The third, and final, list for America’s 250th: 250 books. Plays, novels, children’s books, essays, comics, memoirs, scientific writings, studies: all of it. Besides the typical caveat of one entry per author for maximum diversity, there are two very big caveats to be aware of:
1)
American
books by American authors. With the exception of Tocqueville, the books
selected had to be by American authors, and they had to be, roughly, relevant to America (with a some key exceptions – notably children’s books, sci-fi/fantasy,
and comics were given much wider scope). This especially dinged the hard
sciences. There are tons of brilliant works in the hard sciences by Americans that… aren’t specifically
American in subject. For example, Robert Millikan’s work on the electron doesn’t
exactly reflect who we are as a people. Nor does Ben Franklin’s writing on
electricity, or Feynman’s superb disentangling of physics. All great books –
but not really the scope of this project. An exception was made for Sagan. Which also leads to…
2)
Readability.
There are tons of very important American books by American
authors that are basically unreadable or, while important in their day, not
worth reading now except as curios. Noah Webster’s dictionary, The Joy of
Cooking, Sanger’s pamphlets (which are a very mixed bag of good advice
and bad)… These aren’t the sorts of things you sit down and read cover to
cover. That said, like the movie list, there are a few entries I’ve not read
myself, and those are marked with an asterisk. And, as with the music and movie lists – this is an honest accounting. Some of these works have not aged well, and
some are, by modern standards, problematic. But that’s who we were. Uncle Tom’s
Cabin is part of our cannon, just as much as Frederick Douglass.
Without
further ado, here are the 250 books:
Common
Sense, Thomas Paine, 1776
The
Federalist, anonymous, 1787
The
Private Life of the Late Benjamin Franklin, LL.D., Benjamin Franklin, 1793
History
of the Expedition Under the Command of the Captains Lewis and Clark, Meriwether
Lewis, 1814
The
Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving, 1820
A
Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier: Some of the Adventures, Dangers and
Sufferings of Joseph Plumb Martin, Joseph Plumb Martin, 1830*
Democracy
in America, Alexis de Tocqueville, 1840
On the
Art of Teaching, Horace Mann, 1840
The
Tell-Tale Heart, Edgar Allan Poe, 1843
Nature,
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844
The
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass, 1845
The
Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850
Moby-Dick;
or The Whale, Herman Melville, 1851
Uncle
Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852
Walden;
or Life in the Woods, Henry David Thoreau, 1854
Leaves
of Grass, Walt Whitman, 1855
Letters
and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Conditions of the North American Indians,
George Catlin, 1857
Incidents
in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs, 1861*
Selected
Speeches, Abraham Lincoln, 1865
Little
Women, or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, Louisa May Alcott, 1868
Two
Years Before the Mast and Twenty-Four Years After, Richard Dana Henry Jr., 1869
Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, 1884
Personal
Memoirs of U.S. Grant, Ulysses S, Grant, 1886*
Ten
Days in a Mad-House, Nellie Bly, 1887
Looking
Backward: 2000-1887, Edward Bellamy, 1888
How the
Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis, 1890*
Poems,
Emily Dickinson, 1890
The
Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gillman, 1892
The
Significance of the Frontier in American History, Frederick Jackson Turner,
1893
The
Mountains of California, John Muir, 1894
The Red
Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane, 1895
The
Awakening, Kate Chopin, 1899
On a
Certain Blindness in Human Beings, William James, 1899
The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum, 1900
The
Call of the Wild, Jack London, 1903
The
Ambassadors, Henry James, 1903
The
Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois, 1903
The
History of Standard Oil, Ida Tarbell, 1904*
The
Jungle, Upton Sinclair, 1906
The
Education of Henry Adams, Henry Adams, 1907
Tarzan
of the Apes, Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1914
Winesburg,
Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small-Town Life, Sherwood Anderson, 1919
Main
Street, Sinclair Lewis, 1920
The Age
of Innocence, Edith Wharton, 1920*
American
Indian Stories, Zitkala-Sa, 1921
The
Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
The
Weary Blues, Langston Hughes, 1925
Death
Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather, 1927
Red
Harvest, Dashiell Hammett, 1929
The
Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner, 1929
Tobacco
Road, Erskine Caldwell, 1932
Tropic
of Cancer, Henry Miller, 1934*
Appointment
in Samarra, John O’Hara, 1934
War is
a Racket, Smedley D. Butler, 1935
The
Story of Ferdinand, Munro Leaf, 1936
Their
Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston, 1937
Vertigo,
Lynd Ward, 1937
Our
Town: A Play, Thornton Wilder, 1938
Experience
and Education, John Dewey, 1938
American
Photographs, Walker Evans, 1938
The
Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck, 1939
The Big
Sleep, Raymond Chandler, 1939
For
Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway, 1940*
The
Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers, 1940
Native
Son, Richard Wright, 1940
A Tree
Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith, 1943
The
Iceman Cometh, Eugene O'Neill, 1946*
All the
King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren, 1946
A
Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams, 1947
Goodnight
Moon, Margaret Wise Brown, 1947
The
Lottery, Shirley Jackson, 1948
The
Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell, 1949*
A Sand
County Almanac, Aldo Leopold, 1949
The Sheltering
Sky, Paul Bowles, 1949
I
Robot, Isaac Asimov, 1950
The
Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger, 1951
Charlotte's
Web, E.B. White, 1952
Invisible
Man, Ralph Ellison, 1952
The
Crucible, Arthur Miller, 1953
Fahrenheit
451, Ray Bradbury, 1953
Go Tell
It on the Mountain, James Baldwin, 1953
The
Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow, 1953
A Good
Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories, Flannery O’Connor, 1955
Eloise,
Kay Thompson and Hilary Knight, 1955
Inherit
the Wind, Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, 1955
Howl,
Allen Ginsberg, 1956
On the
Road, Jack Kerouac, 1957
The
Assistant, Bernard Malamud, 1957
Dynamics
of Faith, Paul Tillich, 1957
The
Americans, Robert Frank, 1958
A Coney
Island of the Mind, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 1958
A
Canticle for Liebowitz, Walter M. Miller Jr., 1959
Naked
Lunch, William Burroughs, 1959
To Kill
a Mockingbird, Harper Lee, 1960
Black
Maria, Charles Addams, 1960
This Is
the American Earth, Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall, 1960
Revolutionary
Road, Richard Yates, 1961
The
Moviegoer, Walker Percy, 1961
Catch-22,
Joseph Heller, 1961
Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Edward Albee, 1962
A Wrinkle
in Time, Madeleine L'Engle, 1962
Pale
Fire, Vladimir Nabokov, 1962
Silent
Spring, Rachel Carson, 1962
One
Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey, 1962
The
Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan, 1963*
Where
the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak, 1963
Twentysix
Gasoline Stations, Ed Ruscha, 1963
Letter
from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr., 1963
Eichmann
in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt, 1963
The
Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X and Alex Haley, 1965*
In Cold
Blood, Truman Capote, 1966*
The
Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon, 1966
Best Story
Book Ever, Richard Scarry, 1967
The
Double Helix, James D. Watson, 1968
Slouching
Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion, 1968
Desert
Solitaire, Edward Abbey, 1968
Slaughterhouse-Five,
or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, Kurt Vonnegut, 1969
Ubik,
Philip K. Dick, 1969
I Know
Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou, 1969
Portnoy’s
Complaint, Philip Roth, 1969
Are You
There God? It’s Me Margaret, Judy Blume, 1970
Charlie
Brown and Snoopy, Charles M. Schulz, 1970
Deliverance,
James Dickey, 1970*
Bury My
Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, Dee Brown, 1970*
Carrie,
Stephen King, 1971*
The
Lorax, Dr. Seuss, 1971
Rules
for Radicals, Saul Alinsky, 1971
Angle
of Repose, Wallace Stegner, 1971
Encounters
with the Archdruid, John McPhee, 1971
The
Monster at the End of This Book, Jon Stone and Michael Smollin, 1971
Hope
for the Flowers, Trina Paulus, 1972
Diane
Arbus: An Aperture Monograph, Diane Arbus, 1972
A Crown
of Feathers and Other Stories, Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1973
Fear
and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, Hunter S. Thompson, 1973
The
Island of the Skog, Steven Kellogg, 1973
The
Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure –
The "Good Parts" Version, William Goldman, 1973
The
Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, Ursula K. Le Guin, 1973
Obedience
to Authority, Stanley Milgram, 1974
Pilgrim
at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard, 1974
Ragtime,
E.L. Doctorow, 1975
Tuck
Everlasting, Natalie Babbit, 1975
Bridge
to Terabithia, Katherine Paterson, 1977
A
Contract with God, Will Eisner, 1978
Cloudy
with a Chance of Meatballs, Judi and Ron Barrett, 1978
Little
Monster’s Mother Goose, Mercer Mayer, 1979
Cosmos,
Carl Sagan, 1980
Amphigorey,
Edward Gorey, 1980
Housekeeping,
Marilynne Robinson, 1980
A
People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn, 1980*
Miss
Rumphius, Barbara Cooney, 1982
The
River Why, David James Duncan, 1983
Ironweed,
William Kennedy, 1983
Sister
Outsider, Audre Lorde, 1984
Neuromancer,
William Gibson, 1984
Ender’s
Game, Orson Scott Card, 1985
Blood
Meridian, Cormac McCarthy, 1985
In the
American West, Richard Avedon, 1985
Fences,
August Wilson, 1985
City of
Glass, Paul Auster, 1985
Arctic
Dreams, Barry Lopez, 1986
The Dark
Knight Returns, Frank Miller, 1986
The
Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, Jane Wagner, 1986
Borderlands/La
Frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria E. Anzaldua, 1987
Beloved,
Toni Morrison, 1987
That
Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical
Profession, Peter Novick, 1988
The
Talking Eggs, Robert D. San Souci and Jerry Pinkney, 1989
The Joy
Luck Club, Amy Tan, 1989
Hershel
and the Hanukkah Goblins, Eric Kimmel and Trina Schart Hyman, 1989
The
Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien, 1990
Jurassic
Park, Michael Crichton, 1990
Maus,
Art Spiegelman, 1991
Tuesday,
David Weisner, 1991
Angels
in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Tony Kushner, 1992
Deep
Thoughts: inspiration for the uninspired, Jack Handey, 1992
Ishmael,
Daniel Quinn, 1992
The Lone
Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Sherman Alexie, 1993
Parable
of the Sower, Octavia Butler, 1993
The
Giver, Lois Lowry, 1993
Culture
and Imperialism, Edward Said, 1993
The
Happy Hocky Family, Lane Smith, 1993
Understanding
Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud, 1993
From
Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation, Gene Sharp,
1994
Lies My
Teacher Told Me, James Loewen, 1995
Jerry
Uellsmann: Photo Synthesis, Jerry Uellsmann, 1996
Infinite
Jest, David Foster Wallace, 1996
Falling
Up, Shel Silverstein, 1996
Wisdom
Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache, Keith H.
