The Modern Library on its website lists the “100 best” English-language books in fiction and nonfiction. Alongside each are the best according to an online poll—and the readers’ choices consist of much trash: the top three slots of each list, fiction and nonfiction, are filled by Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard.
Modern Library’s own considered nonfiction list is fascinating because it’s wildly diverse, reflecting the genre’s diversity, no doubt. It mixes histories and works of philosophy that have had social or intellectual impact with essays and memoirs. Virginia Woolf’s pioneering feminist essay A Room of One’s Own is ranked 4th,, while Vladimir Nabokov’s classic literary memoir Speak, Memory—panned and lauded on this very blog—is 8th and Richard Wright’s heartfelt memoir Black Boy is 13th. James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, the title essay of which I’ve previously declared America’s greatest, ranks 19th, while Gertrude Stein’s genre-bending The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas ranks a solid 20th.
The Library’s number one greatest nonfiction book ever published in English is officially an autobiography, memoir’s staid precursor, The Education of Henry Adams. I read it so many years ago I can’t remember it, but do recall that it was recommended to me then because of its introspective impulse, which today we’d call memoiristic—a meditation on Henry Adams’s intellectual life—rather than being the usual dry recitation of a politician’s public deeds.
It helps to be named Woolf, Wolfe, or Wolff
Seeing Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff in 52nd place confirmed my recent hunch that it would be a great book to teach—it’s a monument to immersion reporting and to narrative nonfiction storytelling. Wolfe penetrated the world of military test pilots and rocketed away with their immortal tough-guy phrase—“the right stuff”—as an overarching metaphor. He showed how those steely fighter jocks bent the U.S. space program to their will, wresting a degree of flight control from pocket-protected missile scientists and coffee-breathed NASA bureaucrats.
I was gratified that one of my favorite memoirs, Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, made the list (86th) and nodded when I saw Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood at 96th. Without apparent irony, in 97th place is Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer, an expose of the pitfalls of the kind of empathetic immersion with criminals that Capote practiced. Malcolm generalizes the issue of some crime writers’ duplicity toward killers to all journalists—the way they act friendly and then sell sources out.
Having recently reread and written here about the excesses of The Journalist and the Murderer, I wonder what its placement says about the status of journalism. Even as narrative nonfiction dominates publishing and bookselling, people don’t fully trust it, or at least are wary of what they sense are inherent flaws. Maybe that’s simply wise—most people call any narrative book a novel, after all.
But I can think of several books, equally slim in size, that are better than Malcolm’s narrow screed. Offhand, Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being, reviewed here, is far larger in its ambition, its achievement, and its relevance for civilians.
The Modern Library’s top 100 nonfiction list . . .
1. THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS by Henry Adams
2. THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE by William James
3. UP FROM SLAVERY by Booker T. Washington
4. A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN by Virginia Woolf
5. SILENT SPRING by Rachel Carson
6. SELECTED ESSAYS, 1917-1932 by T. S. Eliot
7. THE DOUBLE HELIX by James D. Watson
8. SPEAK, MEMORY by Vladimir Nabokov
9. THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE by H. L. Mencken
10. THE GENERAL THEORY OF EMPLOYMENT, INTEREST, AND MONEY by John Maynard Keynes
11. THE LIVES OF A CELL by Lewis Thomas
12. THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY by Frederick Jackson Turner
13. BLACK BOY by Richard Wright
14. ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL by E. M. Forster
15. THE CIVIL WAR by Shelby Foote
16. THE GUNS OF AUGUST by Barbara Tuchman
17. THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND by Isaiah Berlin
18. THE NATURE AND DESTINY OF MAN by Reinhold Niebuhr
19. NOTES OF A NATIVE SON by James Baldwin
20. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS by Gertrude Stein
21. THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE by William Strunk and E. B. White
22. AN AMERICAN DILEMMA by Gunnar Myrdal
23. PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell
24. THE MISMEASURE OF MAN by Stephen Jay Gould
25. THE MIRROR AND THE LAMP by Meyer Howard Abrams
26. THE ART OF THE SOLUBLE by Peter B. Medawar
27. THE ANTS by Bert Hoelldobler and Edward O. Wilson
28. A THEORY OF JUSTICE by John Rawls
29. ART AND ILLUSION by Ernest H. Gombrich
30. THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS by E. P. Thompson
31. THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK by W.E.B. Du Bois
32. PRINCIPIA ETHICA by G. E. Moore
33. PHILOSOPHY AND CIVILIZATION by John Dewey
34. ON GROWTH AND FORM by D’Arcy Thompson
35. IDEAS AND OPINIONS by Albert Einstein
36. THE AGE OF JACKSON, Arthur Schlesinger by Jr.
37. THE MAKING OF THE ATOMIC BOMB by Richard Rhodes
38. BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON by Rebecca West
39. AUTOBIOGRAPHIES by W. B. Yeats
40. SCIENCE AND CIVILIZATION IN CHINA by Joseph Needham
41. GOODBYE TO ALL THAT by Robert Graves
42. HOMAGE TO CATALONIA by George Orwell
43. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN by Mark Twain
44. CHILDREN OF CRISIS by Robert Coles
45. A STUDY OF HISTORY by Arnold J. Toynbee
46. THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY by John Kenneth Galbraith
47. PRESENT AT THE CREATION by Dean Acheson
48. THE GREAT BRIDGE by David McCullough
49. PATRIOTIC GORE by Edmund Wilson
50. SAMUEL JOHNSON by Walter Jackson Bate
51. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X by Alex Haley and Malcolm X
52. THE RIGHT STUFF by Tom Wolfe
53. EMINENT VICTORIANS by Lytton Strachey
54. WORKING by Studs Terkel
55. DARKNESS VISIBLE by William Styron
56. THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION by Lionel Trilling
57. THE SECOND WORLD WAR by Winston Churchill
58. OUT OF AFRICA by Isak Dinesen
59. JEFFERSON AND HIS TIME by Dumas Malone
60. IN THE AMERICAN GRAIN by William Carlos Williams
61. CADILLAC DESERT by Marc Reisner
62. THE HOUSE OF MORGAN by Ron Chernow
63. THE SWEET SCIENCE by A. J. Liebling
64. THE OPEN SOCIETY AND ITS ENEMIES by Karl Popper
65. THE ART OF MEMORY by Frances A. Yates
66. RELIGION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM by R. H. Tawney
67. A PREFACE TO MORALS by Walter Lippmann
68. THE GATE OF HEAVENLY PEACE by Jonathan D. Spence
69. THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS by Thomas S. Kuhn
70. THE STRANGE CAREER OF JIM CROW by C. Vann Woodward
71. THE RISE OF THE WEST by William H. McNeill
72. THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS by Elaine Pagels
73. JAMES JOYCE by Richard Ellmann
74. FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE by Cecil Woodham-Smith
75. THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN MEMORY by Paul Fussell
76. THE CITY IN HISTORY by Lewis Mumford
77. BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM by James M. McPherson
78. WHY WE CAN’T WAIT by Martin Luther King by Jr.
79. THE RISE OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT by Edmund Morris
80. STUDIES IN ICONOLOGY by Erwin Panofsky
81. THE FACE OF BATTLE by John Keegan
82. THE STRANGE DEATH OF LIBERAL ENGLAND by George Dangerfield
83. VERMEER by Lawrence Gowing
84. A BRIGHT SHINING LIE by Neil Sheehan
85. WEST WITH THE NIGHT by Beryl Markham
86. THIS BOY’S LIFE by Tobias Wolff
87. A MATHEMATICIAN’S APOLOGY by G. H. Hardy
88. SIX EASY PIECES by Richard P. Feynman
89. PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK by Annie Dillard
90. THE GOLDEN BOUGH by James George Frazer
91. SHADOW AND ACT by Ralph Ellison
92. THE POWER BROKER by Robert A. Caro
93. THE AMERICAN POLITICAL TRADITION by Richard Hofstadter
94. THE CONTOURS OF AMERICAN HISTORY by William Appleman Williams
95. THE PROMISE OF AMERICAN LIFE by Herbert Croly
96. IN COLD BLOOD by Truman Capote
97. THE JOURNALIST AND THE MURDERER by Janet Malcolm
98. THE TAMING OF CHANCE by Ian Hacking
99. OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS by Anne Lamott
100. MELBOURNE by Lord David Cecil
Draft No. 4 