The Modern Library's 100 Best Nonfiction: The Board's List

Given by Modern Library

100 Works 245,046 Books 3,349 Reviews 4.1

The goal of the "100 Best" project was to get people talking about great books. We succeeded beyond our wildest imaginings -- more than 400,000 avid readers rushed online to cast votes for their

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The readers' poll for the best nonfiction published in the English language since 1900 opened on April 29, 1999 and closed on September 30, 1999 with a total of 194,829 votes cast.

This list of 100 nonfiction books was drawn up by the editorial board of Modern Library. See also The Readers' List. show less

WorkOrder Label
The Education of Henry Adams (1907) by Henry Adams
1
The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) by William James
2
Up from Slavery (1901) by Booker T. Washington
3
A Room of One's Own (1929) by Virginia Woolf
4
Silent Spring (1962) by Rachel Carson
5
Selected Essays (1932) by T. S. Eliot
6
The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (1969) by James D. Watson
7
Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1947) by Vladimir Nabokov
8
The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States (1936) by H. L. Mencken
9
The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936) by John Maynard Keynes
10
The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974) by Lewis Thomas
11
The Frontier in American History (1920) by Frederick Jackson Turner
12
Black Boy (1945) by Richard Wright
13
Aspects of the Novel (1927) by E. M. Forster
14
The Civil War: A Narrative (1958) by Shelby Foote
15
The Guns of August (1962) by Barbara W. Tuchman
16
The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (1997) by Isaiah Berlin
17
The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation (1943) by Reinhold Niebuhr
18
Notes of a Native Son (1955) by James Baldwin
19
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) by Gertrude Stein
20
The Elements of Style (1959) by William Jr. Strunk
21
An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944) by Gunnar Myrdal
22
Principia Mathematica (3-volume set) (1927) by Alfred North Whitehead
23
The Mismeasure of Man (1981) by Stephen Jay Gould
24
The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953) by Meyer H. Abrams
25
The Art of the Soluble: Creativity and Originality in Science (1960) by P. B. Medawar
26
The Ants (1990) by Bert Hölldobler
27
A Theory of Justice (1971) by John Rawls
28
Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960) by E. H. Gombrich
29
The Making of the English Working Class (1963) by E. P. Thompson
30
The Souls of Black Folk (1903) by W. E. B. Du Bois
31
Principia Ethica (1903) by G. E. Moore
32
The Philosophy of Civilization (1946) by Albert Schweitzer
33
On Growth and Form (1917) by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
34
Ideas and Opinions (1934) by Albert Einstein
35
The Age of Jackson (1945) by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
36
The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986) by Richard Rhodes
37
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia (1941) by Rebecca West
38
Autobiographies (1927) by William Butler Yeats
39
Science and civilization in China by Joseph Needham
40
Good-Bye to All That: An Autobiography (1929) by Robert Graves
41
Homage to Catalonia (1938) by George Orwell
42
The Autobiography of Mark Twain (1959) by Mark Twain
43
Children of Crisis: A Study of Courage and Fear (1967) by Robert Coles
44
A Study of History, 1: Introduction; The Geneses of Civilizations, Part 1 (1933) by Arnold J. Toynbee
45
The Affluent Society (1958) by John Kenneth Galbraith
46
Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969) by Dean Acheson
47
The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge (1972) by David McCullough
48
Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962) by Edmund Wilson
49
Samuel Johnson (1977) by W. Jackson Bate
50
The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) by Malcolm X
51
The Right Stuff (1979) by Tom Wolfe
52
Eminent Victorians (1918) by Lytton Strachey
53
Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974) by Studs Terkel
54
Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990) by William Styron
55
The Liberal Imagination (1950) by Lionel Trilling
56
The Second World War {complete} (1950) by Winston S. Churchill
57
Out of Africa (1937) by Isak Dinesen
58
Jefferson and His Time (6 Volume Set) (1948) by Dumas Malone
59
In the American Grain (1925) by William Carlos Williams
60
Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (1986) by Marc Reisner
61
The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance (1990) by Ron Chernow
62
The Sweet Science (1987) by A. J. Liebling
63
The Open Society and Its Enemies (1962) by Karl Popper
64
The Art of Memory (1966) by Frances A. Yates
65
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: A Historical Study (1926) by R. H. Tawney
66
A Preface to Morals (1929) by Walter Lippmann
67
The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution (1981) by Jonathan D. Spence
68
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) by Thomas S. Kuhn
69
The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955) by C. Vann Woodward
70
The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (1963) by William H. McNeill
71
The Gnostic Gospels (1979) by Elaine Pagels
72
James Joyce (1959) by Richard Ellmann
73
Florence Nightingale (1951) by Cecil Woodham-Smith
74
The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) by Paul Fussell
75
The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (1961) by Lewis Mumford
76
Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988) by James M. McPherson
77
Why We Can't Wait (1964) by Martin Luther King, Jr.
78
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979) by Edmund Morris
79
Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (1939) by Erwin Panofsky
80
The Face of Battle (1976) by John Keegan
81
The Strange Death of Liberal England (1935) by George Dangerfield
82
Vermeer (Barnes & Noble Art Series) (1961) by Lawrence Gowing
83
A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (1988) by Neil Sheehan
84
West with the Night (1942) by Beryl Markham
85
This Boy's Life (1989) by Tobias Wolff
86
A Mathematician's Apology (1940) by G. H. Hardy
87
Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher (1963) by Richard P. Feynman
88
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) by Annie Dillard
89
The Golden Bough (1890) by James George Frazer
90
Shadow and Act (1964) by Ralph Ellison
91
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974) by Robert A. Caro
92
The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made it (1948) by Richard Hofstadter
93
The Contours of American History (1966) by William Appleman Williams
94
The Promise of American Life (1964) by Herbert Croly
95
In Cold Blood (1965) by Truman Capote
96
The Journalist and the Murderer (1990) by Janet Malcolm
97
The Taming of Chance (1990) by Ian Hacking
98
Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year (1993) by Anne Lamott
99
Melbourne (1954) by David Cecil
100

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