The New York Public Library's Books of the Century by New York Public Library
The following is a complete list of the titles included in the exhibition Books of the Century at The New York Public Library's Center for the Humanities, May 20, 1995-July 13, 1996, and in The New York Public Library's Books of the Century, published by Oxford University Press. A celebration of the NYPL's centenary. The books were selected by public service and research librarians
-
Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov
Three Sisters (Russian: Три сeстры, translit. Tri sestry) is a play by the Russian author and playwright Anton Chekhov, perhaps partially inspired by the situation of the three Brontë sisters.[1] I...
-
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
Swann's Way, the first part of A la recherche de temps perdu, Marcel Proust's seven-part cycle, was published in 1913. In it, Proust introduces the themes that run through the entire work. The narr...
-
Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein
Tender Buttons is a 1914 book by American writer Gertrude Stein consisting of three sections titled "Objects", "Food", and "Rooms". While the short book consists of multiple poems covering the ever...
-
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Metamorphosis (German: Die Verwandlung) is a novella by Franz Kafka, first published in 1915. It is often cited as one of the seminal works of short fiction of the 20th century and is widely st...
-
Renascence and Other Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Title poem plus 22 other works: "Interim," "Sorrow," "Ashes of Life," "Three Songs of Shattering," other poems revealing lyric beauty, romanticism. Lists of titles and first lines.
- Google -
The Wild Swans at Coole by William Butler Yeats
The Wild Swans at Coole is the name of two collections of poetry by W. B. Yeats, published in 1917 and 1919.
-
Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello
Six Characters in Search of an Author (Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore) is the most famous and celebrated play by the Italian writer Luigi Pirandello. The play is a satirical tragicomedy. It was ...
-
The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot
“For many successive generations now, ‘The Waste Land,’ ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ and ‘Four Quartets’ have continued to excited readers and to inspire young poets. Teenagers still disc...
- Google -
Ulysses by James Joyce
Ulysses chronicles the passage of Leopold Bloom through Dublin during an ordinary day, June 16, 1904. The title parallels and alludes to Odysseus (Latinised into Ulysses), the hero of Homer's Odyss...
-
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
The Magic Mountain is a novel by Thomas Mann, first published in November 1924. It is widely considered to be one of the most influential works of 20th century German literature.
-
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The novel chronicles an era that Fitzgerald himself dubbed the "Jazz Age". Following the shock and chaos of World War I, American society enjoyed unprecedented levels of prosperity during the "roar...
-
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
A landmark novel of high modernism, the text, centering on the Ramsay family and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920, skillfully manipulates temporality and psycholog...
-
Gypsy Ballads by Federico García Lorca
The publication in 1928 of Romancero gitano (written 1921–27; Gypsy Ballads), a poetry sequence inspired by the traditional Spanish romance, or ballad, catapulted Lorca into the national spotlight.
-
Native Son by Richard Wright
The novel tells the story of 20-year old Bigger Thomas, an African American living in utter poverty. Bigger lived in Chicago's South Side ghetto in the 1930s. Bigger was always getting into troubl...
-
The Portable Faulkner by William Faulkner
Collects Faulkner's stories that convey his reconstructed history of the southern United States, set in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi.
- Google -
The Age of Anxiety by W. H. Auden
The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1947; first UK edition, 1948) is a long poem in six parts by W. H. Auden, written mostly in a modern version of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse. The poem deal...
-
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Waiting for Godot (pronounced /ˈɡɒdoʊ/) is a play by Samuel Beckett, in which two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait for someone named Godot. Godot's absence, as well as numerous other aspects...
-
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
The novel addresses many of the social and intellectual issues facing African-Americans in the early twentieth century, including black nationalism, the relationship between black identity and Marx...
-
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
The book is internationally famous for its innovative style and infamous for its controversial subject: the protagonist and unreliable narrator, middle aged Humbert Humbert, becomes obsessed and se...
-
Collected Fiction by Jorge Luis Borges
From his 1935 debut with The Universal History of Iniquity, through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, these enigmatic, elaborate, imaginative inventions display Borges'...
-
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
On the Road is a largely autobiographical work that was based on the spontaneous road trips of Kerouac and his friends across mid-century America. It is often considered a defining work of the post...
-
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
One of the 20th century's enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world, and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize–winning car...
-
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
Of course it's vulgar. How could it not be? The sustained cry of a ferociously perplexed, ferociously lucid New York City Jew—you expected maybe Jane Austen? Roth's barbaric yawp of a book was a li...
- Time -
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
It follows the life of Macon "Milkman" Dead III, an African-American male living in Michigan, from birth to adulthood. The main theme in the novel is Milkman's quest for identity as a black man in ...
-
The Life of the Bee by Maurice Maeterlinck
1 IT is not my intention to write a treatise on apiculture, or on practical bee-keeping. Excellent works of the kind abound in all civilised countries, and it were useless to attempt another. Franc...
- Google -
Treatise on Radioactivity by Marie Curie
Treatise on Radioactivity (French: Traité de Radioactivité) is a two-volume book from the year 1910 written by the Polish scientist Marie Curie as a survey on the subject of radioactivity. She was ...
-
Relativity by Albert Einstein
In clear, concise language that is accessible to all, Albert Einstein's brilliant theory is explained and its implications discussed.
-
A Field Guide to the Birds by Roger Tory Peterson
The Peterson Field Guides (PFG) are a popular and influential series of American field guides intended to assist the layman in identification of birds, plants, insects and other natural phenomena. ...
- Google -
A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold
Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac has enthralled generations of nature lovers and conservationists and is indeed revered by everyone seriously interested in protecting the natural world. Hailed ...
- Google -
King Solomon's Ring by Konrad Lorenz
King Solomon's Ring is a zoological book for the general audience, written by the Austrian scientist Konrad Lorenz in 1949. The first English-language edition appeared in 1952. The book's title r...
-
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
Silent Spring is a book written by Rachel Carson and published by Houghton Mifflin in September 1962. The book is widely credited with helping launch the environmental movement. When Silent Spri...
-
The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA by James D. Watson
The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA is an autobiographical account of the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA written by James D. Watson and pub...
-
The Diversity of Life by Edward O. Wilson
An account of how the living world became diverse and how humans are destroying that diversity traces the processes that create new species and identifies the events that have disrupted evolution o...
- Google -
The Battle with the Slum by Jacob A. Riis
Classic work of reportage documents life of the urban poor at the turn of the century. Real-life tales and rare photographs celebrate efforts to demolish breeding grounds of crime and improve condi...
- Google -
The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois
The Souls of Black Folk is a classic work of American literature by W. E. B. Du Bois. It is a seminal work in the history of sociology, and a cornerstone of African-American literary history. Th...
-
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
1906 best-seller shockingly reveals intolerable labor practices and unsanitary working conditions in the Chicago stockyards as it tells the brutally grim story of a Slavic family that emigrates to ...
-
Twenty Years at Hull-House by Jane Addams
A refuge for Chicago's poor, Hull-House provided an unprecedented variety of social services. Its founder's inspiring autobiography chronicles the institution's early years and discusses its guidin...
- Google -
The House on Henry Street by Lillian D. Wald
Nearly one hundred years after the Henry Street Settlement was founded, this venerable institution still serves the people of the lower East Side of New York. Much of the credit for its survival ma...
- Google -
The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens by Lincoln Steffens
Rediscover a man Americans turned to not only for news but for humor and wisdom as well. Growing up in Sacramento, Steffens (1866-1936) was an editor at the New York Evening Post, and later at McCl...
- Google -
U.S.A. Trilogy by John Dos Passos
The U.S.A. Trilogy is the major work of American writer John Dos Passos, comprising the novels The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919, also known as Nineteen Nineteen (1932), and The Big Money (1936). The ...
