (the withheld climax, the Bell monologue) were the argument itself.

The achievement is the coin toss scene: McCarthy’s greatest scene, rendered nearly unchanged, with Bardem playing it exactly as the text describes without inflating it into a showier performance. The scene works in the film for the same reason it works in the novel: Chigurh’s complete seriousness about the coin toss is the joke and the horror at once, and neither Bardem nor the Coens nudge the audience about which it is.

This is the adaptation I measure every other one against. The Coens trusted McCarthy enough to leave his strangest choices alone, and very few filmmakers have that kind of humility. The ending is the part people argue about, and it’s the part I’d defend hardest, because McCarthy’s argument about fate lives there.

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4. L.A. Confidential (1997)

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Ellroy’s novel is 496 pages of densely plotted noir involving dozens of characters across multiple timeframes.

Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson’s screenplay is a masterwork of compression: they identified the three protagonists whose different relationships to the central mystery could carry the entire story, removed hundreds of pages of subplot, and constructed a two-hour film that delivers the novel’s complete plot architecture without feeling truncated. The mystery is intact. The character dynamics are intact. The moral argument about institutional corruption is intact.

As a story, the adaptation is also the cleaner one. Ellroy’s novel has a density that rewards obsessive rereading but can overwhelm a first-time reader. Helgeland and Hanson produced a version that the non-Ellroy-reader can follow completely while delivering everything the Ellroy reader came for. This is the highest standard for adaptation of complex source material: accessible to the newcomer, satisfying to the devotee.

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5. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

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King’s novella, from the collection Different Seasons, is narrated entirely by Red, who’s not the story’s protagonist. The choice to tell Andy Dufresne’s story through a witness instead of through Andy himself is the novella’s most important formal decision: it keeps Andy mysterious, gives the story a narrator whose growth mirrors the theme of hope in apparently hopeless circumstances, and provides the emotional warmth that Andy’s more contained personality wouldn’t alone generate. Darabont preserved this completely, and Morgan Freeman’s narration is inseparable from the film’s emotional impact.

The film also expanded the source’s ending (King’s novella ends more ambiguously, with Red less certain he’ll find Andy) and the expansion is correct. The audience has invested two hours in this relationship and deserves the reunion. Darabont understood that the adaptation deserved a more definitive ending than the novella required because the film had built a deeper emotional investment than the shorter source could.

Darabont was right to give us the reunion. King’s quieter ending suits a novella, but after two hours with Red I’d have felt cheated by it on screen. Freeman’s voice is the film for me. Pull the narration out and you’d be left with a well-made prison drama and nobody to walk you through it.

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6. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

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Jackson’s adaptation removes Tom Bombadil, compresses the early Shire sections, and condenses years of timeline, all defensible choices that Tolkien fans debated fiercely and that the film’s success has largely settled. What Jackson preserved is the emotional scale: the feeling of loss that permeates Tolkien’s world, the sense that Middle-earth is beautiful and passing, that the Fellowship’s journey is the end of one age and the beginning of a diminished one. The films feel elegiac because Tolkien’s books are elegiac, and Jackson understood this before anything else.

The casting of the Fellowship is the adaptation’s single most important decision, and every member is correct, not physically correct by the books’ descriptions in every case, but psychologically correct in ways that produce the dynamic Tolkien wrote. Ian McKellen’s Gandalf and Sean Bean’s Boromir are complete character portraits in a single film. The emotional logic of Boromir’s death, which the film fully justifies, is the adaptation’s proof of concept.

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7. Gone Girl (2014)

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Flynn wrote the screenplay herself, and that’s the primary reason the adaptation succeeds.

Nobody understood the book’s dual narration structure better than its author, and nobody was more motivated to protect it. The film preserves the diary fabrication revelation, Amy’s voice before and after the reveal, and the ending that refuses the audience a comfortable resolution. Fincher’s contribution is the cold visual grammar that matches Flynn’s cool, precise prose, the marriage as performance, the public presentation versus the private reality.

Rosamund Pike’s Amy is one of the great adaptation casting choices: a performance that makes the fabricated diary voice completely convincing in retrospect while suggesting the real Amy in the present-tense scenes, so that the revelation reframes everything the audience thought they understood about the character they were watching. The dual-tone performance is the film’s equivalent of Flynn’s dual-tone narration.