Basso, 1996
Half
Past Autumn: A Retrospective, Gordon Parks, 1997
Three
Seductive Ideas, Jerome Kagan, 1998
The
Long Hard Road Out of Hell, Marilyn Manson, 1998
Dog’s
Best Friend, Mark O’Hare, 1999
Interpreter
of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri, 1999
2 ¼, William
Eggleston, 1999
House
of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski, 2000
The
Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Malcolm Gladwell,
2000
David
Boring, Daniel Clowes, 2000
Jimmy Corrigan:
The Smartest Kid on Earth, Chris Ware, 2000
From
These Ashes: The Complete Short SF of Fredric Brown, Fredric Brown, 2001
Affluenza:
The All-Consuming Epidemic, John De Graaf, David Wann and Thomas H. Naylor,
2001
Fast
Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, Eric Schlosser, 2001
Life Is
Strange and So Are You: A Bizarro Sunday Treasury, Dan Piraro, 2001
The
Corrections, Jonathan Franzen, 2001
Down to
Earth: Nature’s Role in American History, Ted Steinberg, 2002
The
Baloonists, Eula Biss, 2002
Krazy
& Ignatz in "There Is A Heppy Lend Furfur A-Waay": 1925–1926,
George Herriman, 2002
The
Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Kim Deitch, 2002
A Right
to be Hostile, Aaron McGruder, 2003
The
Complete Far Side, Gary Larson, 2003
Don’t
Let Pigeon Drive the Bus, Mo Willems, 2003
Why
Societies Need Dissent, Cass Sunstein, 2003
Blankets,
Craig Thompson, 2003
Ariel:
The Restored Version, Sylvia Plath, 2004
Bone,
Jeff Smith, 2004
Little
Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays!, Winsor McCay, 2005
The
Complete Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson, 2005
Magic
for Beginners, Kelly Link, 2005
Zen Shorts,
Jon J. Muth, 2005
Black
Hole, Charles Burns, 2005
The
Annotated Archy and Mehitabel, Don Marquis, 2006
Fun
Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel, 2006
Averno,
Louise Gluck, 2006
August:
Osage County, Tracy Letts, 2007
Y: The
Last Man, Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra, 2008
Invisible
Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan, Kim
Phillips-Fein, 2009
Copper,
Kazu Kibuishi, 2010
Alfred
Steiglitz: New York, Bonnie Yochelson, 2010
Thinking
Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, 2011
Bloom
County: The Complete Library, Berkeley Breathed, 2012
Beyond
Outrage: What Has Gone Wrong with Our Economy and Our Democracy and How to Fix
It, Robert Reich, 2012
The
Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, George Packer, 2013
The
Tomorrow Girl and Other Stories, A. Senna Diaz, 2013
Hyperbole
and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other
Things That Happened, Allie Brosh, 2013
Six
Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution, John Paul Stevens,
2014
Here,
Richard McGuire, 2014
Citizen:
An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine, 2014
Between
the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2015
Last
Stop on Market Street, Matt de La Pena and Christian Robinson, 2015
The
Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead, 2016
Dark
Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical
Right, Jane Mayer, 2016
Lincoln
in the Bardo, George Saunders, 2017
These
Truths: A History of the United States, Jill Lepore, 2018
The
Fifth Risk, Michael Lewis, 2018
The
Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis, Martha Nussbaum,
2018
The Age
of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of
Power, Shoshana Zuboff, 2018
Sabrina,
Nick Drnaso, 2018
How to
Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi, 2019
Strange
Planet, Nathan W. Pyle, 2019
The
Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson, 2020
Black
Panther: Penguin Classics Marvel Collection, Don McGregor et al, 2022
Fight
Oligarchy, Bernie Sanders, 2025