-
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on a poor family of sharecroppers, the Joads, driven from their home by drought, economic hardship, and changes in the agriculture industry. In a ...
-
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a book with text by American writer James Agee and photographs by American photographer Walker Evans first published in 1941 in the United States. The title is from ...
-
Strange Fruit by Lillian Smith
Strange Fruit is a 1944 bestselling novel debut by American author Lillian Smith that deals with the then-forbidden and controversial theme of interracial romance. Originally given the working titl...
-
Growing Up Absurd by Paul Goodman
Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society is a 1960 book by Paul Goodman.
-
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James...
- Google -
The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley
This book describes Malcolm X's upbringing in Michigan, his maturation to adulthood in Boston and New York, his time in prison, his conversion to Islam, his ministry, his travels to Africa and to M...
-
And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts
And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic is a nonfiction book written by San Francisco Chronicle journalist Randy Shilts, published in 1987. It chronicles the discovery and s...
-
There Are No Children Here by Alex Kotlowitz
There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America is a 1992 biography by Alex Kotlowitz that describes the experiences of two brothers growing up in Chicago's Henry ...
-
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
Conrad's great novel of guilt and redemption follows the first mate on board the Patna, a raw youth with dreams of heroism who, in an act of cowardice, abandons his ship. His unbearable guilt and i...
-
Kim by Rudyard Kipling
Kim is an orphan, living from hand to mouth in the teeming streets of Lahore. One day he meets a man quite unlike anything in his wide experience, a Tibetan lama on a quest. Kim's life suddenly acq...
-
A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
A Passage to India is set against the backdrop of the British Raj and the Indian independence movement in the 1920s. The story revolves around four characters: Dr. Aziz, his British friend Cyril Fi...
-
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Since it was first published in English, in 1946, Albert Camus's extraordinary first novel, The Stranger (L'Etranger), has had a profound impact on millions of American readers. Through this story ...
-
Charter of the United Nations by United Nations
The Charter of the United Nations (also known as the UN Charter) of 1945 is the foundational treaty of the United Nations, an intergovernmental organization. The UN Charter articulated a commitment...
-
Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton
An Oprah Book Club selection, Cry, the Beloved Country, the most famous and important novel in South Africa’s history, was an immediate worldwide bestseller in 1948. Alan Paton’s impassioned novel ...
- Google -
The Family of Man by Edward Steichen
The Family of Man was an ambitious photography exhibition curated by Edward Steichen, the director of the New York City Museum of Modern Art's (MoMA) Department of Photography. According to Steiche...
-
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
A novel of great power that turns the world upside down. The Nigerian novelist Achebe reached back to the early days of his people's encounter with colonialism, the 1890's, though the white man and...
- Time -
The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
The Wretched of the Earth (French: Les Damnés de la Terre) is a 1961 book by Frantz Fanon, in which the author provides a psychiatric and psychologic analysis of the dehumanizing effects of coloniz...
-
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
In Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Bertha is the madwoman locked in the attic by her husband Rochester, the simmering Englishman whose children Jane has been hired to tutor. In Bronte's novel we lear...
- Time -
Season of Migration to the North by Al-Tayyib Salih
Season of Migration to the North is a classic post-colonial Sudanese novel by the late novelist Al-Tayyib Salih. The novel charts individuation of the (un-named) narrator, who has returned to hi...
-
Guerrillas by V. S. Naipaul
Guerrillas is a 1975 novel by V. S. Naipaul. The book is set on an unnamed, remote Caribbean island populated by a mix of ethnicities, but dominated by post-colonial British. Probably the island i...
-
The Bride Price by Buchi Emecheta
The Bride Price is a 1975 novel (first published in the UK by Allison & Busby and in the USA by George Braziller) by Nigerian writer Buchi Emecheta. It concerns, in part, the problems of women in p...
