Non-Fiction Reading List
Autobiographers and Diarists
Angelou I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; Life Doesn’t Frighten Me; All God’s Children Need
Traveling Shoes; Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now
Alexander Fault Lines: A Memoir; The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience; Truth
Tales: Contemporary Stories by Women Writers of India
Boswell The General Correspondence of James Boswell: 1766-1769, 1768-1769
Ortiz-Cofer The Year of Our Revolution: New and Selected Stories and Poems; Woman in Front of the Sun:
On Becoming a Writer; Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood; The Latin Deli: Prose and Poetry; An Island Like You: Stories of the Barrio
Douglass Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave; Escape from Slavery: The
Boyhood of Frederick Douglass in His Own Words
Franklin The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Hellman An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir; Pentimento: A Book of Portraits
Keller Story of My Life
Hong-Kingston The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts; Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake
Book; China Men; Conversations With Maxine Hong Kingston
Lawrence Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph
McCourt Angela’s Ashes; ‘Tis: A Memoir
Newman The Heart of Newman: A Synthesis
Pepys A Pepys Anthology: Passages from the Diary of Samuel Pepys
Rodriguez Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez; Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father
Wright Black Boy; Native Son
Malcolm X The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Yezierska Red Ribbon on a White Horse
Biographers and History Writers
Boswell Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson
Carlyle History of Friedrich II of Prussia; History of Friedrich II Of Prussia Called Frederick The Great (Parts 2 – 5); The Life of Friedrich Schiller; On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History; Past and Present (1909); Sartor Resartus – The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh
Churchill Second World War; Closing the Ring (The Second World War, Vol 5); The Gathering Storm (The Second World War, Vol 1) ; The Great Republic: A History of America; Heroes Of History; The Hinge of Fate (The Second World War, Vol 4); His Father’s Son: The Life Of Randolph Churchill; A History Of The English Speaking Peoples; London To Ladysmith; The Malakand Field Force; Marlborough: His Life And Times; Memoirs of the Second World War; Mr. Brodrick’s Army; My African Journey; My Early Life: A Roving Commission
Deloria, Jr. Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence;
Edel A Bibliography of Henry James
Franklin African Americans and the Living Constitution
Fraser The Wives of Henry VIII; Mary Queen of Scots; Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot; The Cavalier Case; Cool Repentance; Cromwell; Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot; Henry VIII
Gibbon The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Volumes 1-6); The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: An Abridged Version
Haley Malcolm X
Lerner The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy; The Creation of Patriarchy; Black Women in White America: A Documentary History
Macaulay History of England; Lays of Ancient Rome
Morison The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783-1860; The Oxford History of the American People: 1789 Through Reconstruction; Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus; The Battle of the Atlantic, September 1939-May 1943; History of the US Naval Operations in World War II; Breaking the Bismarck’s Barrier: History of the US Naval Operations in World War Two; Christopher Columbus, Mariner; Founding of Harvard College
Parkman The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War After the Conquest of Canada; The Francis Parkman Reader; The Oregon Trail; Francis Parkman and the Plains Indians; Francis Parkman, Historian As Hero: The Formative Years; The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century; La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West; Montcalm and Wolfe: The Riveting Story of the Heroes of the French & Indian War; The Book of Roses
Schama A History of Britain: At the Edge of the World, 3500 B.C.-1603 A.D; The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age; Landscape and Memory; Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution; Dead Certainties; Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands 1780-1813; Rembrandt’s Eyes
Schlesinger A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917 – 1950; The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society; Imperial Presidency
Strachey Biographical Essays; Eminent Victorians
Takaki Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II; A Larger Memory: A History of Our Diversity, With Voices; Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans; A Different Mirror : A History of Multicultural America; From Different Shores: Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America; Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb; In the Heart of Filipino America: Immigrants from the Pacific Isles; Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America; Breaking Silences
Trevelyan The Use Of Poetry In The Expanding Of Consciousness; The Emerging Spiritual World View New Age; The English Revolution 1688-1689; Shortened History of England; American Revolution; Autobiography and Other Essays; Early History of Charles James Fox; England in the Age of Wycliffe; England Under Queen Anne; English Social History: A Survey of Six Centuries from Chaucer to Queen Victoria; Exploration into God; Garibaldi and the Thousand; The Life of John Bright; Lord Grey of the Reform Bill; The Poetry & Philosophy of George Meredith; Select Documents for Queen Anne’s Reign Down to the Union With Scotland, 1702-07; Vision Of The Aquarian Age
Tuchman The Guns of August; March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam; A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
Critics
Allen Off the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary-Busting, Border-Crossing Loose Canons; The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions: With a New Preface by Paula Gunn Allen; As Long As the Rivers Flow: The Stories of Nine Native Americans; Hozho: Walking in Beauty Native American Stories of Inspiration, Humor, and Life.
