Twelve books of argument
Non-fiction that still reads as argument rather than monument: a naturalist's voyage, a case for liberty, a defence of culture, a study of magic and religion, and two American attempts to describe what race and money do to a society.
The list
- Walden — Henry David Thoreau, 1854. Part account book, part experiment in attention, still argued with 170 years later.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The Yellow Wallpaper — Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1892. Twenty minutes long, and the most economical unreliable narrator in the language.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - Apologia Pro Vita Sua — John Henry Newman, 1864. Victorian autobiography at its most lucid, written under pressure and without self-pity.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - Culture and Anarchy — Matthew Arnold, 1869. The source of 'sweetness and light', and a serious argument about what education is for.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The Stones of Venice — John Ruskin, 1851. A Victorian argument about buildings that is really an argument about labour.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - Nature — Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1836. The founding text of American transcendentalism, and a bracing argument against secondhand experience.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - Essays: First Series — Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841. The most quotable book in American literature, and a permanent argument against conformity.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - Far Away and Long Ago — W. H. Hudson, 1918. One of the best childhood memoirs in English, and a portrait of a vanished landscape.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The Souls of Black Folk — W. E. B. Du Bois, 1903. The founding book of modern American sociology, and one of the most beautiful essay collections ever written.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - On Liberty — John Stuart Mill, 1859. The clearest statement of the case for individual liberty in English, and still the starting point for the argument.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The Golden Bough — James George Frazer, 1890. A Victorian anthropology classic that shaped how the modern world thinks about myth.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - Common Sense — Thomas Paine, 1776. The most effective political pamphlet in English, and a lesson in how to write for a crowd.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon
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