The 100 Greatest Non-Fiction Books

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

About this list

The Guardian, 100 Books

The Guardian's list of the greatest non-fiction books of all time. here's their description:

After keen debate at the Guardian's books desk, this is our list of the very best factual writing, organised by category, and then by date.

This list was originally published in 2011 and was added to this site about 2 years ago.

View: List Grid Table
Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
12726 The Shock of the New Robert Hughes 1980 Australian English
806 The Story of Art Ernest H. Gombrich 1950 British English
1617 Ways Of Seeing John Berger 1972 British English
515 Lives of the Artists Giorgio Vasari 1550 Italian Italian
300 The Life of Samuel Johnson James Boswell 1791 British English
2881 The Diary of Samuel Pepys Samuel Pepys 1825 British English
965 Eminent Victorians Lytton Strachey 1918 British English
1621 Good-Bye to All That Robert Graves 1929 British English
395 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Gertrude Stein 1933 American English
7664 Against Interpretation Susan Sontag 1966 American English
659 Mythologies Roland Barthes 1957 French French
1529 Orientalism Edward W. Said 1978 Palestinian English
162 Silent Spring Rachel Carson 1962 American English
4811 Gaia James Lovelock 1979 British English
624 The Histories of Herodotus Herodotus -450 Greek Ancient greek
830 The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Edward Gibbon 1776 British English
13362 The History Of England Thomas Babington Macaulay 1848 British English
1159 Eichmann in Jerusalem Hannah Arendt 1963 German English
1663 The Making of the English Working Class E. P. Thompson 1963 British English
558 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee Dee Alexander Brown 1970 American English
7625 Hard Times Studs Terkel 1970 American English
6600 Shah Of Shahs Ryszard Kapuscinski 1982 Polish Polish
14435 The Age Of Extremes Eric Hobsbawm 1994 British English
4158 We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families Philip Gourevitch 1998 American English
1638 Postwar Tony Judt 2005 British English
3507 The Journalist and the Murderer Janet Malcolm 1990 American English
540 The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Tom Wolfe 1968 American English
652 Dispatches Michael Herr 1977 American English
13362 The Lives Of The Poets Samuel Johnson 1779 British English
13924 An Image Of Africa Chinua Achebe 1975 Nigerian English
1887 The Uses of Enchantment Bruno Bettelheim 1976 Austrian English
1387 Gödel, Escher, Bach Douglas Hofstadter 1979 American English
275 The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1782 French French
913 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass Frederick Douglass 1845 American English
4630 De Profundis Oscar Wilde 1905 British English
541 The Seven Pillars of Wisdom T. E. Lawrence 1926 British English
1573 The Story Of My Experiments With Truth Mahatma Gandhi 1927 Indian Gujarati
448 Homage to Catalonia George Orwell 1938 British English
113 The Diary of a Young Girl Anne Frank 1947 Dutch Dutch
514 Speak, Memory Vladimir Nabokov 1951 American English
3237 The Man Died Wole Soyinka 1972 Nigerian English
958 The Periodic Table Primo Levi 1975 Italian Italian
11868 Bad Blood Lorna Sage 2000 British English
177 The Interpretation of Dreams Sigmund Freud 1899 Austrian German
14458 The Romantic Generation Charles Rosen 1995 American English
1123 The Symposium Plato -385 Greek Ancient greek
313 Meditations Marcus Aurelius 161 Roman Greek
75 Essays Michel de Montaigne 1580 French French
2798 The Anatomy of Melancholy Robert Burton 1621 British English
1030 Meditations on First Philosophy Rene Descartes 1641 French Latin
1746 Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion David Hume 1779 British English
458 Critique of Pure Reason Immanuel Kant 1781 German German
1295 Phenomenology of Mind G. W. F. Hegel 1807 German German
108 Walden Henry David Thoreau 1854 American English
743 On Liberty John Stuart Mill 1859 British English
222 Thus Spake Zarathustra Friedrich Nietzsche 1883 German German
417 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Thomas Kuhn 1962 American English
835 The Art of War Sun Tzu -500 Chinese Classical chinese
152 The Prince Niccolo Machiavelli 1532 Italian Italian
345 Leviathan Thomas Hobbes 1651 British English
1416 Rights of Man Thomas Paine 1791 British English
774 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Mary Wollstonecraft 1792 British English
324 Communist Manifesto Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels 1848 German German
557 The Souls of Black Folk W. E. B. Du Bois 1903 American English
140 The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir 1949 French French
2272 The Wretched of the Earth Frantz Fanon 1961 Algerian French
4527 The Medium Is The Massage Marshall McLuhan 1967 Canadian English
1259 The Female Eunuch Germaine Greer 1970 Australian English
13506 Manufacturing Consent Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman 1988 American English
15615 Here Comes Everybody Clay Shirky 2008 American English
1141 The Golden Bough James George Frazer 1890 British English
646 The Varieties of Religious Experience William James 1902 American English
180 On the Origin of Species Charles Darwin 1859 British English
10546 The Character Of Physical Law Richard P. Feynman 1965 American English
304 The Double Helix James D. Watson 1968 American English
2307 The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins 1976 British English
1122 A Brief History of Time Stephen Hawking 1988 British English
807 The Book of the City of Ladies Christine De Pizan 1405 French French
654 The Praise of Folly Erasmus 1511 Dutch Latin
4168 Letters On England Voltaire 1734 French French
2654 Suicide Emile Durkheim 1897 French French
870 Economy and Society Max Weber 1922 German German
173 A Room of One's Own Virginia Woolf 1929 British English
456 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men James Agee 1941 American English
709 The Feminine Mystique Betty Friedan 1963 American English
109 In Cold Blood Truman Capote 1966 American English
1020 Slouching Towards Bethlehem Joan Didion 1968 American English
206 The Gulag Archipelago Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 1973 Russian Russian
1959 Discipline and Punish Michel Foucault 1975 French French
14499 News Of A Kidnapping Gabriel García Márquez 1996 Colombian Spanish
10657 The Travels of Ibn Battutah Ibn Battúta 1355 Moroccan Arabic
11540 The Innocents Abroad Mark Twain 1869 American English
580 Black Lamb and Grey Falcon Rebecca West 1941 British English
6579 Venice Jan Morris 1960 British English
1811 A Time Of Gifts Patrick Leigh Fermor 1977 British English
1246 Danube Claudio Magris 1986 Italian Italian
14630 China Along The Yellow River Cao Jinqing 2000 Chinese Chinese
697 The Rings of Saturn W. G. Sebald 1995 German German
14599 Passage To Juneau Jonathan Raban 1999 British English
14680 Letters To A Young Novelist Mario Vargas Llosa 2002 Peruvian Spanish