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

by John | Mar 10, 2021 | Classic Literature, Non Fiction, Top Compilations | 0 comments

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.

  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
  36. Rights of Man by Thomas Paine
  37. Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell
  38. Second Treatise of Government by John Locke
  39. Selected Writings by Thomas Aquinas
  40. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
  41. Suicide by Emile Durkheim
  42. Swerve: How the World Became Modern,The by Stephen Greenblatt
  43. The Agony of Power by Jean Baudrillard
  44. The Art of War by Sun Tzu
  45. The Autobiography of Malcom X by Malcom X, Alex Haley
  46. The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne
  47. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex by Charles Darwin
  48. The Division of Labor in Society by Emile Durkheim
  49. The Early History of Rome by Titus Livius (Livy)
  50. The Essays by Francis Bacon
  51. The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton
  52. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
  53. The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
  54. The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman
  55. The Histories by Herodotus
  56. The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
  57. The Kama Sutra by Vatsyayana
  58. The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
  59. The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
  60. The Other America by Michael Harrington
  61. The Politics by Aristotle
  62. The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli
  63. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber
  64. The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
  65. The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  66. The Souls of Black Folks by W.E.B. DeBois
  67. The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin
  68. The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
  69. The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
  70. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
  71. Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau

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