Agee Agee on Film: Criticism and Comment on the Movies
Anzaldua La frontera / Borderlands; Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras : Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color
Arlen Living Room War (Television Series); Passage to Ararat (Hungry Mind Find); Story of Christianity: A Celebration of 2,000 Years of Faith; The View from Highway 1 : Essays on Television
Arnold Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings; The Apostles Creed
Clark The Nude; Leonardo Da Vinci
Coleridge Biographia Literaria
Croce Writing in the Dark, Dancing in the New Yorker
Emerson Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures
Gates, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism
Hazlitt Offspring of Thought in Solitude; The Plain Speaker: The Key Essays; Selected Writings; The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt; William Hazlitt: The Plain Speaker
hooks Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics; Where We Stand: Class Matters; Teaching to Transgress: Education As the Practice of Freedom; Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism; All About Love: New Visions; Art on My Mind: Visual Politics
Johnson Samuel Johnson: The Major Works
Kael 5001 Nights at the Movies: Expanded for the 90s; Conversations With Pauline Kael; Going Steady: Film Writings 1968-1969
Oates Above the Line: Conversations about the Movies; The Best American Essays of the Century
Pater The Renaissance; The Child in the House: An Imaginary Portrait; Gaston De Latour: The Revised Text (1880-1920)
Postman Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business; Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology; The Disappearance of Childhood; Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future; Conscientious Objections: Stirring Up Trouble About Language, Technology, and Education; The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School; How to Watch TV News; Audible.com: Technopoly; Television and the Teaching of English; Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk: How We Defeat Ourselves by the Way We Talk and What to Do About It; Language in America; Linguistics: A Revolution in Teaching; School Book
Ruskin The Bible of Amiens, Valle Crucis, The Art of Enland, The Pleasurers of England (The Complete Works o John Ruskin – Volume 33)
Santayana The Birth of Reason & Other Essays
Shaw Bernard Shaw on Cinema
Sontag On Photography; Against Interpretation, and Other Essays
West The African-American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Country; The Cornel West Reader; Race Matters
Wilde Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde; Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Stories, Plays, Poems and Essays; Complete Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde
Wilson Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War; The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest; The American Earthquake; Apologies to the Iroquois; Axel’s Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930; The Bit Between My Teeth: A Literary Chronicle of 1950-1965; Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties; The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest; The Devils and Canon Barham: Ten Essays on Poets, Novelists and Monsters; The Duke of Palermo: And Other Plays, with an Open Letter to Mike Nichols; The Edmund Wilson Reader; Europe Without Baedeker: Sketches Among the Ruins of Italy, Greece and England, Together with Notes from a European Diary: 1963-1964; The Fifties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period; The Forties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period; From the Uncollected Edmund Wilson; The Higher Jazz; Israel and the Dead Sea Scrolls
Journalists
Some of the magazines that have published the following journalists include: The New York Times, New Yorker, The Nation, Esquire, Time, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and Forbes. Articles by these journalists can be found by searching in your Library on programs like SIRS, EBSCO, or NewsBank. Many newspapers publish these journalists daily. Get a complete list of newspapers at http://www.newspapers.com/
Agee Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families
Angell Once More Around the Park: A Baseball Reader; Nothing but You: Love Stories from the New Yorker; Summer Game; A Pitcher’s Story: Innings with David Cone; A Baseball Century: The History of the National
Dowd Are Men Necessary?: When Sexes Collide
Drew Whatever It Takes: The Real Struggle for Political Power in America; The Corruption of American Politics: What Went Wrong and Why
