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100 Books That Belong in Every American Library

By Daniel McAdam

I've had this project - listing one hundred books that I feel should be found in every American library, either public or private - in mind for over a year. That such a list should be controversial does not bother me, so long as the list serves its purpose as a starting point for discussion on what constitutes essential American literature.

But here's the part of the project I've struggled with: I actually hope that you, dear reader, will visit your local public library (and local high school library) and determine whether or not these books were found there. This isn't to make things harder for librarians; to me, our librarians are under-appreciated heroes who deserve help and praise much more than any criticism. But what I think is that, if we agree that these 100 books do actually belong in every American library, and we find public and high school libraries lacking these texts, we should take the next step and either donate the books ourselves or publicize the need so that someone, somewhere, can get the right books to the right places. The logistics of how such a thing could be accomplished is at present a mystery, but I know that the readers of this website are an intelligent, resourceful, bunch, so my hope is that somehow together we'll find a way to make this effort work successfully.

Herewith, the list, and don't worry about the order:

Autobiography, by Benjamin Franklin
Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
Life on the Mississippi, by Mark Twain
The Call of the Wild, by Jack London
Complete Works, by Edgar Allan Poe
The Virginian, by Owen Wister
Journal, by John Woolman
Walden, by Henry David Thoreau
The Sketch-Book, by Washington Irving
The Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper
Complete Works, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The House of Seven Gables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Complete Works, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, by Oliver Wendell Holmes
The Conquest of Mexico, by William H. Prescott
The Oregon Trail, by Francis Parkman
Complete Works, by William Cullen Bryant
Complete Works, by John Greenleaf Whittier
Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman
Washington Square, by Henry James
Daisy Miller, by Henry James
Outcasts of Poker Flat, and Other Stories, by Bret Harte
To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway
On the Road, by Jack Kerouac
The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
My Antonia, by Willa Cather
Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather
Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson
The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton
Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
Tobacco Road, by Erskine Caldwell
The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, by H. P. Lovecraft
The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger
Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott
Complete Poems, by Emily Dickinson
Democracy in America, by Alexis de Toqueville
Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
Dune, by Frank Herbert
Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein
Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
One Lonely Night, by Mickey Spillane
The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey
An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser
Native Son, by Richard Wright
Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett
The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler
The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane
The Education of Henry Adams, by Henry Adams

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