Ranking |
Name of Novel |
Author(s) |
1 |
THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS |
Henry Adams |
2 |
THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE |
William James |
3 |
UP FROM SLAVERY |
Booker T. Washington |
4 |
A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN |
Virginia Woolf |
5 |
SILENT SPRING |
Rachel Carson |
6 |
SELECTED ESSAYS, 1917-1932 |
T. S. Eliot |
7 |
THE DOUBLE HELIX |
James D. Watson |
8 |
SPEAK, MEMORY |
Vladimir Nabokov |
9 |
THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE |
H. L. Mencken |
10 |
THE GENERAL THEORY OF EMPLOYMENT, INTEREST, AND MONEY |
John Maynard Keynes |
11 |
THE LIVES OF A CELL |
Lewis Thomas |
12 |
THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY |
Frederick Jackson Turner |
13 |
BLACK BOY |
Richard Wright |
14 |
ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL |
E. M. Forster |
15 |
THE CIVIL WAR |
Shelby Foote |
16 |
THE GUNS OF AUGUST |
Barbara Tuchman |
17 |
THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND |
Isaiah Berlin |
18 |
THE NATURE AND DESTINY OF MAN |
Reinhold Niebuhr |
19 |
NOTES OF A NATIVE SON |
James Baldwin |
20 |
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS |
Gertrude Stein |
21 |
THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE |
William Strunk and E. B. White |
22 |
AN AMERICAN DILEMMA |
Gunnar Myrdal |
23 |
PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA |
Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell |
24 |
THE MISMEASURE OF MAN |
Stephen Jay Gould |
25 |
THE MIRROR AND THE LAMP |
Meyer Howard Abrams |
26 |
THE ART OF THE SOLUBLE |
Peter B. Medawar |
27 |
THE ANTS |
Bert Hoelldobler and Edward O. Wilson |
28 |
A THEORY OF JUSTICE |
John Rawls |
29 |
ART AND ILLUSION |
Ernest H. Gombrich |
30 |
THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS |
E. P. Thompson |
31 |
THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK |
W.E.B. Du Bois |
32 |
PRINCIPIA ETHICA |
G. E. Moore |
33 |
PHILOSOPHY AND CIVILIZATION |
John Dewey |
34 |
ON GROWTH AND FORM |
D’Arcy Thompson |
35 |
IDEAS AND OPINIONS |
Albert Einstein |
36 |
THE AGE OF JACKSON |
Arthur Schlesinger by Jr. |
37 |
THE MAKING OF THE ATOMIC BOMB |
Richard Rhodes |
38 |
BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON |
Rebecca West |
39 |
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES |
W. B. Yeats |
40 |
SCIENCE AND CIVILIZATION IN CHINA |
Joseph Needham |
41 |
GOODBYE TO ALL THAT |
Robert Graves |
42 |
HOMAGE TO CATALONIA |
George Orwell |
43 |
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN |
Mark Twain |
44 |
CHILDREN OF CRISIS |
Robert Coles |
45 |
A STUDY OF HISTORY |
Arnold J. Toynbee |
46 |
THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY |
John Kenneth Galbraith |
47 |
PRESENT AT THE CREATION |
Dean Acheson |
48 |
THE GREAT BRIDGE |
David McCullough |
49 |
PATRIOTIC GORE |
Edmund Wilson |
50 |
SAMUEL JOHNSON |
Walter Jackson Bate |
51 |
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X |
Alex Haley and Malcolm X |
52 |
THE RIGHT STUFF |
Tom Wolfe |
53 |
EMINENT VICTORIANS |
Lytton Strache |
54 |
WORKING |
Studs Terkel |
55 |
DARKNESS VISIBLE |
William Styron |
56 |
THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION |
Lionel Trilling |
57 |
THE SECOND WORLD WAR |
Winston Churchill |
58 |
OUT OF AFRICA |
Isak Dinesen |
59 |
JEFFERSON AND HIS TIME |
Dumas Malone |
60 |
IN THE AMERICAN GRAIN |
William Carlos Williams |
61 |
CADILLAC DESERT |
Marc Reisner |
62 |
THE HOUSE OF MORGAN |
Ron Chernow |
63 |
THE SWEET SCIENCE |
A. J. Liebling |
64 |
THE OPEN SOCIETY AND ITS ENEMIES |
Karl Popper |
65 |
THE ART OF MEMORY |
Frances A. Yates |
66 |
RELIGION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM |
R. H. Tawney |
67 |
A PREFACE TO MORALS |
Walter Lippmann |
68 |
THE GATE OF HEAVENLY PEACE |
Jonathan D. Spence |
69 |
THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS |
Thomas S. Kuhn |
70 |
THE STRANGE CAREER OF JIM CROW |
C. Vann Woodward |
71 |
THE RISE OF THE WEST |
William H. McNeill |
72 |
THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS |
Elaine Pagels |
73 |
JAMES JOYCE |
Richard Ellmann |
74 |
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE |
Cecil Woodham-Smith |
75 |
THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN MEMORY |
Paul Fussell |
76 |
THE CITY IN HISTORY |
Lewis Mumford |
77 |
BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM |
James M. McPherson |
78 |
WHY WE CAN’T WAIT |
Martin Luther King by Jr. |
79 |
THE RISE OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT |
Edmund Morris |
80 |
STUDIES IN ICONOLOGY |
Erwin Panofsky |
81 |
THE FACE OF BATTLE |
John Keegan |
82 |
THE STRANGE DEATH OF LIBERAL ENGLAND |
George Dangerfield |
83 |
VERMEER |
Lawrence Gowing |
84 |
A BRIGHT SHINING LIE |
Neil Sheehan |
85 |
WEST WITH THE NIGHT |
Beryl Markham |
86 |
THIS BOY’S LIFE |
Tobias Wolff |
87 |
A MATHEMATICIAN’S APOLOGY |
G. H. Hardy |
88 |
SIX EASY PIECES |
Richard P. Feynman |
89 |
THE GOLDEN BOUGH |
James George Frazer |
90 |
THE POWER BROKER |
Robert A. Caro |
91 |
THE AMERICAN POLITICAL TRADITION |
Richard Hofstadter |
92 |
THE CONTOURS OF AMERICAN HISTORY |
William Appleman Williams |
93 |
THE PROMISE OF AMERICAN LIFE |
Herbert Croly |
94 |
IN COLD BLOOD |
Truman Capote |
95 |
THE JOURNALIST AND THE MURDERER |
Janet Malcolm |
96 |
THE TAMING OF CHANCE |
Ian Hacking |
97 |
OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS |
Anne Lamott |
98 |
MELBOURNE |
Lord David Cecil |
99 |
THE GINGER MAN |
J.P. Donleavy |
100 |
THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS |
Booth Tarkington |