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thoughtco.com /major-works-of-modern-creative-nonfiction-1688768
by Richard Nordquist
Essays, memoirs, autobiographies, biographies, travel writing, history,
cultural studies, nature writing--all fit under the broad heading of creative nonfiction, and
all are represented here: a list of 100 major works of creative nonfiction published by
British and American writers over the past 80 years. The links will direct you to
representative passages collected in our Scrapbook of Styles.
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17. Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)
18. Annie Dillard, An American Childhood (1987)
19. Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)
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19. Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942)
20. Aldous Huxley, Collected Essays (1958)
21. Clive James, Reliable Essays: The Best of Clive James (2001)
22. Alfred Kazin, A Walker in the City (1951)
23. Tracy Kidder, House (1985)
24. Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Childhood Among
Ghosts (1989)
1. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its
Prospects (1961)
2. Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited , (1967)
3. P.J. O'Rourke, Parliament of Whores (1991)
4. Susan Orlean, My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been
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Everywhere (2004)
5. George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
6. George Orwell, Essays (2002)
7. Cynthia Ozick, Metaphor and Memory (1989)
8. Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1975)
9. Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory (1982)
10. Lillian Ross, Picture (1952)
11. David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000)
12. Richard Selzer, Taking the World in for Repairs (1986)
13. Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (2009)
14. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)
15. John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley (1962)
16. Studs Terkel, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970)
17. Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell (1974)
18. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963; rev. 1968)
19. Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the
Heart of the American Dream (1971)
20. James Thurber, My Life and Hard Times (1933)
21. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (1950)
22. Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August (1962)
23. John Updike, Self-Consciousness (1989)
24. Gore Vidal, United States: Essays 1952-1992 (1993)
25. Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates (2008)
26. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983)
27. David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and
Arguments (1997)
28. James D. Watson, The Double Helix (1968)
29. Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings (1984)
30. E.B. White, Essays of E.B. White (1977)
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31. E.B. White, One Man's Meat (1944)
32. Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great
Migration (2010)
33. Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)
34. Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff (1979)
35. Tobias Wolff, This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)
36. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929)
37. Richard Wright, Black Boy (1945)
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