AP English Language Non-fiction Reading List

Autobiography, biography, journal, and history

Maya Angelou

• Gather Together in My Name
• The Heart of a Woman
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Walter Jackson Bate

• Samuel Johnson

Charles A. Beard

• An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution
• The Rise of American Civilization

Van Wyck Brooks

• An Autobiography
• Days of Phoenix
• From a Writer’s Notebook

Bruce Catton

• Mr. Loncoln’s Army
• A Stillness at Appomattox

Leon Edel

• Bloomsbury: A Hose of Lions
• Henry James, a Life
• The Stuff of Sleep and Dreams
• Telling Lives

Lillian Hellman

• Scoundrel Time
• Un Unfinished Woman

William Dean Howells

• Years of My Youth

Alfred Kazin

• New York Jew
• Starting Out in the Thirties
• A Walker in the City

Hellen Keller

• The Story of My Life

Maxine Hong Kingston

• The Woman Warrior
• China Men

 

 

Gerda Lerner

• The Creation of Patriarchy
• The Female Experience: An American Documentary
• The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History

Malcolm X

• The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Samuel Eliot Morison

• Christopher Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea
• The Growth of the American Republic
• Harrison Gray Otis: Urbane Federalist

Francis Parkman

·        The Oregon Trail

·        Pioneers of France in the New World

Richard Rodriquez

• Days of Obligation
• Hunger of Memory

Mari Sandoz

• The Battle of Little Bighorn
• Old Jules

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

• The Age of Jackson
• The Age of Roosevelt
• The Bitter Heritage
• Robert Kennedy and His Times
• A Thousand Days

Barbara Tuchman

• Bible and Sword
• A Distant Mirror
• The Guns of August
• The Proud Tower

Richard Wright

• American Hunger
• Black Boy

Anzia Yezierska

• Bread and Givers
• The Open Cage
• Red Ribbon on a White House

 

 

Essays and Criticism

James Agee

• Let us Now Praise Famous Men

Joan Didion

• Slouching Toward Bethlehem

Paul Fussell

• Bad, or the Dumbing of America
• The Great War and Modern Memory
• Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays

Pauline Kael

• 5001 Nights at the Movies
• I Lost It at the Movies
• State of the Art

William Hugh Kenner

• A Colder Eye

Joyce Carol Oates

• Contraries: Essays
• On Boxing
• Women Writers

Cynthia Ozick  Art and Ardor

Susan Sontag

• Against Interpretation
• Aids and Its Metaphors
• Illness as a Metaphor

John Updike

• Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism
• Self Consciousness

Gore Vidal

• Matters of Fact and Fiction
• Reflections upon a Stinking Ship
• Rocking the Boat

Eudora Welty

• The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews
• One Writer’s Beginnings

E.B. White

• The Essays of E.B. White
• One Man’s Meat

 

 

Political Writing and Journalism

Roger Angell

• Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion
• Late Innings
• Once More Around the Park

Hannah Arendt

• Between Past and Future
• The Human Condition
• On Revolution
• The Origins of Totalitarianism

Elizabeth Drew

• American Journal: Events of 1976
• Washington Journal: The Events of 1973-1974

 

 

 

Francis Fitzgerald

• America Revisited
• Cities on a Hill
• Fire in the Lake

John Kenneth Galbraith

• The Affluent Society
• Ambassador’s Journal
• The Anatomy of Power
• The Nature of Mass Poverty

Calvin Trillin

• American Fried
• An Education in Georgia
• Third Helpings
• Uncivil Liberties

Tom Wolfe

• The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby