Non-Fiction

Top 100 non-fiction books of all time as selected by thegreatestbooks.org. 

Book reviews out of five stars. 

1. Essays – Michel de Montaigne
2. Confessions – Augustine
3. The Interpretation of Dreams – Sigmund Freud
4. The Prince – Niccolo Machiavelli
5. Walden – Henry David Thoreau
6. On the Origin of Species – Charles Darwin
7. The Complete Works of Plato – Plato
8. The Republic – Plato
9. Silent Spring – Rachel Carson
10. The Elements of Style – William Strunk, Jr. & E.B. White

11. Pensees – Blaise Pascal
12. The Diary of a Young Girl – Anne Frank
13. Democracy in America – Alexis de Tocqueville
14. The Autobiography of Malcolm X – Alex Haley
15. Homage to Catalonia – George Orwell
16. The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau – Jean-Jacques Rousseu
17. Communist Manifesto – Karl Marx and Friedrech Engels
18. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
19. Speak, Memory – Vladimir Nabokov
20. Relativity – Albert Einstein

21. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and money – John Maynard Keynes
22. Das Kapital – Karl Marx
23. Thus Spake Zarathustra – Friedrich Nietzche
24. The Histories of Herodotus – Herodotus
25. The Double Helix: A Personal Account – James D. Watson
26. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions – Thomas Kuhn
27. Meditations – Marcus Aurelius
28. The Second World War – Winston Churchill
29. The Education of Henry Adams – Henry Adams
30. The Civil War – Shelby Foote

31. Leviathan – Thomas Hobbes
32. The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson – Ralph Waldo Emerson
33. A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf
34. The Principles of Psychology – William James
35. The Abolition of Man – C.S. Lewis
36. The History of the Peloponnesian War – Thucydides
37. Selected Essay of T.S. Elliot – T.S. Elliot
38. Civilization and Its Discontents – Sigmund Freud
39. Collected Essays of George Orwell – George Orwell
40. The Second Sex – Simone de Beauvoir

41. The Life of Samuel Johnson – James Boswell
42. The Art of War – Sun Zi
43. Annals – Cornelius Tacitus
44. The Liberal Imagination – Lionel Trilling
45. R.E. Lee – Douglass Southall Freeman
46. Philosophical Investigations – Ludwig Wittgenstein
47. The Right Stuff – Tom Wolfe
48. The Gulag Archipelago – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
49. Parallel Lives – Plutarch
50. The Constitution of Liberty – Friedrich A. Hayek

51. In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
52. Capitalism and Freedom – Milton Friedman
53. Modern Times – Paul Johnson
54. Mere Christianity – C.S. Lewis
55. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy – Joseph Schumpeter
56. Memoirs From Beyond the Grave – Francois Rene De Chateubriand
57. The Open Society – Karl Popper
58. Witness – Whittaker Chambers
59. Pragmatism – William James
60. The Origins of Totalitarianism – Hannah Arendt

61. Orthodoxy – G.K. Chesterton
62. Encyclopedia Britannica – (Not gonna happen)
63. Black Lam and Grey Flacon – Rebecca West
64. Summa Theologica – Thomas Aquinas
65. Corpus Aristotelicum – Aristotle
66. Beyond Good and Evil – Friedrich Nietzche
67. Out of Africa – Isak Dinesen
68. Discourse on Method – Rene Descartes
69. The Waning of the Middle Ages – Johan Huizinga
70. The Seven Story Mountain – Thomas Merton

71. The Quest for Community – Robert Nisbet
72. Tao Te Ching – Lao Tsu
73. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems – Galileo
74. Black Boy – Richard Wright
75. Oxford English Dictionary
76. A Study of History – Arnold J. Tonybee
77. A Brief History of Time – Stephen Hawking
78. The Golden Bough – James George Frazer
79. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – Edward Gibbon
80. The Federalist Papers – Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay

81. Analects – Confucius
82. The Death and Life of Great American Cities – Jane Jacobs
83. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality – Sigmund Freud
84. If This Is a Man – Primo Levi
85. Moveable Feast – Ernest Hemingway
86. The Road to Serfdom – Friedrich von Hayek
87. On Liberty – John Stuart Mill
88. The Varieties of Religious Experience – William James
89. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – Tom Wolfe
90. The Making of the Atomic Bomb – Richard Rhodes

91. The Myth of Sisphyus – Albert Camus
92. Ethics – Baruch de Spinoza
93. Roll, Jordan, Roll – Eugene Genovese
94. An American Dilemma – Gunnar Myrdal
95. Mythology – Edith Hamilton
96. The Conservative Mind – Russell Kirk
97. Civil Disobedience – Henry David Thoreau
98. The Wealth of Nations – Adam Smith
99. Up from Slavery – Booker T. Washington
100. The Feynman Lectures on Physics – Richard P. Feynman