A List of 71 (Free & Paid) Non-Fiction Classic eBooks that Everyone Should Read

This list is intended as an aid and starting point for picking classics to read. It is not intended to be comprehensive. This list is meant primarily for an American readership, but also contains many international works. Informative as well as entertaining, some are well-known and look at universal themes, while others are relatively unsung and are more narrowly focused. Non-fiction’s power comes from its truth-telling. As we read them, these books come to define us as they allow us to better see the world and our place in it. Their stories are every bit as captivating as fiction.

These are all non-fiction classic favorites and will leave a strong impression after you finished reading them, even if they may not all stand the test of time. While these aren’t the most original or arcane selections, they’re ones you’ll almost certainly be glad you checked out. This is our list of the 71 (Free & Paid) Non-Fiction Books that Everyone Should Read, in no particular order. Free ones are available as a red underlined link, likewise, the paid ones will be just listed as they are.

A List of 71 (Free & Paid) Non-Fiction Books that Everyone Should Read

1. A Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
2. A Discourse on Inequality by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
3. A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman
4. A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
5. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
6. A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume
7. A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft
8. Age of Reason by Thomas Paine
9. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
10. Beyond Good and Evil by Frederick Nietzsche
11. Capital by Karl Marx
12. Common Sense by Thomas Paine
13. Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
14. Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold
15. Custer Died For Your Sins by Vine Deloria Jr.
16. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
17. Democracy in America and Two Essays on America by Alexis de Tocqueville
18. Discourses on Livy by Niccolo Machiavelli
19. Four Books and Five Classics by Confucius
20. History of Rome by Theodor Mommsen
21. History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault
22. History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
23. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Ann Jacobs
24. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by Walker Evans and James Agee
25. Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
26. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
27. Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings by Rene Descartes
28. Narrative of Sojourner Truth by Sojourner Truth
29. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
30. On Duties by Cicero
31. On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
32. On Old Age by Cicero
33. Orientalism by Edward W. Said
34. Records of the Grand Historian by Qian Sima
35. Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke