The Modern Library produced a list of the 100 greatest
non-fiction English-language works of the century, but, recognizing they
needed to produce a more balanced list than last year's fiction selections,
they employed a different methodology to arrive at the final 100.
This list's title, description, and content copyright
© 1998, Random House Modern Library. All rights reserved.
| # |
TITLE |
AUTHOR |
Amazon Link |
| 1 |
The Education of Henry Adams |
Henry Adams |
Buy |
| 2 |
The Varieties of Religious Experience |
William James |
Buy |
| 3 |
Up from Slavery |
Booker T. Washington |
Buy |
| 4 |
A Room of One's Own |
Virginia Woolf |
Buy |
| 5 |
Silent Spring |
Rachel Carson |
Buy |
| 6 |
Selected Essays, 1917-1932 |
T. S. Eliot |
Buy |
| 7 |
The Double Helix |
James D. Watson |
Buy |
| 8 |
Speak, Memory |
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov |
Buy |
| 9 |
The American Language |
H. L. Mencken |
Buy |
| 10 |
The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money |
John Maynard Keynes |
Buy |
| 11 |
The Lives of a Cell |
Lewis Thomas |
Buy |
| 12 |
The Frontier in American History |
Frederick Jackson Turner |
Buy |
| 13 |
Black Boy |
Richard A. Wright |
Buy |
| 14 |
Aspects of the Novel |
E.M. Forster |
Buy |
| 15 |
The Civil War |
Shelby Foote |
Buy |
| 16 |
The Guns of August |
Barbara W. Tuchman |
Buy |
| 17 |
The Proper Study of Mankind |
Isaiah Berlin |
Buy |
| 18 |
The Nature and Destiny of Man |
Reinhold Niebuhr |
Buy |
| 19 |
Notes of a Native Son |
James Baldwin |
Buy |
| 20 |
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas |
Gertrude Stein |
Buy |
| 21 |
The Elements of Style |
William Strunk, Jr. & E.B. White |
Buy |
| 22 |
An American Dilemma |
Gunnar Myrdal |
Buy |
| 23 |
Principia Mathematica |
Alfred North Whitehead |
Buy |
| 24 |
The Mismeasure of Man |
Stephen Jay Gould |
Buy |
| 25 |
The Mirror and the Lamp |
Meyer Howard Abrams |
Buy |
| 26 |
The Art of the Soluble |
Peter B. Medawar |
Buy |
| 27 |
The Ants |
Bert Holldobler |
Buy |
| 28 |
A Theory of Justice |
John Rawls |
Buy |
| 29 |
Art and Illusion |
Ernest H. Gombrich |
Buy |
| 30 |
The Making of the English Working Class |
E. P. Thompson |
Buy |
| 31 |
The Souls of Black Folk |
W. E. B. Du Bois |
Buy |
| 32 |
Principia Ethica |
G. E. Moore |
Buy |
| 33 |
Philosophy and Civilization |
John Dewey |
Buy |
| 34 |
On Growth and Form |
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson |
Buy |
| 35 |
Ideas and Opinions |
Albert Einstein |
Buy |
| 36 |
The Age of Jackson |
Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr. |
Buy |
| 37 |
The Making of the Atomic Bomb |
Richard Rhodes |
Buy |
| 38 |
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon |
Rebecca West |
Buy |
| 39 |
Autobiographies |
William H. O'Donnell |
Buy |
| 40 |
Science and Civilization in China |
Joseph Needham |
Buy |
| 41 |
Good-Bye to All That |
Robert Graves |
Buy |
| 42 |
Homage to Catalonia |
George Orwell |
Buy |
| 43 |
The Autobiography of Mark Twain |
Mark Twain |
Buy |
| 44 |
Children of Crisis |
Robert Coles |
Buy |
| 45 |
A Study of History |
Arnold J. Toynbee |
Buy |
| 46 |