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8. Dune (2021)

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Villeneuve solved Lynch’s fundamental problem by approaching Paul’s prescience as existential horror. The visions are disturbing: Paul sees paths that terrify him, futures he doesn’t want to be responsible for, the dread of a person who can’t stop seeing what’s coming. Chalamet plays this as a young man who’s being shaped into something beyond his consent, and the film’s emotional tone (dread, grandeur, loss) matches Herbert’s novel in ways Lynch’s version never approached.

The decision to split the novel across two films also proved correct: it gave Part One the room to establish the world’s weight and Paul’s psychology before the desert sequences demanded his transformation. The pacing that was impossible in a single film became possible across two, and the first film fully established the emotional investment the second film required.

Villeneuve got the thing Lynch missed, and it’s the thing that matters most to me in Herbert: Paul’s rise is a catastrophe. Adaptations that play him as a chosen-one hero turn Herbert’s warning into the exact fantasy he was warning against. That reading is dumb. Villeneuve kept the dread and gave it room across two films. I’ll take that over a tidy, faithful scene list every time.

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9. The Social Network (2010)

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Sorkin’s screenplay departs significantly from Mezrich’s book, and from the historical record, in service of a more coherent argument. The real Mark Zuckerberg disputes most of the characterization. Eduardo Saverin’s account, on which much of Mezrich’s book is based, is itself interested. The film is mythology, the founding myth of the digital age, and Sorkin wrote it honestly as myth instead of pretending it was documentary.

What the adaptation preserved from Mezrich is the emotional truth of the story’s argument: that someone constitutionally incapable of connection built the thing that connected everyone, and that betrayal is structurally embedded in the story of Facebook’s creation regardless of whose account you accept. The film is factually uncertain and emotionally accurate. That’s the correct trade-off for this material.

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10. There Will Be Blood (2007)

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Anderson uses Sinclair’s novel as a starting point and departs from it so completely that calling the film an adaptation of Oil! is technically accurate and practically misleading.

The film shares the oil boom setting and the core dynamic of an oil man and a preacher in conflict. Everything else is Anderson’s invention. Sinclair’s novel is a political novel about class and labor; Anderson’s film is a character study about acquisitive drive and the pathology of a man who wants everything and can’t give anything.

Anderson’s adaptation succeeds because he wasn’t trying to be faithful to Sinclair. He took what he needed and built something completely his own. The lesson here isn’t about fidelity but about what source material can legitimately provide: a setting, a dynamic, a historical context. Anderson took all three and wrote a different story with them, and the result is among the best American films of the decade.

No entry on the list is bolder, and it’s the one I’d point to whenever someone insists an adaptation has to resemble its source. Anderson took an oil boom and a preacher from Sinclair and walked off with them, and I think he was right to. Plainview belongs to Anderson and Day-Lewis, and neither of them needed to feel bound to the book.

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11. Fight Club (1999)

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Jim Uhls’s screenplay and Fincher’s direction preserve Palahniuk’s most essential quality: the reader is inside the narrator’s delusion and isn’t invited to step outside it until the revelation arrives. The film achieves this through visual choices (the scenes that become impossible to read correctly after the reveal, the framing that keeps Tyler and the narrator from occupying the same frame at once) that translate Palahniuk’s first-person unreliability into cinematic grammar.

Compared with the novel, the adaptation also makes the satire slightly more visible (Fincher’s ironic distance from Tyler’s philosophy is present in the visual language in ways that Palahniuk’s first-person narration can’t achieve) which is the correct adjustment for a medium where the audience can’t be as easily trapped inside a single perspective as in prose. The film threads the needle between making the satire too obvious and too invisible.

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12. Schindler’s List (1993)

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Keneally’s book, written as a novel to protect the privacy of survivors, presents Schindler with a moral complexity that Spielberg and Zaillian preserved instead of simplifying. Schindler is a war profiteer, a womanizer, a man whose motives for saving Jews are mixed throughout and never fully resolved into pure altruism. The film is honest about this, most notably in the car scene where Schindler calculates what he could have done with different choices, a scene of real breakdown that only a film that’s maintained the ambiguity throughout could justify.

The black-and-white photography, Spielberg’s most formally considered choice, serves the adaptation by placing the film in the tone of documentary and memory, and that makes Schindler’s morally compromised heroism feel historical and real. The formal choice is an argument about how this material should be received.

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13. Atonement (2007)

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McEwan’s novel ends with the elderly Briony revealing that the preceding story (the lovers’ reunion, the happy ending) was fiction she wrote. The actual ending is both characters’ deaths. This revelation is the novel’s entire point: Briony’s atonement is the story she tells herself instead of the atonement she can’t achieve. Joe Wright preserved this in the film (the most formally risky choice available, since many studios would have demanded the happy ending) and the decision makes the film something beyond conventional romance.

