| 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 |