The Seven Literary Wonders Of The World according to the editors of Penguin Books (as recounted in a recent Guardian Unlimited Books review:

Cervantes - Don Quixote Part I
Dante - Hell
Goethe - Faust
Tolstoy - Anna Karenina
Flaubert - Madame Bovary
Virgil - The Aeneid
Homer - The Odyssey

My point of personal pride is that I own most of these books. My point of personal shame is that I've only read some of them (Dante, Homer and parts of Goethe, whose name I still can't say because I'm functionally illiterate). Here are the Top 10 Contenders For the Eighth Literary Wonder:

Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice
Charlotte Brontë - Jane Eyre
John Bunyan - Pilgrim's Progress
Emily Brontë - Wuthering Heights
Geoffrey Chaucer - Canterbury Tales
George Eliot - Middlemarch
James Joyce - Ulysses
John Milton - Paradise Lost
William Shakespeare - Hamlet, King Lear

Here, my shame is considerably less: I've read five of these, but was assigned to read them all in one class or another (except for Pilgrim's Progress, which I've never been able to finish). If anyone cares, Hamlet won--a decision I am more than comfortable with. However: why isn't an American work up yet? You'd think Moby Dick (my personal choice) or maybe The Scarlet Letter would have been considered, given their breadth of effect and impact on American culture. How about The Grapes of Wrath for crying out loud?

They definitely should have considered Huck Finn. Maybe it's because, as Bag says, our measly 300 years of history isn't enough to stack up to the rest of the European, WCP-dominated literary works flooding the market.