Home | Reviews | Blog | Daily | Glossary | Orrin's Stuff | Email

List: Modern Library Top 100 Non-Fiction Books of the 20th Century

The Education of Henry Adams : An Autobiography (1918) - Henry Brooks Adams (1838 -1918) (Grade:B+)

Once More Around the Park : A Baseball Reader (1991) - Roger Angell (9/19/1920 -5/20/2022) (Grade:A+)

The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History (1951) - Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) (Grade:A+)

The Unmaking of a Mayor (1966) - William F. Buckley, Jr. (11/24/1925 -2/27/2008) (Grade:A+)

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974) - Robert A. Caro (10/30/1935 -)  (Grade:A+)

Silent Spring (1962) - Rachel Carson (5/27/1907 -4/14/1964)  (Grade:F)

The Strange Death of Liberal England (1935) - George Dangerfield (10/28/1904 -12/27/1986)  (Grade:A-)

Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek (1974) - Annie Dillard (4/30/1945 -)  (Grade:A)

The End of History and the Last Man (1992) - Francis Fukuyama (10/27/1952 -)  (Grade:A+)

The Mismeasure of Man (1981) - Stephen Jay Gould (-)  (Grade:F)

The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) - William James (1/11/1842 -8/26/1910)  (Grade:F)

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) - Thomas S. Kuhn (7/18/1929 -6/17/1996)  (Grade:A)

The Journalist and the Murderer (1990) - Janet Malcolm (-) (Grade:A+)

West With the Night (1941) - Beryl Markham (1902-1986) (Grade:A+)

The Great Bridge : The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge (1972) - David McCullough (7/07/1933 -8/07/2022)  (Grade:A+)

The City in History (1961) - Lewis Mumford (1895-1990)  (Grade:D)

Speak, Memory : An Autobiography Revisited (1966) - Vladimir Nabokov (4/22/1899 -7/02/1977)  (Grade:A)

A Theory of Justice (1971) - John Rawls (02/21/1921 -11/24/2002)  (Grade:F)

The Elements of Style (1959) - William Strunk Jr. (1869-1946)  (Grade:A+)

The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974) - Lewis Thomas (1913-1993)  (Grade:C)

Up From Slavery (1901) - Booker T. Washington (1856-1915)  (Grade:A)

The Right Stuff (1979) - Tom Wolfe (3/02/1931 -5/14/2018) (Grade:A+)

The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) - Malcolm X (5/19/1925 -2/21/1965)  (Grade:A+)

4)   A Room of One's Own (1929) - Virginia Woolf (1/25/1882 -3/28/1941)  (Grade:C+)

9)   The American Language (1936) - H. L. Mencken (9/12/1880 -1/29/1956)  (Grade:A)

10)   The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) - John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946)  (Grade:F)

13)   Black Boy (1945) - Richard Wright (9/04/1908 -11/28/1960)  (Grade:C)

14)   Aspects of the Novel (1927) - E.M. Forster (1/01/1879 -6/07/1970)  (Grade:A-)

41)   Good-Bye to All That: An Autobiography (1929) - Robert Graves (7/24/1895 -12/07/1985)  (Grade:C-)

42)   Homage to Catalonia (1938) - George Orwell (06/25/1903 -1/21/1949)  (Grade:A)

44)   Children of Crisis: A Study of Courage and Fear (1967) - Robert Coles (-)  (Grade:C)

46)   The Affluent Society (1958) - John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-)  (Grade:F)

54)   Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974) - Studs Terkel (5/16/1912 -10/31/2008)  (Grade:C-)

55)   Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990) - William Styron (6/11/1925 -11/01/2006)  (Grade:C)

58)   Out of Africa (1937) - Isak Dinesen (1885-1962)  (Grade:B+)

70)   The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955) - C. Vann Woodward (11/13/1908 -12/17/1999)  (Grade:B)

84)   A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (1988) - Neil Sheehan (-)  (Grade:C)

87)   A Mathematician's Apology (1940) - G. H. Hardy (1877-1947)  (Grade:C+)

93)   The American Political Tradition: and the Men Who Made It (1948) - Richard Hofstadter (08/16/1916 -10/24/1970)  (Grade:F)