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 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
- A Discourse on Inequality by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman
- A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
- A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
- A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume
- A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft
- Age of Reason by Thomas Paine
- All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
- Beyond Good and Evil by Frederick Nietzsche
- Capital by Karl Marx
- Common Sense by Thomas Paine
- Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
- Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold
- Custer Died For Your Sins by Vine Deloria Jr.
- Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
- Democracy in America and Two Essays on America by Alexis de Tocqueville
- Discourses on Livy by Niccolo Machiavelli
- Four Books and Five Classics by Confucius
- History of Rome by Theodor Mommsen
- History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault
- History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
- Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Ann Jacobs
- Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by Walker Evans and James Agee
- Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
- Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings by Rene Descartes
- Narrative of Sojourner Truth by Sojourner Truth
- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
- On Duties by Cicero
- On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
- On Old Age by Cicero
- Orientalism by Edward W. Said
- Records of the Grand Historian by Qian Sima
- Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke
- Rights of Man by Thomas Paine
- Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell
- Second Treatise of Government by John Locke
- Selected Writings by Thomas Aquinas
- Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
- Suicide by Emile Durkheim
- Swerve: How the World Became Modern,The by Stephen Greenblatt
- The Agony of Power by Jean Baudrillard
- The Art of War by Sun Tzu
- The Autobiography of Malcom X by Malcom X, Alex Haley
- The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne
- The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex by Charles Darwin
- The Division of Labor in Society by Emile Durkheim
- The Early History of Rome by Titus Livius (Livy)
- The Essays by Francis Bacon
- The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton
- The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
- The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
- The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman
- The Histories by Herodotus
- The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
- The Kama Sutra by Vatsyayana
- The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
- The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
- The Other America by Michael Harrington
- The Politics by Aristotle
- The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli
- The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber
- The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
- The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- The Souls of Black Folks by W.E.B. DeBois
- The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin
- The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
- The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
- Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau
