AP English Language Non-fiction Reading List
Autobiography, biography, journal, and history
Maya Angelou
 The Female Experience: An
American Documentary
 Gather Together in My Name
 The Heart of a Woman
 The Majority Finds Its Past:
Placing Women in History
 I Know Why the Caged Bird
Malcolm
X
Sings
Walter Jackson Bate
 The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Samuel
Eliot Morison
 Samuel Johnson
Charles A. Beard
 Christopher Columbus, Admiral
of the Ocean Sea
 An Economic Interpretation of
the Constitution
 The Growth of the American
Republic
 The Rise of American
Civilization
 Harrison Gray Otis: Urbane
Van Wyck Brooks
Federalist
Francis Parkman
 An Autobiography
 The Oregon Trail
 Days of Phoenix
 Pioneers of France in the
 From a Writer’s Notebook
New World
Bruce Catton
Richard
Rodriquez
 Mr. Loncoln’s Army
 Days of Obligation
 A Stillness at Appomattox
 Hunger of Memory
Leon Edel
Mari
Sandoz
 Bloomsbury: A Hose of Lions
 The Battle of Little Bighorn
 Henry James, a Life
 Old Jules
 The Stuff of Sleep and Dreams
Arthur
M. Schlesinger, Jr.
 Telling Lives
 The Age of Jackson
Lillian Hellman
 The Age of Roosevelt
 Scoundrel Time
 The Bitter Heritage
 Un Unfinished Woman
 Robert Kennedy and His Times
William Dean Howells
 A Thousand Days
 Years of My Youth
Barbara Tuchman
Alfred Kazin
 Bible and Sword
 New York Jew
 A Distant Mirror
 Starting Out in the Thirties
 The Guns of August
 A Walker in the City
Hellen Keller
 The Proud Tower
Richard Wright
 The Story of My Life
Maxine Hong Kingston
 American Hunger
 The Woman Warrior
 Black Boy
Anzia Yezierska
 China Men
 Bread and Givers
 The Open Cage
Gerda Lerner
 Red Ribbon on a White House
 The Creation of Patriarchy
Essays and Criticism
James Agee
Cynthia Ozick Art and Ardor
Susan Sontag
 Let us Now Praise Famous Men
Joan Didion
 Against Interpretation
 Slouching Toward Bethlehem
 Aids and Its Metaphors
Paul Fussell
 Illness as a Metaphor
John Updike
 Bad, or the Dumbing of America
 The Great War and Modern
 Hugging the Shore: Essays and
Memory
Criticism
 Thank God for the Atom Bomb
 Self Consciousness
and Other Essays
Gore Vidal
Pauline Kael
 Matters of Fact and Fiction
 5001 Nights at the Movies
 Reflections upon a Stinking Ship
 I Lost It at the Movies
 Rocking the Boat
Eudora Welty
 State of the Art
William Hugh Kenner
 The Eye of the Story: Selected
Essays and Reviews
 A Colder Eye
Joyce Carol Oates
 One Writer’s Beginnings
 Contraries: Essays
E.B. White
 On Boxing
 The Essays of E.B. White
 Women Writers
 One Man’s Meat
Political Writing and Journalism
Roger Angell
Francis Fitzgerald
 Five Seasons: A Baseball
 America Revisited
Companion
 Cities on a Hill
 Late Innings
 Fire in the Lake
John
Kenneth Galbraith
 Once More Around the Park
Hannah Arendt
 The Affluent Society
 Between Past and Future
 Ambassador’s Journal
 The Human Condition
 The Anatomy of Power
 On Revolution
 The Nature of Mass Poverty
Calvin Trillin
 The Origins of Totalitarianism
Elizabeth Drew
 American Fried
 American Journal: Events of
 An Education in Georgia
1976
 Third Helpings
 Washington Journal: The Events
 Uncivil Liberties
of 1973-1974
Tom Wolfe
 The Kandy-Kolored TangerineFlake Streamline Baby
Science and Nature Writing
Isaac Asimov
 The Exploding Suns
 the Joy Still Felt
 In Memory of Yet Green
 Until the Sun Dies
Annie Dillard
 An American Childhood
 Holy and Firm
 Living by Fiction
 Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
 Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
 The Writing Life
Gretel Ehrlich
 The Solace of Open Spaces
Stephen Jay Gould
 Ever Since Darwin
 Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes
 The Mismeasure of Man
 Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle
 Un Urchin in the Storm
Peter Matthiessen
 At Play in the Fields of the Lord
 Far Tortuga
 In the Spirit of Crazy Horse
 The Snow Leopard
 The Tree Where Man Was Born
Margaret Mead
 And Keep your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America
 Blackberry Winter
 Coming of Age in Samoa
Carl Sagan
 The Dragons of Eden
 A Path Where No Man Thought
Lewis Thomas
 The Fragile Species
 Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s 9th Symphony
 The Lives of a Cell: The Notes of a Biology Watcher
 the Medusa and the Snail