Ephron Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women
Fisher, Among Friends; As They Were; From the Journals of M.F.K. Fisher; The Gastronomical Me; How to Cook a Wolf
Fitzgerald Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan and Star Wars and the End of the Cold War; Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam
Flanner Paris Was Yesterday: 1925-1939
Goodman I Know Just What You Mean: The Power of Friendship in Women’s Lives; Value Judgments; As Others See Us: Body Movement and the Art of Successful Communication
Halberstam The Fifties; The Amateurs; The Best American Sports Writing of the Century; The Children; Ho; October 1964; Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made; The Powers That Be; Sports on New York Radio: A Play-By-Play History; Summer of ’49
McPhee Alaska: Images of the Country; Assembling California; Basin and Range; Coming into the Country; Control of Nature; Crofter and the Laird; The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed; Giving Good Weight; Heirs of General Practice; In Suspect Terrain; Irons in the Fire; La Place De La Concorde Suisse; Pieces of the Frame; Pine Barrens; The Ransom of Russian Art; A Sense of Where You Are; Stalking the Wild Asparagus
Mencken A Second Mencken Chrestomathy; Mencken Chrestomathy; Prejudices: A Selection; Heathen Days: 1890-1936
Morris Hong Kong: Epilogue to an Empire; Farewell The Trumpets; Fifty Years of Europe: An Album; Heaven’s Command; Manhattan ’45; Pax Britannica
Remnick King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero; The New Gilded Age: The New Yorker Looks at the Culture of Affluence; The Devil Problem; Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire; Resurrection: The Struggle for a New Russia; Wonderful Town: New York City Stories from the New Yorker
Smith Red Smith on Baseball
Steffens The Shame of the Cities
Theroux Fresh Air Fiend: Travel Writings; The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia; Sir Vidia’s Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents; The Family Arsenal; The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific; The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain; Kowloon Tong; My Other Life; On the Edge of the Great Rift: Three Novels of Africa; Picture Palace The Pillars of Hercules: A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean
Trillin Family Man; The Tummy Trilogy: American Fried/Alice, Let’s Eat/Third Helpings; Messages from My Father
Wolfe The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Political Writers
Arendt Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil; The Origins of Totalitarianism; The Portable Hannah Arendt
Beauvoir All Men Are Mortal; All Said and Done; America Day by Day; The Second Sex; The Mandarins
Buckley, Jr. Amo, Amas, Amat and More: How to Use Latin to Your Own Advantage and to the Astonishment of Others; Brothers No More
Crevecoeur Letters From an American Farmer
Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk; Biography of a Race, 1868-1919
Fuller The Wit & Wisdom of Margaret Fuller Ossoli; Gender Roles, Literary Authority, and Three American Women Writers: Anne Dudley Bradstreet, Mercy Otis Warren, Margaret Fuller Ossoli; The Letters of Margaret Fuller; Margaret Fuller’s New York Journalism: A Biographical Essay and Key Writings by Margaret Fuller;
Galbraith The Cuomo Commission Report; Economics Peace and Laughter
Gilman Herland; The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Writings; The Abridged Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Hamilton The Federalist Papers
Hobbes Leviathan; Behemoth: Or the Long Parliament; A Dialogue Between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England; The Elements of Law Natural and Politic: Human Nature/De Corpore Politico With Three Lives
Jefferson Thomas Jefferson: Writings
Kennan American Diplomacy
King, Jr. The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.; Why We Can’t Wait; A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Lapham Money and Class in America: Notes and Observations on the Civil Religion
Locke The Second Treatise on Civil Government
Machiavelli The Prince
Mill Autobiography; Considerations on Representative Government
Milton Areopagitica
Montagu Letters; Romance Writings; Essays and Poems and Simplicity, a Comedy
More Utopia; The Complete Works of St. Thomas More; The Last Letters of Thomas More
Paine Thomas Paine: Collected Writings; Common Sense; Age of Reason; The Life and Major Writings of Thomas Paine
Postman Amusing Ourselves to Death; Teaching as a Subversive Activity
Elizabeth I “Speech to her Troops,” 1992 AP Language Exam
