The Best Southern Nonfiction of All Time

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

About this list

The best southern United States nonfiction books of all time judged by 130 literary experts and authors.

This list was originally published in 2009 and was added to this site over 12 years ago.

Rank	Book	Authors	Year	Country	Language
456	Let Us Now Praise Famous Men	James Agee	1941	American	English
640	Black Boy	Richard Wright	1945	American	English
4175	The Mind of the South	W. J. Cash	1941	American	English
3075	One Writer's Beginnings	Eudora Welty	1984	American	English
483	The Civil War	Shelby Foote	1958	American	English
109	In Cold Blood	Truman Capote	1966	American	English
4502	Killers of the Dream	Lillian Smith	1949	American	English
913	Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass	Frederick Douglass	1845	American	English
1996	A Childhood	Harry Crews	1978	American	English
5117	North Toward Home	Willie Morris	1967	American	English
3566	Mystery and Manners	Flannery O'Connor	1969	American	English
2697	All Over But The Shoutin'	Rick Bragg	1997	American	English
2012	The Habit of Being	Flannery O'Connor	1979	American	English
2003	Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl	Harriet Jacobs	1861	American	English
4657	Lanterns on the Levee	William Alexander Percy	1941	American	English
7855	Salvation on Sand Mountain	Dennis Covington	1995	American	English
3512	Mary Chesnut's Civil War	Mary Boykin Chesnut	1981	American	English
4717	I'll Take My Stand	Twelve Southerners	1930	American	English
1415	Life on the Mississippi	Mark Twain	1883	American	English
4806	The Burden of Southern History	C. Vann Woodward	1960	American	English
5748	The Message In the Bottle	Walker Percy	1975	American	English
4875	The Earl of Louisiana	A. J. Liebling	1961	American	English
4751	Origins of the New South	C. Vann Woodward	1951	American	English
4619	Rising Tide	John Barry	1997	American	English
4496	The Unsettling of America	Wendell Berry	1977	American	English