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