Saville essay on England’s King Charles II (1630-1685), 1994 AP Language Exam
Schreiner Woman and Labor; The Story of an African Farm
Stevenson “The Cat Bill”
Swift A Modest Proposal and Other Satirical Works; Abolishing Christianity and Other Short Pieces
Tocqueville Democracy in America
Vidal Decline and Fall of the American Empire (The Real Story Series)
Will The Woven Figure: Conservatism and America’s Fabric, 1994-1997
Wills Values Americans Live By
Wollstonecraft Ahead of Her Time: A Sampler of the Life and Thought of Mary Wollstonecraft
Science and Nature Writers
Abbey Desert Solitaire; The Monkey Wrench Gang; The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West; Abbey’s Road: Take the Other; The Best of Outside: The First 20 Years; Beyond The Wall: Essays from the Outside; Black Sun; The Brave Cowboy: An Old Tale in a New Time; Confessions of a Barbarian: Selections from the Journals of Edward Abbey, 1951-1989; Down the River; Fire on the Mountain
Berry A Place on Earth; Jayber Crow; Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition; Another Turn of the Crank: Essays; Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural; The Hidden Wound; Home Economics: Fourteen Essays; Remembering; SeekingAwareness in American Nature Writing; Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays
Bronowski The Ascent of Man; Common Sense of Science; The Identity of Man; Magic Science and Civilization; Sense of the Future: Essays on Natural Philosophy
Carson Silent Spring; Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson; The Sea Around Us; The Sense of Wonder; Under the Sea Wind; The Edge of the Sea
Dillard Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; For the Time Being; The Writing Life; An American Childhood
Ehrlich The Solace of Open Spaces; Islands, the Universe, Home; Cowboy Island: Farewell to a Ranching Legacy; A Blizzard Year: Timmy’s Almanac of Seasons
Eiseley The Immense Journey; The Night Country; The Unexpected Universe; The Firmament of Time; The Immense Journey; The Invisible Pyramid ; Francis Bacon and the Modern Dilemma; Loren Eiseley: A Modern Ishmael; Another Kind of Autumn; Darwin’s Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It; The Innocent Assassins; The Lost Notebooks of Loren Eiseley; Notes of an alchemist
Geertz The Interpretation of Cultures; Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology; Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics; After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist; The Social History of an Indonesian Town; Myth, Symbol and Culture
Gould Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life; The Mismeasure of Man; Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin
Keller Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology; Secret Secrets of Death: Essays on Language; Gender and Science; Reflections on Gender and Science
Barry Lopez Arctic Dreams; Of Wolves and Men
Matthiessen The Snow Leopard
Mead Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years; Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies; And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America; The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe; Continuities in Cultural Evolution; Male and Female: The Classic Study of the Sexes; Soviet Attitudes Toward Authority; The Study of Culture at a Distance
Muir John Muir : Nature Writings: The Story of My Boyhood and Youth; My First Summer in the Sierra; The Mountains of California; Stickeen; Essays
Quammen The Boilerplate Rhino: Nature in the Eye of the Beholder
Thomas Elementary Turkish; The Fragile Species; A General Theory of Love; Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony; The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher; The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher
Thoreau Walden
Weiner The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time
Other titles of interest
Adams The Education of Henry Adams
Albom Tuesdays with Morrie
Allende Paula
Baker Growing Up
Bissinger Friday Night Lights
Bragg All Over But the Shoutin’
Capote In Cold Blood
Chang Life and Death in Shanghai
Chen Colors of the Mountain
Dinesen Out of Africa
Eggers A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Goodwin Wait Till Next Year
Hickham Rocket Boys: A Memoir
James A Little Tour in France
Krakauer Into the Wild; Into Thin Air
Lawrence The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail
McBride The Color of Water
Pirsig Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Suskind A Hope in the Unseen
Walker In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens
Waller Old Songs in a new Café
Washington Up from Slavery
Wiesel Night
Yen Mah Falling Leaves