-
The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuscinski
After the deposition of Haile Selassie in 1974, which ended the ancient rule of the Abyssinian monarchy, Ryszard Kapuscinski travelled to Ethiopia and sought out surviving courtiers to tell their s...
- Google -
I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala by Rigoberta Menchú Tum
Interviews with a Guatemalan national leader discuss her country's political situation and the resulting violence, which has claimed the lives of her brother, mother, and father
- Google -
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
An international best-seller with more than one million copies in print and a winner of France's Prix Goncourt, The Lover has been acclaimed by critics all over the world since its first publicatio...
- Google -
Suicide by Emile Durkheim
Suicide (French: Le suicide) is an 1897 book written by French sociologist Émile Durkheim. It was the first methodological study of a social fact in the context of society. It is ostensibly a case ...
-
The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
This book introduces Freud's theory of the unconscious with respect to dream interpretation. Dreams, in Freud's view, were all forms of "wish-fulfillment" — attempts by the unconscious to resolve a...
-
Studies in the Psychology of Sex by Havelock Ellis
Studies in the Psychology of Sex Vol. 2 is a book published in 1900 written by Havelock Ellis (1859–1939), an English physician, writer and social reformer. The book deals with the phenomenon of se...
-
The Varieties of Religious Experience by Will James
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature is a book by the Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James that comprises his edited Gifford Lectures on "Natural Theology" d...
-
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
A prophet has is about to board a ship home after 12 years in exile, when he is stopped by a group of people. His teachings to them, discussing love, marriage, crime, freedom and law among many oth...
- Google -
Why I Am Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell
Why I Am Not a Christian is an essay by the British philosopher Bertrand Russell. Originally a talk given 6 March 1927 at Battersea Town Hall, under the auspices of the South London Branch of the N...
-
Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead
Coming of Age in Samoa is a book by Margaret Mead based upon youth in Samoa and lightly relating to youth in America, first published in 1928. In the foreword to Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead's advi...
-
Being and Nothingness by Jean Paul Sartre
Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, sometimes subtitled A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, is a 1943 philosophical treatise by Jean-Paul Sartre. Its main purpose was to...
-
The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care by Benjamin Spock
The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (often referred to simply as Baby and Child Care), written by Benjamin Spock, was first published on 14 July 1946, and is one of the biggest best-seller...
-
The Bible by Christian Church
The Authorized King James Version is an English translation of the Christian Bible begun in 1604 and completed in 1611 by the Church of England. Printed by the King's Printer, Robert Barker, the fi...
-
The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich
Originally published more than fifty years ago, The Courage to Be has become a classic of twentieth-century religious and philosophical thought. The great Christian existentialist thinker Paul Till...
- Google -
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
Narrated by the gigantic but docile half-Indian "Chief" Bromden, who has pretended to be a deaf-mute for several years, the story focuses on the antics of the rebellious Randle Patrick McMurphy, a ...
-
The Politics of Ecstasy by Timothy Leary
Writings that sparkle with the psychedelic revolution. The Politics of Ecstasy is Timothy Leary's most provocative and influential exploration of human consciousness, written during the period from...
- Google -
On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Explains the attitudes of the dying toward themselves and others and presents a humane approach to relieving the psychological suffering of the terminally ill and their families
- Google -
The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim
The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales is a 1976 book by Bruno Bettelheim, in which the author analyzes fairy tales in terms of Freudian psychoanalysis. The book has be...
-
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Dracula is an 1897 novel by Irish author Bram Stoker, featuring as its primary antagonist the vampire Count Dracula. Dracula has been attributed to many literary genres including vampire literat...
-
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
The Turn of the Screw, originally published in 1898, is a gothic ghost story novella written by Henry James. Due to its ambiguous content, it became a favourite text of academics who subscribe t...
-
The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Hound of the Baskervilles is a crime novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle featuring the detective Sherlock Holmes. Originally serialized in the Strand Magazine from August 1901 to April 1902, it ...
-
Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Tarzan of the Apes is a novel written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the first in a series of books about the title character Tarzan. It was first published in the pulp magazine All-Story Magazine in Oct...
