From the Library of Congress website: “The titles featured here (by American authors) have had a profound effect on American life, but they are by no means the only influential ones…Curators and experts from throughout the Library of Congress contributed their choices, but there was much debate –
even agony – in having to remove worthy titles from a much larger list in order to accommodate the physical constraints of this exhibition space. Some of the titles on display have been the source of great controversy, even derision, yet they nevertheless shaped Americans’ views of their world and often the world’s view of the United States.” Here are the 88 featured titles, listed alphabetically by the authors’ names.
- Henry Adams The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
- Louisa May Alcott Little Women (1869)
- Horatio Alger Jr. Mark, the Match Boy (1869)
- anonymous A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible (1788)
- anonymous The New England Primer (1803)
- James Baldwin The Fire Next Time (1963)
- L. Frank Baum The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)
- Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe The American Woman’s Home (1869)
- Boston Womens’ Health Book Collective Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973)
- Benjamin A. Botkin A Treasury of American Folklore (1944)
- Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
- Sarah H. Bradford Harriet, the Moses of Her People (1901)
- Gwendolyn Brooks A Street in Bronzeville (1945)
- Dee Brown Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1971)
- Margaret Wise Brown Goodnight Moon (1947)
- Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan of the Apes (1914)
- Truman Capote In Cold Blood (1966)
- Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936)
- Rachel Carson Silent Spring (1962)
- Christopher Colles A Survey of the Roads of the United States of America (1789)
- Steven Crane The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
- Emily Dickinson Poems (1890)
- Frederick Douglass Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)
- W.E. Burghardt Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (1903)
- Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (1952)
- William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury (1929)
- Federal Writers’ Project Idaho: A Guide in Word and Pictures (1937)
- F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (1925)
- Benjamin Franklin Experiments and Observations on Electricity, Made at Philadelphia in America (1751)
- Benjamin Franklin Poor Richard’s Almanac (1757)
- Benjamin Franklin The Private Life of the Late Benjamin Franklin (1793)
- Betty Friedan The Feminine Mystique (1963)
- Robert Frost New Hampshire, a Poem (1923)
- Allen Ginsberg Howl and Other Poems (1956)
- Samuel Goodrich Peter Parley’s Universal History (1837)
- Zane Grey Riders of the Purple Sage (1912)
- Alex Haley and Malcolm X The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)
- Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay The Federalist Papers (1787)
- Dashiell Hammett Red Harvest (1929)
- Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter (1850)
- Robert A. Heinlein Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)
- Joseph Heller Catch-22 (1961)
- Ernest Hemingway For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
- Langston Hughes The Weary Blues (1926)
- Zora Neal Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
- Washington Irving The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820)
- William James Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking: Popular Lectures on Philosophy (1907)
- Richard Jensen and John C. Hammerback (editors) The Words of César Chávez (2002)
- Ezra Jack Keats The Snowy Day (1962)
- Jack Kerouac On the Road (1957)
- Alfred C. Kinsey Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948)
- Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
- Meriweather Lewis History of the Expedition Under the Command of the Captains Lewis and Clark (1814)
- Jack London The Call of the Wild (1903)
- William Holmes McGuffey McGuffey’s Newly Revised Eclectic Primer (1849)
- Herman Melville Moby-Dick (1851)
- Margaret Mitchell Gone with the Wind (1936)
- Toni Morrison Beloved (1987)
- Ralph Nader Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile (1965)
- Eugene O’Neill The Iceman Cometh, a Play (1946)
- Thomas Paine Common Sense (1776)
- Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged (1957)
- Jacob Riis How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (1890)
- Irma Rombauer Joy of Cooking (1931)
- Carl Sagan Cosmos (1980)
- J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
- Margaret Sanger Family Limitation (1914)
- Maurice Sendak Where the Wild Things Are (1963)
- Dr. Seuss The Cat in the Hat (1957)
- Randy Shilts And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (1987)
- Amelia Simmons American Cookery (1796)
- Upton Sinclair The Jungle (1906)
- Betty Smith A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943)
- Benjamin Spock Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946)
- John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
- Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)
- Ida Tarbell The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904)
- Henry David Thoreau Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854)
- Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
- James D. Watson The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (1968)
- Noah Webster A Grammatical Institute of the English Language (1783)
- E.B. White Charlotte’s Web (1952)
- Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass (1855)
- Thornton Wilder Our Town: A Play (1938)
- Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)
- William Carlos Williams Spring and All (1923)
- Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith Alcoholics Anonymous (1939)
- Richard Wright Native Son (1940)
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