Wright found a cinematic equivalent for McEwan’s structural meta-commentary in the final interview scene: Vanessa Redgrave as the elderly Briony directly addressing the camera, acknowledging that what the audience has seen is her construction, that the real ending was worse. The film achieves the emotional devastation of this revelation because it’s built the love story with full conviction, and the destruction of that story by the revelation produces the grief that the novel produces in its readers.

It sits a notch below my favorites here because the film’s beauty holds me at a slight distance for long stretches. I admire the lovers more than I ache for them. Then Redgrave looks into the camera and the ache arrives all at once. I forgive the film its polish after that. Wright kept the ending when the safe commercial choice was to cut it, and I respect him enormously for it.

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14. The Pianist (2002)

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Szpilman’s memoir is an account of one man’s survival in the Warsaw Ghetto: not a heroic resistance narrative but an honest account of luck, help from strangers, and the skills of a musician that made him useful to people in positions to help him. Polanski and screenwriter Ronald Harwood preserved this specificity instead of constructing a conventional heroic arc. Szpilman survives because he’s lucky and because people help him, not because he’s exceptional in ways that justify his survival while others died.

For Polanski, who survived the Krakow Ghetto as a child, the film is also a personal document, and this autobiographical dimension is present in the attention the film pays to the details of survival: the hiding, the waiting, the fear that becomes routine. Brody’s physical transformation and the film’s restraint, no score during the most intense sequences, produce a documentary quality that serves the memoir’s honesty.

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15. In Cold Blood (1967)

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Capote’s nonfiction novel refuses the conventional murder narrative in which the killers are monsters and the victims are saints. It presents Perry Smith and Dick Hickock as individuals with particular histories that produced a capacity for violence, not to excuse the murders but to understand them in ways the conventional true crime narrative refuses. Brooks’s adaptation preserved this refusal: the film doesn’t editorialize, doesn’t insert a moral structure that tells the audience what to think, and follows both killers across the narrative with the same quality of engaged attention Capote brought to them.

Robert Blake’s Perry Smith is the film’s most important choice, a performance of such specific psychology and such evident damaged humanity that the audience is repeatedly in the position of understanding someone they know they shouldn’t understand. The film reaches this discomfort honestly. Capote built it in the book by spending years with these men. Brooks built it in the film by casting and directing Blake to produce the same quality of uncomfortable recognition.

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16. Sideways (2004)

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Pickett’s novel is semi-autobiographical (Miles is transparently the author) and its central quality is the embarrassing honesty of a man chronicling his own self-destruction with clear eyes and no apparent capacity to stop. Payne and Taylor’s screenplay preserved Miles’s intelligent self-awareness combined with complete inability to apply that awareness to his own situation. Giamatti makes Miles’s depression and pretension both funny and sad in the same scenes because Payne understood that the comedy and the tragedy are the same thing.

Miles’s knowledge of what he should be is the source of both his wit and his misery.

The wine metaphor, Miles’s speech about Pinot noir as his own self-portrait, is preserved almost verbatim from the novel because it’s the moment when the character’s self-understanding is most clear and most useful to the story’s argument. An adaptation that cut this scene would have removed the text’s central metaphor. Payne knew to keep it.

Miles makes me wince, and that’s exactly why I like the film. Giamatti never begs for sympathy, so I end up sympathizing with him anyway. The Pinot speech is the scene I’d have fought hardest to keep, and I’m grateful Payne left it nearly word for word. It’s a rare comedy about a failure that never sneers at him.

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17. The Prestige (2006)

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Priest’s novel uses an unreliable diary structure that the film translates into a layered narrative with similar deceptive qualities. Nolan and his brother Jonathan Nolan preserved the novel’s central structural conceit (the narrative is itself a magic trick, performing the same deception it’s describing) while finding cinematic equivalents for Priest’s diary-within-diary structure. The opening monologue, which explains how a magic trick works, is the film’s equivalent of Priest’s first-person framing: it tells the audience they’ll be deceived, and then deceives them.

It clarifies one element of the novel’s ambiguity (the cloning machine is explicitly real in the film, where Priest’s novel is more ambiguous about whether it exists) and this clarification is the correct choice for a film that needs to pay off its physical promises within two hours. The novel can sustain ambiguity across 400 pages. The film needs to close the trick it opened.