-
Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey
The classic Zane Grey that established the modern western tradition.
- Google -
The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
The Mysterious Affair at Styles is a detective novel by British writer Agatha Christie. It was written in the middle of the First World War, in 1916, and first published by John Lane in the United...
-
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
Dale Breckenridge Carnegie (originally Carnagey until 1922 and possibly somewhat later) (November 24, 1888 – November 1, 1955) was an American writer and lecturer and the developer of famous course...
-
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Gone With the Wind is set in Jonesboro and Atlanta, Georgia during the American Civil War and Reconstruction and follows the life of Scarlett O'Hara, the daughter of an Irish immigrant plantation o...
-
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
The Big Sleep (1939) is a crime novel by Raymond Chandler, the first in his acclaimed series about hardboiled detective Philip Marlowe. The work has been adapted twice into film, once in 1946 and a...
-
The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
The Day of the Locust is a 1939 novel by American author Nathanael West, set in Hollywood, California during the Great Depression, depicting the alienation and desperation of a disparate group of i...
-
Peyton Place by Grace Metalious
Peyton Place is a 1956 novel by Grace Metalious. The novel describes how three women are forced to come to terms with their identity, both as women and as sexual beings, in a small, conservative, g...
-
The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss
The Cat in the Hat is a children's book written and illustrated by Theodor Geisel under the pen name Dr. Seuss and first published in 1957. The story centers on a tall anthropomorphic cat, who wear...
-
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
This is the epic saga of an earthling, Valentine Michael Smith, born and educated on Mars, who arrives on our planet with "psi" powers--telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis, and the ability to take...
- Google -
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Catch-22 is a satirical, historical novel by the American author Joseph Heller, first published in 1961. The novel, set during the later stages of World War II from 1943 onwards, is frequently cite...
-
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no appar...
-
Ball Four by Jim Bouton
Ball Four is a book written by former Major League Baseball pitcher Jim Bouton in 1970. The book is a diary of Bouton's 1969 season, spent with the Seattle Pilots and then the Houston Astros follow...
-
Carrie by Stephen King
Carrie is an epistolary horror novel by American author Stephen King. It was his first published novel, released on April 5, 1974, with an approximate first print-run of 30,000 copies. Set primaril...
-
Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
Tom Wolfe’s modern American satire tells the story of Sherman McCoy, a Wall Street “Master of the Universe” who has it all — a Park Avenue apartment, a job that brings wealth, power and prestige, a...
-
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
The Age of Innocence centers on an upperclass couple's impending marriage, and the introduction of a scandalous woman whose presence threatens their happiness. Though the novel questions the assump...
-
Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement by Carrie Chapman Catt
This book addresses the question of why women in twenty-six other countries received the right to vote before American women were enfranchised. The authors blame the liquor lobby for the delay.
- loc.gov -
My Fight for Birth Control by Margaret Sanger
Margaret Sanger writes of her efforts and struggles to bring birth control education to working class women in order to combat issues such as infant and maternal mortality, abortion, and poverty. S...
- Google -
Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography by Zora Neale Hurston
First published in 1942 at the height of her popularity, Dust Tracks on a Road is Zora Neale Hurston's candid, funny, bold, and poignant autobiography, an imaginative and exuberant account of her r...
- Google -
The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
The Feminine Mystique, published 25 February 1963, is a book written by Betty Friedan which brought to light the lack of fulfillment in many women's lives, which was generally kept hidden[citation ...
-
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local “po...
- Google -
Sisterhood Is Powerful by robin morgan
Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement is a 1970 anthology of feminist writings edited by Robin Morgan, a feminist poet and founding member of New Yor...
-
Against Our Will by Susan Brownmiller
Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape is a 1975 book about rape by Susan Brownmiller, in which the author argues that rape is "a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in...
