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100 Major Works of Modern Creative Nonfiction

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Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
B.A., English, State University of New York

Essays , memoirs , autobiographies , biographies , travel writing , history, cultural studies, nature writing —all of these fit under the broad heading of creative nonfiction , and all are represented in this list of 100 major works of creative nonfiction published by British and American writers over the past 90 years or so. They're arranged alphabetically by author last name.

Recommended Creative Nonfiction

Edward Abbey, "Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness" (1968)
James Agee, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" (1941)
Martin Amis, "Experience" (1995)
Maya Angelou , "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" (1970)
Russell Baker, "Growing Up" (1982)
James Baldwin , "Notes of a Native Son" (1963)
Julian Barnes, "Nothing to Be Frightened Of" (2008)
Alan Bennett, "Untold Stories" (2005)
Wendell Berry, "Recollected Essays" (1981)
Bill Bryson, "Notes From a Small Island" (1995)
Anthony Burgess, "Little Wilson and Big God: Being the First Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess" (1987)
Joseph Campbell, "The Hero With a Thousand Faces" (1949)
Truman Capote , "In Cold Blood" (1965)
Rachel Carson, "Silent Spring" (1962)
Pat Conroy, "The Water Is Wide" (1972)
Harry Crews, "A Childhood: The Biography of a Place" (1978)
Joan Didion, "We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction" (2006)
Joan Didion, "The Year of Magical Thinking" (2005)
Annie Dillard, "An American Childhood" (1987)
Annie Dillard, "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" (1974)
Barbara Ehrenreich, "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America" (2001)
Gretel Ehrlich, "The Solace of Open Spaces" (1986)
Loren Eiseley, "The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature" (1957)
Ralph Ellison, "Shadow and Act" (1964)
Nora Ephron, "Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women" (1975)
Joseph Epstein, "Snobbery: The American Version" (2002)
Richard P. Feynman, "The Feynman Lectures on Physics" (1964)
Shelby Foote, "The Civil War: A Narrative" (1974)
Ian Frazier, "Great Plains" (1989)
Paul Fussell, "The Great War and Modern Memory" (1975)
Stephen Jay Gould, "Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History" (1977)
Robert Graves, "Good-Bye to All That" (1929)
Alex Haley, "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" (1965)
Pete Hamill, "A Drinking Life: A Memoir" (1994)
Ernest Hemingway , "A Moveable Feast" (1964)
Michael Herr, "Dispatches" (1977)
John Hersey, "Hiroshima" (1946)
Laura Hillenbrand, "Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption" (2010)
Edward Hoagland, "The Edward Hoagland Reader" (1979)
Eric Hoffer, "The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements" (1951)
Richard Hofstadter, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" (1963)
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, "Farewell to Manzanar" (1973)
Langston Hughes , "The Big Sea" (1940)
Zora Neale Hurston , "Dust Tracks on a Road" (1942)
Aldous Huxley, "Collected Essays" (1958)
Clive James, "Reliable Essays: The Best of Clive James" (2001)
Alfred Kazin, "A Walker in the City" (1951)
Tracy Kidder, "House" (1985)
Maxine Hong Kingston, "The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Childhood Among Ghosts" (1989)
Thomas Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (1962)
William Least Heat-Moon, "Blue Highways: A Journey Into America" (1982)
Bernard Levin, "Enthusiasms" (1983)
Barry Lopez, "Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape" (1986)
David McCullough, "Truman" (1992)
Dwight Macdonald, "Against The American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture" (1962)
John McPhee, "Coming Into the Country" (1977)
Rosemary Mahoney, "Whoredom in Kimmage: The Private Lives of Irish Women" (1993)
Norman Mailer, "The Armies of the Night" (1968)
Peter Matthiessen, "The Snow Leopard" (1979)
H.L. Mencken, "A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing" (1949)
Joseph Mitchell, "Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories" (1992)
Jessica Mitford, "The American Way of Death" (1963)
N. Scott Momaday, "Names" (1977)
Lewis Mumford, "The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects" (1961)
Vladimir Nabokov, "Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited" (1967)
P.J. O'Rourke, "Parliament of Whores" (1991)
Susan Orlean, "My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere" (2004)
George Orwell , "Down and Out in Paris and London" (1933)
George Orwell, "Essays" (2002)
Cynthia Ozick, "Metaphor and Memory" (1989)
Robert Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (1975)
Richard Rodriguez, "Hunger of Memory" (1982)
Lillian Ross, "Picture" (1952)
David Sedaris, "Me Talk Pretty One Day" (2000)
Richard Selzer, "Taking the World in for Repairs" (1986)
Zadie Smith, "Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays" (2009)
Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation and Other Essays" (1966)
John Steinbeck, "Travels with Charley" (1962)
Studs Terkel, "Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression" (1970)
Lewis Thomas, "The Lives of a Cell" (1974)
E.P. Thompson, "The Making of the English Working Class" (1963; rev. 1968)
Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream" (1971)
James Thurber, "My Life and Hard Times" (1933)
Lionel Trilling, "The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society" (1950)
Barbara Tuchman, "The Guns of August" (1962)
John Updike, "Self-Consciousness" (1989)
Gore Vidal, "United States: Essays 1952–1992" (1993)
Sarah Vowell, "The Wordy Shipmates" (2008)
Alice Walker , "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose" (1983)
David Foster Wallace, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments" (1997)
James D. Watson, "The Double Helix" (1968)
Eudora Welty, "One Writer's Beginnings" (1984)
E.B. White , "Essays of E.B. White" (1977)
E.B. White, "One Man's Meat" (1944)
Isabel Wilkerson, "The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration" (2010)
Tom Wolfe, "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" (1968)
Tom Wolfe, "The Right Stuff" (1979)
Tobias Wolff, "This Boy's Life: A Memoir" (1989)
Virginia Woolf , "A Room of One's Own" (1929)
Richard Wright, "Black Boy" (1945)
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Creative Nonfiction: An Overview

