Books That Shaped America

The Books That Shaped America is a list of books written by American authors which the Library of Congress feels are the most influential to the formation of the United States of America. In 2012, the list included 88 titles and was last updated in 2013 when it was expanded to 100 books. Despite their importance, many of the books are also frequently challenged in libraries.

Personal

After learning about the existence of this list, I was curious to see if I had read any of the books. So far, I've read 17 of the 100 titles.

List

Here is the updated 2013 list presented chronologically:

Released	Title	Authors
1640	The Bay Psalm Book	Stephen Daye
1751	Experiments and Observations on Electricity	Benjamin Franklin
1758	Poor Richard Improved	Benjamin Franklin
1776-01-10	Common Sense	Thomas Paine
1783	A Grammatical Institute of the English Language	Noah Webster
1787	The Federalist	Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay
1788	A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible	Isaiah Thomas
1789	A Survey of the Roads of the United States of America	Christopher Colles
1793	The Private Life of the Late Benjamin Franklin, LL.D.	Benjamin Franklin
1796	American Cookery	Amelia Simmons
1803	New England Primer	Anonymous
1814	History of the Expedition Under the Command of the Captains Lewis and Clark	Meriwether Lewis
1820-??-??	The Legend of Sleepy Hollow	Washington Irving
1830	The Book of Mormon	Joseph Smith
1836	McGuffey's Newly Revised Eclectic Primer	William Holmes McGuffey
1837	Peter Parley's Universal History	Samuel Goodrich
1845	The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass	Frederick Douglass
1845	Tales	Edgar Allan Poe
1850	The Scarlet Letter	Nathaniel Hawthorne
1851	Moby-Dick	Herman Melville
1852	Uncle Tom's Cabin	Harriet Beecher Stowe
1854	Walden	Henry David Thoreau
1855	Leaves of Grass	Walt Whitman
1868	Little Women	Louisa May Alcott
1869	Mark, the Match Boy	Horatio Alger Jr.
1869	The American Woman's Home	Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
1881	The Common Law	Oliver Wendell Holmes
1884-12-??	Adventures of Huckleberry Finn	Mark Twain
1890	Poems	Emily Dickinson
1890	How the Other Half Lives	Jacob Riis
1893	The Frontier in American History	Frederick Jackson Turner
1895	The Red Badge of Courage	Stephen Crane
1900-??-??	The Wonderful Wizard of Oz	L. Frank Baum
1901	Harriet, the Moses of Her People	Sarah H. Bradford
1903-??-??	The Call of the Wild	Jack London
1903	The Souls of Black Folk	W.E.B. Du Bois
1904	The History of Standard Oil	Ida Tarbell
1906	The Jungle	Upton Sinclair
1907	The Education of Henry Adams	Henry Adams
1907	Pragmatism	William James
1912	Riders of the Purple Sage	Zane Grey
1914-06-??	Tarzan of the Apes	Edgar Rice Burroughs
1914	Family Limitation	Margaret Sanger
1918	My Antonia	Willa Cather
1923	Spring and All	William Carlos Williams
1923	New Hampshire	Robert Frost
1925-04-10	The Great Gatsby	F. Scott Fitzgerald
1925	The Weary Blues	Langston Hughes
1929	The Sound and the Fury	William Faulkner
1929	Red Harvest	Dashiell Hammett
1931	Joy of Cooking	Irma Rombauer
1936	Gone With the Wind	Margaret Mitchell
1936-10-??	How to Win Friends and Influence People	Dale Carnegie
1937	Their Eyes Were Watching God	Zora Neale Hurston
1937	Idaho: A Guide in Word and Pictures	Anonymous
1938	Our Town: A Play	Thornton Wilder
1939	Alcoholics Anonymous	William Griffith Wilson
1939	The Grapes of Wrath	John Steinbeck
1940	For Whom the Bell Tolls	Ernest Hemingway
1940	Native Son	Richard Wright
1943	A Tree Grows in Brooklyn	Betty Smith
1944	A Treasury of American Folklore	Benjamin A. Botkin
1945	A Street in Bronzeville	Gwendolyn Brooks
1946	The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care	Benjamin Spock
1946	The Iceman Cometh	Eugene O'Neill
1947-09-03	Goodnight Moon	Margaret Wise Brown
1947	A Streetcar Named Desire	Tennessee Williams
1948	Sexual Behavior in the Human Male	Alfred C. Kinsey
1951-??-??	The Catcher in the Rye	J.D. Salinger
1952-04-14	Invisible Man	Ralph Ellison
1952-10-15	Charlotte's Web	E.B. White
1953-10-19	Fahrenheit 451	Ray Bradbury
1956	Howl	Allen Ginsberg
1957	Atlas Shrugged	Ayn Rand
1957-03-12	The Cat in the Hat	Dr. Seuss
1957	On the Road	Jack Kerouac
1959	Goodbye, Columbus	Philip Roth
1960	To Kill a Mockingbird	Harper Lee
1961	Catch-22	Joseph Heller
1961-06-??	Stranger in a Strange Land	Robert Heinlein
1962	The Snowy Day	Ezra Jack Keats
1963	Where the Wild Things Are	Maurice Sendak
1963	The Fire Next Time	James Baldwin
1963	The Feminine Mystique	Betty Friedan
1965	The Autobiography of Malcolm X	Malcolm X and Alex Haley
1965	Unsafe at Any Speed	Ralph Nader
1962	Silent Spring	Rachel Carson
1966	In Cold Blood	Truman Capote
1968	The Double Helix	James D. Watson
1969-03-31	Slaughterhouse-Five	Kurt Vonnegut
1970	Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee	Dee Brown
1971	Our Bodies, Ourselves	Boston Women's Health Book Collective
1972	Bless Me Ultima	Rudolfo Anaya
1975	The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts	Maxine Hong Kingston
1976	Roots	Alex Haley
1980	Free to Choose: A Personal Statement	Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman
1981-??-??	Cosmos	Carl Sagan
1987	Beloved	Toni Morrison
1987	And the Band Played On	Randy Shilts
2002	The Words of César Chávez	César Chávez

Links

• loc.gov/item/prn-13-005/books-that-shaped-america-on-amazon - Synopsis of each book.