-
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Taking place mostly in rural Georgia, the story focuses on female black life during the 1930s in the Southern United States, addressing the numerous issues including their exceedingly low position ...
-
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (German: Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus) is a book written by Max Weber, a German sociologist, economist, and politician....
-
The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams
The Education of Henry Adams records the struggle of Bostonian Henry Adams (1838-1918), in early old age, to come to terms with the dawning 20th century, so different from the world of his youth. I...
-
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was written by the English economist John Maynard Keynes. The book, generally considered to be his magnum opus, is largely credited with creatin...
-
The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich von Hayek
The Road to Serfdom is a book written by Friedrich von Hayek (recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1974) which transformed the landscape of political thought in the 20th ce...
-
A Theory Of The Consumption Function by Milton Friedman
What is the exact nature of the consumption function? Can this term be defined so that it will be consistent with empirical evidence and a valid instrument in the hands of future economic researche...
- Google -
The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
The Affluent Society is a 1958 book by Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. The book sought to clearly outline the manner in which the post-World War II America was becoming wealthy in the pri...
-
The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs, is a greatly influential book on the subject of urban planning in the 20th century. First published in 1961, the book is a critique of m...
-
Superhighway--superhoax by Helen Leavitt
Points out that the original plan as conceived in 1944 was to have the system link cities but not to enter them. Explains why the cores of the cities have been invaded by the highway system and why...
- Google -
Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by E. F. Schumacher
Small Is Beautiful is Oxford-trained economist E. F. Schumacher’s classic call for the end of excessive consumption. Schumacher inspired such movements as “Buy Locally” and “Fair Trade,” while voic...
- Google -
The Whole Internet: User's Guide & Catalog by Ed Krol
Updated for Windows 95, this book describes the tools that Windows 95 Internet explorers use to get the most out of the Internet. The best source of information about the World Wide Web, Microsoft ...
- Google -
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
When the Time Traveler courageously stepped out of his machine for the first time, he found himself in the year 802,700--and everything had changed. H.G. Wells's famous novel of one man's astonishi...
-
Der Judenstaat by Theodor Herzl
Der Judenstaat (German, literally The Jews' State, commonly rendered as The Jewish State) is a pamphlet written by Theodor Herzl and published in February 1896 in Leipzig and Vienna by M. Breitenst...
-
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
The story chronicles the adventures of a girl named Dorothy in the Land of Oz. Thanks in part to the 1939 MGM movie, it is one of the best-known stories in American popular culture and has been wid...
-
Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie
Peter Pan (Peter And Wendy) is the original fantasy story that takes you to Neverland and everlasting youth. This is the story the Disney movie is based on and it is still very popular today. Set y...
- Google -
Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Herland is a utopian novel from 1915, written by feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The book describes an isolated society composed entirely of women, who reproduce via parthenogenesis (asexual rep...
-
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Set in the London of AD 2540 (632 A.F. in the book), the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology and sleep-learning that combine to change society. The future society is an embod...
-
Lost Horizon by James Hilton
Hilton’s bestselling classic about a man who stumbles on the world’s last great hope for peace: Shangri-La Hugh Conway saw humanity at its worst while fighting in the trenches of the First World Wa...
- Google -
Walden Two by B. F. Skinner
Walden Two is a utopian novel written by behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner, first published in 1948. In its time, it could have been considered science fiction, since science-based methods for...
-
Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell
The story follows the life of one seemingly insignificant man, Winston Smith, a civil servant assigned the task of perpetuating the regime's propaganda by falsifying records and political literatur...
-
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
A totalitarian regime has ordered all books to be destroyed, but one of the book burners suddenly realizes their merit
- Google -
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand's epochal novel, first published in 1957, has been a bestseller for more than four decades as well as an intellectual landmark. It is the story of a man who said that he would stop the mot...
-
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
The title is taken from an old Cockney expression, "as queer as a clockwork orange" and alludes to the prevention of the main character's exercise of his free will through the use of a classical co...
-
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid's Tale is a feminist dystopian novel, a work of science fiction or speculative fiction, written by Canadian author Margaret Atwood and first published by McClelland and Stewart in 1985...
-
Armenian Atrocities: The Murder of a Nation by Arnold Toynbee
There is nothing in the precepts of Islam which justifies the slaughter which has been perpetrated. I am told on good authority that high Moslem religious authorities condemned the massacres ordere...
- Google -
Ten Days That Shook the World by John Reed
Ten Days that Shook the World (1919) is a book by American journalist and socialist John Reed about the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 which Reed experienced firsthand. Reed followed many of ...
-
War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon by Siegfried Sassoon
Epigrammatic and bitterly satirical verses by the well-known English poet convey the shocking brutality and pointlessness of World War I. Includes "Counter-Attack," "They," "The General," "Base Det...
- Google -
The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hašek
The Good Soldier Švejk is the abbreviated title of an unfinished satirical novel by Jaroslav Hašek. It was illustrated by Josef Lada and George Grosz after Hašek's death. The original Czech title o...
-
Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
Mein Kampf, in English: My Struggle, is a book by Adolf Hitler. It combines elements of autobiography with an exposition of Hitler's political ideology. Volume 1 of Mein Kampf was published in 1925...
-
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
All Quiet on the Western Front (German: Im Westen nichts Neues) is a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of World War I. The book describes the German soldiers' extreme physical and men...
-
Requiem by Anna Akhmatova
Requiem is an elegy by Anna Akhmatova about suffering of people under the Great Purge. It was written over three decades, between 1935 and 1961. She carried it with her, redrafting, as she worked a...
-
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
It tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to a communist guerilla unit during the Spanish Civil War. As an expert in the use of explosives, he is ...
-
Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
Darkness At Noon stands as an unequaled fictional portrayal of the nightmare politics of our time. Its hero is an aging revolutionary, imprisoned and psychologically tortured by the Party to which ...
-
Hiroshima by John Hersey
The classic tale of the day the first atom bomb was dropped offers a haunting evocation of the memories of survivors and an appeal to the conscience of humanity
- Google -
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
The Diary of a Young Girl is a book based on the writings from a diary written by Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The...
-
The Second World War by Winston Churchill
The Second World War is a six-volume history of the period from the end of the First World War to July 1945, written by Sir Winston Churchill. It was largely responsible for him winning (in 1953) t...
-
Night by Elie Wiesel
A New Translation From The French By Marion Wiesel Night is Elie Wiesel’s masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi dea...
- Google -
Quotations from Chairman Mao by Mao
Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong (simplified Chinese: 毛主席语录; pinyin: Máo zhǔxí yǔlù), better known in the West as The Little Red Book, was published by the Government of the People's Republic of...
-
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
Documents, personal narratives, and illustrations record the experiences of Native Americans during the nineteenth century.
- Google -
The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Gulag Archipelago is a book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn based on the Soviet forced labor and concentration camp system. The three-volume book is a massive narrative relying on eyewitness testimon...
-
Dispatches by Michael Herr
Dispatches is a non-fiction book by Michael Herr that describes the author's experiences in Vietnam as a war correspondent for Esquire magazine. First published in 1977, Dispatches was one of the f...
-
Maus by Art Spiegelman
Maus: A Survivor's Tale is an autobiography by Art Spiegelman, told using the comics form. Parts of the story were originally published in the magazine RAW between 1980 to 1991. The complete story ...
-
The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett
A writer comes one summer to Dunnet Landing, a Maine seacoast town, where she follows the lonely inhabitants of once-prosperous coastal towns. Here, lives are molded by the long Maine winters, rock...
- Google -
The Story of My Life by Helen Keller
The Story of My Life, first published in 1903, is Helen Keller's autobiography detailing her early life, especially her experiences with Anne Sullivan. Portions of it were adapted by William Gibson...
