Recommended Books

Here, in their own words, are the answers to the question, What book did you read when you were young that most influenced your life? The answers reflect the wonderfully varied power of books, and remind us of some neglected timeless classics and other works we may want to take into our own lives.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X
by Malcolm X and Alex Haley
R.E. Lee, A Biography
by Douglas Southall Freeman
The Little Grey Men
by B.B. (Denys Watkins-Pitchford)
Dubliners
by James Joyce
The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Wrinkle in Time
by Madeleine L'Engle
Snow Crash
by Neal Stephenson
A Study of History
by Arnold J. Toynbee
The Third Wave
by Alvin Toffler
The Two-Ocean War
by Samuel Eliot Morison
A Streetcar Named Desire
by Tennessee Williams
The Wizard of Oz
by L. Frank Baum
Arabian Nights
by Sir Richard Burton
Napoleon
by Vincent Cronin
David Copperfield
by Charles Dickens
Fathers and Sons
by Ivan Turgenev
A Separate Peace
by John Knowles
The Road Less Traveled
by M. Scott Peck, M.D.
Profiles in Courage
by John F. Kennedy
One Two Three…Infinity
by George Gamow
The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck
The Reason Why
by Cecil Woodham-Smith
The Warlord of Mars
by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Amusing Ourselves to Death
by Neil Postman
The Name Above the Title
by Frank Capra
Moby-Dick, or The Whale
by Herman Melville
Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
Roughing It
by Mark Twain
The Song of Hiawatha
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Nineteen Eighty-Four
by George Orwell
Escape From Freedom
by Erich Fromm
My Name is Aram
by William Saroyan
The Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner
Oliver Twist
by Charles Dickens
Reveille in Washington
by Margaret Leech
Lost Illusions
by Honoré de Balzac
The Moon is Down
by John Steinbeck
Leaves of Grass
by Walt Whitman
The Jungle
by Upton Sinclair
The Cloister and the Hearth
by Charles Reade
The Moviegoer
by Walker Percy
The Story of Ferdinand
by Munro Leaf
Walden and Civil Disobedience
by Henry David Thoreau
D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths
by Ingri and Edgar Parin D'Aulaire
Crime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Holy Bible
by World Bible Publishing
The Island Within
by Ludwig Lewisohn
A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
Arrowsmith
by Sinclair Lewis
Don Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes
To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee
The Catcher in the Rye
by J.D. Salinger
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Waste Land
by T.S. Eliot
Miss Pickerell Goes to Mars
by Ellen MacGregor
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
by Betty Smith
Studs Lonigan
by James T. Farrell
All the King’s Men
by Robert Penn Warren