100 Most Influential Books of the Century
A bookllist for adults. List compiled by Dawn Cook, General Library, Adult Reader and Information Services, Boston Public Library, May 2000.
- 1
- 2
Philosophy of Modern Music
Theodor Adorno · 1973 · 1 list
- 3
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
James Agee · 1941 · 5 lists
- 4
Go Tell It on the Mountain
James Baldwin · 1952 · 9 lists
- 5
The Second Sex
Simone de Beauvoir · 1949 · 6 lists
- 6
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
Julia Child · 1961 · 1 list
- 7
Patterns of Culture
Ruth Benedict · 1934 · 1 list
- 8
The Engineering of Consent
Edward Bernays · 1955 · 1 list
- 9
Our Bodies, Ourselves
Unknown · 1891 · 1 list
- 10
I and Thou
Martin Buber · 1923 · 2 lists
- 11
A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess · 1962 · 17 lists
- 12
The Stranger
Albert Camus · 1942 · 23 lists
- 13
How to Win Friends and Influence People
Dale Carnegie · 1913 · 4 lists
- 14
Silent Spring
Rachel Carson · 1962 · 9 lists
- 15
The Cherry Orchard
Anton Chekhov · 1904 · 2 lists
- 16
2001
Arthur C. Clarke · 1968 · 5 lists
- 17
The Joy of Sex
Alex Comfort · 1972 · 2 lists
- 18
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad · 1899 · 29 lists
- 19
Looking at Dance
Edwin Denby · 1943 · 1 list
- 20
The School and the Child
John Dewey · 1990 · 1 list
- 21
Genetics and the Origin of Species
Theodosius Dobzhansky · 1937 · 1 list
- 22
Relativity
Albert Einstein · 1925 · 4 lists
- 23
Prufrock and Other Observations
T.S. Eliot · 1917 · 2 lists
- 24
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1925 · 43 lists
- 25
The Diary of a Young Girl
Anne Frank · 1947 · 10 lists
- 26
Man's Search for Meaning
Viktor Frankl · 2017 · 1 list
- 27
The Golden Bough
James George Frazer · 1890 · 2 lists
- 28
The Interpretation of Dreams
Sigmund Freud · 2018 · 10 lists
- 29
The Masters and the Slaves
Gilberto Freyre · 1956 · 1 list
- 30
Satyagraha in South Africa
Gandhi · 1928 · 2 lists
- 31
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez · 1967 · 33 lists
- 32
Howl and Other Poems
Allen Ginsberg · 1956 · 4 lists
- 33
In the Shadow of Man
Jane Goodall · 1971 · 1 list
- 34
Creatures that Once Were Men
Maxim Gorky · 1905 · 1 list
- 35
Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus
John Gray · 1992 · 1 list
- 36
Art and Culture
Clement Greenberg · 1961 · 1 list
- 37
Roots
Alex Haley · 1861 · 7 lists
- 38
Being and Time
Martin Heidegger · 1927 · 2 lists
- 39
Uncertainty Principle
Werner Heisenberg · 2014 · 1 list
- 40
Catch-22
Joseph Heller · 1961 · 29 lists
- 41
The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway · 1926 · 22 lists
- 42
Steppenwolf
Hermann Hesse · 1927 · 8 lists
- 43
Reflections from Captivity
Ho Chi Minn · 1978 · 1 list
- 44
Pragmatism
William James · 1999 · 5 lists
- 45
Encyclicals of Pope John XXIII
Pope John XXIII · 1963 · 1 list
- 46
Ulysses
James Joyce · 1920 · 39 lists
- 47
Psychology of the Unconscious
C.G. Jung · 1912 · 1 list
- 48
The Trial
Franz Kafka · 1925 · 21 lists
- 49
On the Road
Jack Kerouac · 1957 · 24 lists
- 50
- 51
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
Alfred C. Kinsey · 1948 · 3 lists
- 52
Darkness at Noon
Arthur Koestler · 1948 · 7 lists
- 53
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Thomas Kuhn · 1962 · 5 lists
- 54
Lady Chatterley's Lover
D.H. Lawrence · 1900 · 8 lists
- 55
The Golden Notebook
Doris May Lessing · 1962 · 11 lists
- 56
The Raw and the Cooked
Claude Lévi-Strauss · 1969 · 1 list
- 57
Babbitt
Sinclair Lewis · 1922 · 6 lists
- 58
On Aggression
Konrad Lorenz · 1966 · 1 list
- 59
Man's Fate
André Malraux · 1934 · 4 lists
- 60
The Magic Mountain
Thomas Mann · 1924 · 18 lists
- 61
Quotations from Chairman Mao
Anonymous · 1972 · 3 lists
- 62
Motivation and Personality
Abraham Maslow · 1954 · 1 list
- 63
Coming of Age in Samoa
Margaret Mead · 1928 · 2 lists
- 64
The Seven Storey Mountain
Thomas Merton · 1948 · 2 lists
- 65
The Power Elite
C. Wright Mills · 1956 · 2 lists
- 66
A Critique of the Theory of Evolution
Thomas Hunt Morgan · 1916 · 1 list
- 67
The Montessori Method
Maria Montessori · 1917 · 1 list
- 68
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov · 1955 · 38 lists
- 69
Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell · 1948 · 36 lists
- 70
Conditioned Reflexes
Ivan Pavlov · 1927 · 1 list
- 71
Judgement and Reasoning in the Child
Jean Piaget · 1928 · 1 list
- 72
Six Characters in Search of an Author
Luigi Pirandello · 1921 · 3 lists
- 73
In Search of Lost Time
Marcel Proust · 1913 · 29 lists
- 74
Atlas Shrugged
Ayn Rand · 1936 · 9 lists
- 75
Ten Days That Shook the World
John Reed · 1919 · 2 lists
- 76
Function of the Orgasm
Wilhelm Reich · 1948 · 2 lists
- 77
All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque · 1929 · 11 lists
- 78
How the Other Half Lives
Jacob A. Riis · 1890 · 2 lists
- 79
Intelligent Life in the Universe
Carl Sagan · 1966 · 1 list
- 80
The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger · 1951 · 32 lists
- 81
Happiness in Marriage
Margaret Sanger · 1936 · 1 list
- 82
Being and Nothingness
Jean-Paul Sartre · 1966 · 4 lists
- 83
The Jungle
Upton Sinclair · 1906 · 8 lists
- 84
Beyond Freedom and Dignity
B. F. Skinner · 1971 · 2 lists
- 85
The Gulag Archipelago
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 1973 · 5 lists
- 86
Decline of the West
Oswald Spengler · 1928 · 1 list
- 87
The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care
Benjamin Spock · 1946 · 5 lists
- 88
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck · 1939 · 32 lists
- 89
Smoking and Health
Surgeon General · 1959 · 2 lists
- 90
The History of the Standard Oil Company
Ida Tarbell · 1904 · 2 lists
- 91
Theory of Games and Economic Behavior
John von Neumann · 1944 · 1 list
- 92
AA Big Book
Bill W · 2019 · 1 list
- 93
The Double Helix
James D. Watson · 1968 · 6 lists
- 94
Behaviorism
John Watson · 1914 · 1 list
- 95
Cybernetics
Norbert Wiener · 1948 · 2 lists
- 96
A Room of One’s Own
Virginia Woolf · 1929 · 5 lists
- 97
Native Son
Richard Wright · 1940 · 18 lists
- 98
Syntactic Structures
Noam Chomsky · 1957 · 2 lists
- 99
The Feminine Mystique
Betty Friedan · 1963 · 5 lists
- 100
Mein Kampf
Adolf Hitler · 1925 · 2 lists
