Monday, June 22, 2020

The Top 100 Non-Fiction Books of All Time

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First posted 5/26/2018; updated 6/21/2020.

Non-Fiction:

Top 100 All-Time

These are the best non-fiction books of all-time, according to an aggregate of more than 30 lists focused specifically on non-fiction books and another 60+ general book lists.

  1. Various writers The Holy Bible: King James Version (1451)
  2. Mao Zedong Quotations from Mao Tse-tung (1966)
  3. Anne Frank The Diary of a Young Girl (aka The Diary of Anne Frank) (1947)
  4. Muhammad Quran (632 A.D.)
  5. Niccolo Machiavelli The Prince (1532)
  6. Charles Darwin The Origin of Species (1859)
  7. Henry David Thoreau Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854)
  8. Truman Capote In Cold Blood (1966)
  9. Plato The Republic (380 B.C.)
  10. Stephen Hawking A Brief History of Time (1988)

  11. Rachel Carson Silent Spring (1962)
  12. Sigmund Freud The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
  13. Alex Haley & Malcolm X The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)
  14. Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels The Communist Manifesto (1888)
  15. Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex (1948)
  16. Elie Weisel Night (Un di Velt Hot Geshvign) (1958)
  17. Virginia Woolf A Room of One’s Own (1929)
  18. Maya Angelou I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970)
  19. Hunter S. Thompson Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)
  20. St. Augustine of Hippo The Confessions (400 A.D.)

  21. Wei Jiangong (editor) Xinhua Zidian (Xinhua Dictionary) (1953)
  22. William Strunk & E.B. White The Elements of Style (1959)
  23. Adam Smith Wealth of Nations (1776)
  24. Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936)
  25. James D. Watson The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (1968)
  26. Michel de Montaigne Essays (1580)
  27. Sun Tzu The Art of War (5th century B.C.)
  28. John Maynard Kenyes General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936)
  29. Robert Pirsig Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
  30. Marcus Aurelius Meditations (167 A.D.)

  31. Thucydides The History of the Peloponnesian War (5th century B.C.)
  32. Herodotus The Histories (5th century B.C.)
  33. Jean-Jacques Rousseau Confessions (1781)
  34. Henry Adams The Education of Henry Adams (1918)
  35. George Orwell Homage to Catalonia (1938)
  36. Dr. Benjamin Spock The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946)
  37. W.E.B. DuBois The Souls of Black Folks (1903)
  38. Thomas Paine The Rights of Man (1791)
  39. Betty Friedan The Feminine Mystique (1963)
  40. Albert Einstein Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (1916)

  41. Thomas S. Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
  42. Thomas Hobbes Leviathan (1651)
  43. Confucious The Analects (4th century B.C.)
  44. Howard Zinn A People's History of the United States (2005)
  45. Edward Gibbon The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1787)
  46. Frederick Douglass Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845)
  47. Robert Graves Goodbye to All That (1929)
  48. Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America (1840)
  49. Mary Wollstonecraft A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792)
  50. Karl Marx Das Kapital (Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1: The Process of Production of Capital) (1867)

  51. Frank McCourt Angela’s Ashes (1996)
  52. Thomas Paine Common Sense (1776)
  53. Edward Said Orientalism (1978)
  54. Tom Wolfe The Right Stuff (1979)
  55. William James The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
  56. Viktor Frankl Man’s Search for Meaning (1946)
  57. Publius (Alexander Hamilton/James Madison/John Jay) (edited by Clinton Rossiter) The Federalist Papers (1788)
  58. Friedrich Nietzsche Thus Spake Zarathustra (1885)
  59. William James Pragmatism (1907)
  60. Oxford University Press The Oxford English Dictionary (1948)

  61. Noah Webster Webster’s Dictionary (1783)
  62. Vladimir Nabokov Speak, Memory (1951)
  63. Lao Tzu The Way and Its Power (Tao Te Ching) (4th century B.C.)
  64. Jean-Paul Sartre Being and Nothingness (1943)
  65. John Stewart Mill On Liberty (1859)
  66. Stephen R. Covey 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989)
  67. Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene (2006)
  68. Primo Levi If This Is a Man (1947)
  69. Napoleon Hill Think and Grow Rich (1937)
  70. Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (2005)

  71. Mark C. Young The Guinness Book of Records (1955)
  72. John Hersey Hiroshima (1946)
  73. Michael Herr Dispatches (1977)
  74. John Kenneth Galbraith The Affluent Society (1958)
  75. James Boswell The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)
  76. James Agee & Walker Evans Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941)
  77. René DescartesDiscourse on Method (Discours sur la Méthode) (1637)
  78. Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)
  79. Henry David Thoreau Civil Disobedience (1849)
  80. Euclid Euclid’s Elements (280 B.C.)

  81. Dee Brown Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970)
  82. Paul Kalanithi When Breath Becomes Air (2016)
  83. Winston Churchill The Second World War (series: 1948-1953)
  84. Thomas Cranmer The Book of Common Prayer (1549)
  85. Joseph Smith The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ (1830)
  86. Galileo Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632)
  87. Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays (1841)
  88. Shelby Foote The Civil War (1974)
  89. Art Spiegelman Maus: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History (1980)
  90. Mitch Albom Tuesdays with Morrie (1997)

  91. Benjamin Franklin The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1793)
  92. Karen Blixen (as Isak Dinesen) Out of Africa (1937)
  93. Robert Baden-Powell Scouting for Boys (1908)
  94. Bill Wilson & Dr. Bob Smith Alcoholic’s Anonymous Big Book (1939)
  95. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn The Gulag Archipelago (1973)
  96. Tom Wolfe The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)
  97. Elizabeth Gilbert Eat Pray Love (2010)
  98. Gertrude Stein The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1993)
  99. Eric Schlosser Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (2001)
  100. Jack Canfield & Victor Hansen Chicken Soup for the Soul (1993)
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