The Affluent Society |
John Kenneth Galbraith |
Buy |
| 47 |
Present at the Creation |
Dean Acheson |
Buy |
| 48 |
The Great Bridge |
David McCullough |
Buy |
| 49 |
Patriotic Gore |
Edmund Wilson |
Buy |
| 50 |
Samuel Johnson |
Walter Jackson Bate |
Buy |
| 51 |
The Autobiography of Malcolm X |
Malcolm X |
Buy |
| 52 |
The Right Stuff |
Tom Wolfe |
Buy |
| 53 |
Eminent Victorians |
Lytton Strachey |
Buy |
| 54 |
Working |
Studs Terkel |
Buy |
| 55 |
Darkness Visible |
William Styron |
Buy |
| 56 |
The Liberal Imagination |
Lionel Trilling |
Buy |
| 57 |
The Second World War |
Winston S. Churchill |
Buy |
| 58 |
Out of Africa |
Isak Dinesen |
Buy |
| 59 |
Jefferson and His Time |
Dumas Malone |
Buy |
| 60 |
In the American Grain |
William Carlos Williams |
Buy |
| 61 |
Cadillac Desert |
Marc Reisner |
Buy |
| 62 |
The House of Morgan |
Ron Chernow |
Buy |
| 63 |
The Sweet Science |
A. J. Liebling |
Buy |
| 64 |
The Open Society and Its Enemies |
Karl R. Popper |
Buy |
| 65 |
The Art of Memory |
Frances Amelia Yates |
Buy |
| 66 |
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism |
R. H. Tawney |
Buy |
| 67 |
A Preface to Morals |
Walter Lippmann |
Buy |
| 68 |
The Gate of Heavenly Peace |
Jonathan D. Spence |
Buy |
| 69 |
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions |
Thomas S. Kuhn |
Buy |
| 70 |
The Strange Career of Jim Crow |
C. Vann Woodward |
Buy |
| 71 |
The Rise of the West |
William H. McNeill |
Buy |
| 72 |
The Gnostic Gospels |
Elaine Pagels |
Buy |
| 73 |
James Joyce |
Richard Ellmann |
Buy |
| 74 |
Florence Nightingale |
Cecil Woodham-Smith |
Buy |
| 75 |
The Great War and Modern Memory |
Paul Fussell |
Buy |
| 76 |
The City in History |
Lewis Mumford |
Buy |
| 77 |
Battle Cry of Freedom |
James M. McPherson |
Buy |
| 78 |
Why We Can’t Wait |
Martin Luther, Jr. King |
Buy |
| 79 |
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt |
Edmund Morris |
Buy |
| 80 |
Studies in Iconology |
Erwin Panofsky |
Buy |
| 81 |
The Face of Battle |
John Keegan |
Buy |
| 82 |
The Strange Death of Liberal England |
George Dangerfield |
Buy |
| 83 |
Vermeer |
Lawrence Gowing |
Buy |
| 84 |
A Bright Shining Lie |
Neil Sheehan |
Buy |
| 85 |
West with the Night |
Beryl Markham |
Buy |
| 86 |
This Boy’s Life |
Tobias Wolff |
Buy |
| 87 |
A Mathematician's Apology |
G. H. Hardy |
Buy |
| 88 |
Six Easy Pieces |
Robert B. Leighton |
Buy |
| 89 |
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek |
Annie Dillard |
Buy |
| 90 |
The Golden Bough |
James George Frazer |
Buy |
| 91 |
Shadow and Act |
Ralph Ellison |
Buy |
| 92 |
The Power Broker |
Robert A. Caro |
Buy |
| 93 |
The American Political Tradition |
Richard Hofstadter |
Buy |
| 94 |
The Contours of American History |
William Appleman Williams |
Buy |
| 95 |
The Promise of American Life |
Herbert Croly |
Buy |
| 96 |
In Cold Blood |
Truman Capote |
Buy |
| 97 |
The Journalist and the Murderer |
Janet Malcolm |
Buy |
| 98 |
The Taming of Chance |
Ian Hacking |
Buy |
| 99 |
Operating Instructions |
Anne Lamott |
Buy |
| 100 |
Melbourne |
Lord David Cecil |
Buy |
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