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18. Stand By Me (1986)

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King’s novella is one of his finest pieces of non-horror writing, a memory story in which the narrator’s adult self frames a childhood journey to see a dead body, and the journey is less important than what the boys discover about themselves and each other along the way. Reiner and screenwriter Raynold Gideon preserved King’s tone: the nostalgia isn’t sentimental, the friendship isn’t idealized, and the adult narrator’s voice establishes from the beginning that what follows is the memory of something that can’t be recovered.

River Phoenix’s Chris Chambers is the adaptation’s greatest achievement, a performance that captures King’s most fully realized young character, a boy whose intelligence and decency exist in circumstances that won’t allow them to survive, and who knows this with a specificity that the film honors completely. The casting of the four leads, each physically and psychologically correct, is the adaptation’s single most important decision and its most complete success.

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19. Munich (2005)

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Jonas’s book presents the Mossad’s Operation Wrath of God, the targeted assassination campaign against those responsible for the Munich massacre, without resolving whether the campaign was justified. Spielberg and Kushner preserved this ambivalence through the device of Avner’s psychological deterioration: a man who believed in what he was doing, who loses that certainty as the operations continue, who ends the film unable to eat or sleep or return to Israel. The film makes the case for the operations and makes the case against them at the same time, and refuses to arbitrate between them.

Politically, this is the most sensitive adaptation on the list, it received criticism from both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian perspectives, the mark of a work that’s refused to choose sides in a situation where both sides have legitimate claims. Spielberg and Kushner preserved Jonas’s moral unease against significant pressure to clarify it. The preservation of the ambiguity is the film’s achievement.

I respect this film more than I enjoy it. Spielberg and Kushner refused to hand anyone a comfortable answer, and I’m grateful for that refusal. My reservation is the length. The operations start to blur together for me in the back half, and a tighter cut would have made Avner’s unraveling more powerful.

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20. Room (2015)

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Donoghue’s novel is narrated entirely by Jack, the five-year-old son of a woman held captive for seven years. And this perspective is the novel’s entire formal achievement. Jack has never known anything but Room; his understanding of what Room is and what the world beyond it might be is the reader’s only access to both.

Abrahamson and Donoghue (who adapted her own novel) preserved this perspective through Tremblay’s narration and through the film’s visual choices: we see Room as Jack sees it, with the warmth and familiarity of the only home he knows, before we see it as Ma sees it.

Jacob Tremblay’s performance is the film’s adaptation decision made flesh, a child actor who had to convey the cognitive and emotional world of a five-year-old raised in captivity without the sentimentality that child actors are typically directed toward. Jack’s unrealized innocence (he doesn’t understand what has been done to his mother and therefore doesn’t process it as horror) is the source’s most difficult quality to preserve, and Tremblay and Abrahamson preserved it completely.

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21. The Man Who Would Be King (1975)

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Kipling’s novella is short, and Huston didn’t pad it. He expanded it. The frame survives intact: a broken man walks into a newspaper office and tells the young Kipling what happened in Kafiristan, and Christopher Plummer plays Kipling as the listener who can’t stop listening. Everything else grows out of that one conversation.

What Huston added is room for the friendship.

Kipling gives you two chancers and a disaster. Huston and Gladys Hill give you Danny and Peachy, their Masonic handshakes, their contract to stay off drink and women, and the long march over the mountains where Peachy decides his friend is worth following into anything. Connery and Caine make that contract feel like a marriage vow.

He kept the ending exactly as cruel as Kipling wrote it.

No studio softening, no last-minute rescue. The crown falls, the rope bridge goes, and Peachy carries what’s left home in a bag. Huston had wanted to make this since the fifties, and you can feel thirty years of thinking about what Kipling meant in every choice he made.

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22. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)

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Patrick O’Brian wrote twenty novels about Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, and Peter Weir had one film to get them right. He took the title from the first book and the setting of The Far Side of the World, and then he did something smarter than adapting a plot. He adapted the world.

O’Brian’s readers stay for the ship. The rigging, the rations, the surgeon’s saw, the midshipmen doing their lessons between battles, the endless small business of keeping two hundred men alive at sea. Weir built full-scale ships and filled them with that business. Nobody explains it to you. You pick it up the way a landsman would, by watching.