-
The Innocence of Father Brown by G. K. Chesterton
This first collection of Father Brown mysteries, widely considered the author’s best, includes "The Blue Cross" "The Hammer of God," "The Eye of Apollo" and more. Father Brown is the opposite of Sh...
- Google -
Platero by Juan Ramón Jiménez
Platero is the eponymous donkey of the 1914 story Platero y yo (Spanish for Platero and I). The book is one of the most popular works by Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, the recipient of the 1956 N...
-
Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw
Pygmalion is a play by George Bernard Shaw, named after a Greek mythological character. It was first presented on stage to the public in 1912. Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that ...
- Google -
Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home by Emily Post
Upon publication in 1922 her book, “Etiquette: In Society, In Business, In Politics and At Home,” topped the nonfiction bestseller list, and the phrase “according to Emily Post” soon entered our la...
- Google -
The Inimitable Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse
One of the earliest and best collections of stories about hapless aristocrat Bertie Wooster and his supremely efficient valet Jeeves, this volume centers on the romantic travails of Bertie's school...
- Google -
Winnie the Pooh by A. A Milne
Winnie-the-Pooh, commonly shortened to Pooh Bear and once referred to as Edward Bear, is a fictional bear created by A. A. Milne. The first collection of stories about the character was the book Wi...
-
Shadows on the Rock by Willa Cather
Shadows on the Rock is a novel by the American writer Willa Cather, published in 1931. The novel covers one year of the lives of Cecile Auclair and her father Euclide, French colonists in Quebec. ...
-
The Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, Ethan Becker
The Joy of Cooking is one of the United States' most-published cookbooks, having been in print continuously since 1936 and with more than 18 million copies sold. It was privately published in 1931 ...
-
The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
A fantasy novel and children's book by J. R. R. Tolkien. Set in a time "Between the Dawn of Færie and the Dominion of Men", The Hobbit follows the quest of home-loving Bilbo Baggins to win a share ...
-
Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown
A little bunny bids goodnight to all the objects in his room before falling asleep.
- Google -
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
As a Southern Gothic novel and a Bildungsroman, the primary themes of To Kill a Mockingbird involve racial injustice and the destruction of innocence. Scholars have noted that Lee also addresses is...
-
Best of Simple by Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes's stories about Jesse B. Semple--first composed for a weekly column in the Chicago "Defender" and then collected in "Simple Speaks His Mind," "Simple Takes a Wife," and "Simple Stak...
- Google -
Complete Poems by Elizabeth Bishop
This is the definitive edition of one of America's greatest poets, increasingly recognised as one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century, loved by readers and poets alike. This ...
- Google -
The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter
The Tale of Peter Rabbit is a British children's book written and illustrated by Beatrix Potter that follows mischievous and disobedient young Peter Rabbit as he is chased about the garden of Mr. M...
- Google -
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
The American classic about a young girl's coming-of-age at the turn of the century. This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended ...
- Google -
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
World War II has just begun and four children, Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy Pevensie, are evacuated from London in 1940 to escape the Blitz. They are sent to live with Professor Digory Kirke, who ...
-
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye is a 1945 novel by J. D. Salinger. Originally published for adults, the novel has become a common part of high school and college curricula throughout the English-speaking wo...
-
Charlotte's Web by E. B. White
The novel tells the story of a pig named Wilbur and his friendship with a barn spider named Charlotte. When Wilbur is in danger of being slaughtered by the farmer, Charlotte writes messages praisin...
-
The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats
The Snowy Day is a 1962 children's picture book by American author and illustrator Ezra Jack Keats (March 11, 1916 – May 6, 1983). It features Peter, an African American boy, who explores his neigh...
-
Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
Maurice Bernard Sendak (born June 10, 1928) is an American writer and illustrator of children's literature. He is best known for his book Where the Wild Things Are, published in 1963.
-
Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan
Sarah, Plain and Tall is a children's book written by Patricia MacLachlan, and the winner of the 1986 Newbery Medal, the 1986 Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction and the 1986 Golden Kite Awar...
