The Modern Library | 100 Best Nonfiction

This is one of the 759 lists we use to generate our main The Greatest Books list.

About this list

The Modern Library, 100 Books

who voted:
The same ten-member Modern Library Editorial Board that produced the companion “100 Best Novels” list also voted on the non-fiction list in 1999. The board was:
• Daniel J. Boorstin (historian)
• A. S. Byatt (novelist/critic)
• Christopher Cerf (publisher/author, board chair)
• Shelby Foote (historian/novelist)
• Vartan Gregorian (scholar/philanthropist)
• Edmund Morris (biographer)
• John Richardson (art historian)
• Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (historian)
• William Styron (novelist)
• Gore Vidal (novelist/essayist)

how they voted:
Modern Library sent each board member a ballot of 440 pre-selected titles from its catalogue. Members marked every book they thought belonged on the list (an approval-voting method). Titles with the most checks were ranked highest; ties were broken internally by Random House staff.

This list was originally published in 1999 and was added to this site over 12 years ago.

View: List Grid Table
Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
377 The Education of Henry Adams Henry Adams 1907 American English
646 The Varieties of Religious Experience William James 1902 American English
906 Up from Slavery Booker T. Washington 1901 American English
173 A Room of One's Own Virginia Woolf 1929 British English
162 Silent Spring Rachel Carson 1962 American English
1045 Selected Essays of T. S. Eliot T. S. Eliot 1932 British English
304 The Double Helix James D. Watson 1968 American English
514 Speak, Memory Vladimir Nabokov 1951 American English
2187 The American Language H. L. Mencken 1919 American English
319 The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money John Maynard Keynes 1936 British English
3194 The Lives of a Cell Lewis Thomas 1974 American English
1929 The Frontier in American History Frederick J. Turner 1920 American English
640 Black Boy Richard Wright 1945 American English
2226 Aspects of the Novel E. M. Forster 1927 British English
483 The Civil War Shelby Foote 1958 American English
1588 The Guns of August Barbara Wertheim Tuchman 1962 American English
10988 The Proper Study of Mankind Isaiah Berlin 1997 British English
1572 Nature and Destiny of Man Reinhold Niebuhr 1941 American English
3154 Notes of a Native Son James Baldwin 1955 American English
395 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Gertrude Stein 1933 American English
620 The Elements of Style E. B. White, William Strunk Jr. 1918 American English
1462 An American Dilemma Gunnar Myrdal 1944 Swedish English
1706 The Principia Mathematica Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell 1910 British English
2666 The Mismeasure of Man Stephen Jay Gould 1981 American English
6282 The Mirror and the Lamp Meyer Howard Abrams 1953 American English
7083 The Art of the Soluble Peter B. Medawar 1967 British English
5485 The Ants E. O. Wilson, Bert Hölldobler 1990 American English
1677 A Theory of Justice John Rawls 1971 American English
4113 Art and Illusion Ernest H. Gombrich 1960 British English
1663 The Making of the English Working Class E. P. Thompson 1963 British English
557 The Souls of Black Folk W. E. B. Du Bois 1903 American English
3115 Principia Ethica George Edward Moore 1903 British English
6175 Philosophy and Civilization John Dewey 1931 American English
2370 On Growth and Form D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson 1917 British English
6432 Ideas and Opinions Albert Einstein 1954 German English
2419 The Age of Jackson Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr 1945 American English
1750 The Making of the Atomic Bomb Richard Rhodes 1986 American English
580 Black Lamb and Grey Falcon Rebecca West 1941 British English
2673 Autobiographies William Butler Yeats 1926 Irish English
6459 Science and Civilisation in China Joseph Needham 1954 British English
1621 Good-Bye to All That Robert Graves 1929 British English
448 Homage to Catalonia George Orwell 1938 British English
4682 The Autobiography of Mark Twain Mark Twain 1924 American English
2843 Children of Crisis Robert Coles 1967 American English
645 A Study of History Arnold J. Toynbee 1934 British English
506 The Affluent Society John Kenneth Galbraith 1958 American English
6165 Present at the Creation Dean Acheson 1969 American English
3241 The Great Bridge David McCullough 1972 American English
2576 Patriotic Gore Edmund Wilson 1962 American English
3547 Samuel Johnson Walter Jackson Bate 1977 American English
306 The Autobiography of Malcolm X Alex Haley 1965 American English
3617 The Right Stuff Tom Wolfe 1979 American English
965 Eminent Victorians Lytton Strachey 1918 British English
5475 Working Studs Terkel 1974 American English
2602 Darkness Visible William Styron 1990 American English
1363 The Liberal Imagination Lionel Trilling 1950 American English
379 The Second World War Winston Churchill 1948 British English
416 Out of Africa Isak Dinesen 1937 Danish Danish
2960 Jefferson and His Time Dumas Malone 1948 American English
3515 In the American Grain William Carlos Williams 1925 American English
8024 Cadillac Desert Marc Reisner 1986 American English
7573 The House of Morgan Ron Chernow 1990 American English
3942 The Sweet Science A. J. Liebling 1956 American English
682 The Open Society and Its Enemies Karl Popper 1945 British English
2807 The Art of Memory Frances A. Yates 1966 British English
6332 Religion And The Rise Of Capitalism R. H. Tawney 1926 British English
6335 A Preface to Morals Walter Lippmann 1929 American English
2206 The Gate of Heavenly Peace Jonathan Spence 1981 American English
417 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Thomas Kuhn 1962 American English
5251 The Strange Career of Jim Crow C. Vann Woodward 1955 American English
3000 The Rise of the West William H. McNeill 1963 American English
2817 The Gnostic Gospels Elaine Pagels 1979 American English
4390 James Joyce Richard Ellmann 1959 American English
6417 Florence Nightingale Cecil Woodham-Smith 1950 British English
2717 The Great War and Modern Memory Paul Fussell 1975 American English
4455 The City in History Lewis Mumford 1961 American English
2383 Battle Cry of Freedom James M. McPherson 1988 American English
3098 Why We Can't Wait Martin Luther King 1964 American English
5018 The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt Edmund Morris 1979 American English
6367 Studies in Iconology Erwin Panofsky 1939 German English
2392 The Face of Battle John Keegan 1976 British English
4850 The Strange Death of Liberal England George Dangerfield 1935 British English
6502 Vermeer Lawrence Gowing 1952 British English
4418 A Bright Shining Lie Neil Sheehan 1988 American English
1981 West With the Night Beryl Markham 1942 British English
2670 This Boy's Life Tobias Wolff 1989 American English
2420 A Mathematician's Apology G. H. Hardy 1940 British English
1276 The Feynman Lectures on Physics Richard P. Feynman 1963 American English
1557 Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Annie Dillard 1974 American English
1141 The Golden Bough James George Frazer 1890 British English
4737 Shadow and ACT Ralph Ellison 1964 American English
1901 The Power Broker Robert Caro 1974 American English
4853 The American Political Tradition Richard Hofstadter 1948 American English
6995 Contours of American History William Appleman Williams 1961 American English
6374 The Promise of American Life Herbert Croly 1909 American English
109 In Cold Blood Truman Capote 1966 American English
3507 The Journalist and the Murderer Janet Malcolm 1990 American English
10120 The Taming of Chance Ian Hacking 1990 Canadian English
9113 Operating Instructions Anne Lamott 1993 American English
4854 Melbourne David Cecil 1939 British English