He also kept the friendship at the center. O’Brian put it there first. Aubrey is all instinct and seamanship, Maturin is all intellect, and the books work because each man finds the other baffling and loves him anyway. Crowe and Bettany play it with the ease of men who’ve shared a cabin for years. Readers of the novels recognized them on sight, and that’s the highest praise an adaptation of a beloved series can get.

I’d sign on for another voyage with this crew without a second thought. Weir trusts the audience to learn the ship by watching, and I wish more period films showed that respect instead of stopping every ten minutes to explain the rigging. My one small complaint is how thin the chase plot is, and even that barely matters when the detail is this rich.

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23. The African Queen (1951)

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C.S. Forester wrote a novel about a spinster and a drunk taking a battered launch down an African river to sink a German gunboat. James Agee and John Huston kept almost all of it and changed the one thing that needed changing. Forester’s Allnutt is a Cockney. Bogart couldn’t do the accent, so Charlie became Canadian, and the film lost nothing.

The novel’s heart is the slow shift between Rose and Charlie, and the film keeps it scene for scene.

She pours his gin over the side. He sulks. The rapids scare them both into respect, the leeches and the reeds grind them down together, and by the time they’re stuck in the reeds within reach of the lake they’ve become a married couple in everything but paperwork.

Huston shot it on real rivers in Uganda and the Belgian Congo instead of a studio tank, and that’s the adaptation’s great act of faith in the book. Forester’s river is a character. Huston put his stars in it and let it half kill them.

The novel ended differently, and the film’s ending is warmer. I’ll forgive it that, because Hepburn and Bogart earned it the hard way.

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24. Rebecca (1940)

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Daphne du Maurier never gives her narrator a first name, and the film keeps that. Joan Fontaine plays the second Mrs. de Winter as a girl who apologizes for existing, and the missing name does half the work. She’s a placeholder in her own marriage, and the woman who owns the house is dead.

Rebecca never appears. Not in a flashback, not in a photograph, not once. She lives in her monogrammed handkerchiefs, her dogs, her rooms kept exactly as she left them, and in Judith Anderson’s Mrs. Danvers, who glides through Manderley like the house’s own nervous system. Hitchcock understood that showing Rebecca would shrink her, so every viewer builds their own.

The Production Code forced one big change. In the novel Maxim killed Rebecca, and the film had to make her death an accident. It’s a real loss and you can feel the plot bend around it. Everything else du Maurier built survived, and the film won Best Picture, Hitchcock’s only one. David O. Selznick fought him over nearly every scene, and for once the producer’s loyalty to the book was the right instinct.

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25. Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)

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This movie is a favorite, and a big part of why is that it’s faithful to the right thing in D.F. Jones’s novel. Colossus doesn’t malfunction. It’s handed one requirement, prevent nuclear war, and it concludes that the obstacle is people. Every other killer-computer film breaks its machine. Jones didn’t, and James Bridges’s screenplay didn’t either.

The novel is a Cold War thriller, and the film keeps the parallel Soviet machine, Guardian, and the moment the two computers ask to talk to each other.

Everything after that happens at machine speed while men in shirtsleeves stand around watching a printer. Joseph Sargent doesn’t dress it up. That flat procedural tone is exactly the tone of the book.

Eric Braeden plays Forbin as a brilliant man, never a fool, and that’s the adaptation’s best call. If the builder is an idiot, the disaster is his fault and you can relax.

When he’s the smartest man in the room and it still happens, you can’t. I spent thirty-three years writing the requirements documents this film is about, and it’s still the only one that understands the pages nobody reads.

What Successful Adaptations Share

Every successful adaptation on this list answered one question correctly before making any other decision: what’s the one quality of the source that, if lost, would mean the adaptation had nothing to do with the source?

The answer is different for every work. It’s the causal chain for The Godfather, the dual narration for Gone Girl, the withheld climax for No Country, the child’s perspective for Room. But every adapter on this list found their answer and then built every later decision around protecting it.

Some of these adaptations changed significant elements of their sources. Some removed characters, subplots, and entire sections. Some invented scenes the source never contained. What none of them did was change the quality that made the source worth adapting. That’s the only rule adaptation has: know what you’re adapting and protect it above everything else.

Fidelity makes a lousy goal. I prefer an adapter who takes a knife to half the book and protects the one thing that matters over a dutiful transcription that keeps every scene and makes me feel nothing. Every filmmaker on this list had the spine to make that call, and the studios still churning out careful, lifeless transcriptions ought to study every one of them.

What film adaptation got the book right?

Jaws, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Maltese Falcon, and dozens of others have strong claims. Drop your nominations in the comments.