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The Creative Nonfiction (CNF) genre can be rather elusive. It is focused on story, meaning it has a narrative plot with an inciting moment, rising action, climax and denoument, just like fiction. However, nonfiction only works if the story is based in truth, an accurate retelling of the author’s life experiences. The pieces can vary greatly in length, just as fiction can; anything from a book-length autobiography to a 500-word food blog post can fall within the genre.

Additionally, the genre borrows some aspects, in terms of voice, from poetry; poets generally look for truth and write about the realities they see. While there are many exceptions to this, such as the persona poem, the nonfiction genre depends on the writer’s ability to render their voice in a realistic fashion, just as poetry so often does. Writer Richard Terrill, in comparing the two forms, writes that the voice in creative nonfiction aims “to engage the empathy” of the reader; that, much like a poet, the writer uses “personal candor” to draw the reader in.

Creative Nonfiction encompasses many different forms of prose. As an emerging form, CNF is closely entwined with fiction. Many fiction writers make the cross-over to nonfiction occasionally, if only to write essays on the craft of fiction. This can be done fairly easily, since the ability to write good prose—beautiful description, realistic characters, musical sentences—is required in both genres.

So what, then, makes the literary nonfiction genre unique?

The first key element of nonfiction—perhaps the most crucial thing— is that the genre relies on the author’s ability to retell events that actually happened. The talented CNF writer will certainly use imagination and craft to relay what has happened and tell a story, but the story must be true. You may have heard the idiom that “truth is stranger than fiction;” this is an essential part of the genre. Events—coincidences, love stories, stories of loss—that may be expected or feel clichéd in fiction can be respected when they occur in real life .

A writer of Creative Nonfiction should always be on the lookout for material that can yield an essay; the world at-large is their subject matter. Additionally, because Creative Nonfiction is focused on reality, it relies on research to render events as accurately as possible. While it’s certainly true that fiction writers also research their subjects (especially in the case of historical fiction), CNF writers must be scrupulous in their attention to detail. Their work is somewhat akin to that of a journalist, and in fact, some journalism can fall under the umbrella of CNF as well. Writer Christopher Cokinos claims, “done correctly, lived well, delivered elegantly, such research uncovers not only facts of the world, but reveals and shapes the world of the writer” (93). In addition to traditional research methods, such as interviewing subjects or conducting database searches, he relays Kate Bernheimer’s claim that “A lifetime of reading is research:” any lived experience, even one that is read, can become material for the writer.

The other key element, the thing present in all successful nonfiction, is reflection. A person could have lived the most interesting life and had experiences completely unique to them, but without context—without reflection on how this life of experiences affected the writer—the reader is left with the feeling that the writer hasn’t learned anything, that the writer hasn’t grown. We need to see how the writer has grown because a large part of nonfiction’s appeal is the lessons it offers us, the models for ways of living: that the writer can survive a difficult or strange experience and learn from it. Sean Ironman writes that while “[r]eflection, or the second ‘I,’ is taught in every nonfiction course” (43), writers often find it incredibly hard to actually include reflection in their work. He expresses his frustration that “Students are stuck on the idea—an idea that’s not entirely wrong—that readers need to think” (43), that reflecting in their work would over-explain the ideas to the reader. Not so. Instead, reflection offers “the crucial scene of the writer writing the memoir” (44), of the present-day writer who is looking back on and retelling the past. In a moment of reflection, the author steps out of the story to show a different kind of scene, in which they are sitting at their computer or with their notebook in some quiet place, looking at where they are now, versus where they were then; thinking critically about what they’ve learned. This should ideally happen in small moments, maybe single sentences, interspersed throughout the piece. Without reflection, you have a collection of scenes open for interpretation—though they might add up to nothing.