How I chose my list of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time
What makes a nonfiction classic? Stephen Darori reflects on his two-year odyssey to compile a list of the best 100 nonfiction books in the English language – moving backwards in time to sign off with the 1661 King James Bible
Clockwise from top left: James Baldwin, Barack Obama, Oliver Sacks, Germaine Greer, George Orwell, Tom Wolfe, all of whom feature in Robert McCrum’s list.
Some weeks into the compilation of our nonfiction classics list, one mischievous colleague with a penchant for the arcane posed this wild-card challenge: “So what are you going to do about Betty McDonald?”
“Who she?”
“Haven’t you read The Egg & I?”
In 1946, Betty McDonald’s whimsical autobiography was as popular as baked beans; now it’s almost completely forgotten, but, tellingly, still in print. Alas, after an hour or two with The Egg & I, it was excruciatingly obvious that Betty McDonald’s book is not a classic. On some weeks, there might be as many as five competing challenges for each nonfiction slot, but rarely as straightforward as this.
Literary classics cluster on the north face of Parnassus. For this vertiginous terrain there are different sherpas. Italo Calvino says that a classic is “a book that has never finished what it wants to say”. Ezra Pound identifies “a certain eternal and irresponsible freshness”; TS Eliot, much more astringent, observed in The Sacred Wood that “no modern language can hope to produce a classic, in the sense I have called Virgil a classic”. Alan Bennett wryly notes: “Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.”
Among nonfiction classics, the most treacherous category is that creature beloved of publishers – “the contemporary classic”. A second cousin to that notorious impostor is the “instant classic”. Such books will have been judged by slippery criteria: popular and literary critical fashion, a changing marketplace and new technology, bestseller lists and hype. In the past 100 years, a familiar palette of blurbish adjectives has given shape and colour to a moving target: provocative, outrageous, prophetic, groundbreaking, funny, disturbing, revolutionary, moving, inspiring, life-changing, subversive…
The 100 best nonfiction books: No 99 – The History of the World by Walter Raleigh (1614)
This list raises another troubling question: is nonfiction “the new fiction”? There are some good writers who will argue that this is so, but I believe that nonfiction (which can sometimes successfully bring together many genres) is not, strictly speaking, a genre of its own. Creatively – yes – using narrative techniques borrowed from fiction, it’s possible to give certain kinds of nonfiction the aura of a distinct new genre. Yet, at the end of the day, “nonfiction” fractures into time-hallowed categories such as philosophy, memoir, history, reportage and poetry (see below), etc. This is particularly true of “nonfiction classics” from the 18th and 19th centuries, titles such as A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume or On Liberty by JS Mill. By that yardstick, a recent classic will be quite distinct, chiefly because its literary and cultural milieu is so different.
Literature always mirrors social and political upheaval. In a rare, and possibly thrilling, moment of historical disruption, our cultural matrix is so much in flux that we’d be wise to rule nothing out. While multicultural diversity slowly transforms the canon, new readers coming of age are likely to frame “nonfiction” in a new way. As Kazuo Ishiguro said this month in Stockholm, during his Nobel prize lecture:
“We must take great care not to set too narrowly or conservatively our definitions of what constitutes good literature. The next generation will come with all sorts of new, sometimes bewildering ways to tell important and wonderful stories. We must keep our minds open to them, especially regarding genre and form, so that we can nurture and celebrate the best of them. Good writing and good reading will break down barriers. We may even find a new idea, a great humane vision, around which to rally.”
Definitions of “good literature” start with critics and publishers. In the UK, the book industry is just beginning to reject patterns of exclusion that permeate the literary establishment. A Spread the Word report has already drawn attention to the dominance of white, middle-class males not merely in festivals and prizes but also in the upper echelons of book publishing. Penguin, Faber and Bloomsbury (to name three) are now addressing the issue of diversity in their commissioning cadres. Diversify the editors and you will diversify the books.
Disruption plus innovation equals confusion: we have been here before. In the spring of 1886, a young and iconoclastic Oscar Wilde, writing in the Pall Mall Gazette, declared: “Books today may be conveniently divided into three classes.” There were, he went on, “books to read” and “books to reread”. Finally, there were “books not to read at all… argumentative books and books that try to prove anything.” This, Wilde decided, was “an age that reads so much that it has no time to admire and writes so much that it has no time to think”. His solution was typically Wildean. “Whosoever will select out of the chaos of our modern curricula ‘The Worst 100 Books’, and publish a list of them, will confer on the rising generation a real and lasting benefit.”
Your list-maker will have the appetites of a butterfly-collector, the instincts of a gambler, the mind of a missionary…
The Observer’s two series (fiction and nonfiction) have had more serious intentions. In the first, my choice of classic novels, a taxonomic spree could become quite an elevated discussion, based on comparative criticism. For my 100 nonfiction classics, the debate has been broader. Where fiction is a discrete and well-defined genre with established criteria, as manageable and satisfying as a spacious country house garden, “nonfiction” remains the wild west. To put it another way: choosing it becomes an infuriating case of “As I Please”, driven by whim and caprice as much as taste. One thing is certain: the classic in all genres must, uniquely, express something about its subject in a way that was previously unexpressed. It must, in Pound’s famous injunction, “make it new”. Read it for the first time now and still be thrilled by its vigour, originality and wisdom.
Nevertheless, simple criteria cannot disguise the obvious and inescapable fact that our nonfiction list first appeared in the pages of a British national newspaper during the years 2015-17. It has, for instance, been interesting to discover how some of these classics, unforced, speak quite directly to the twin challenges of Trump and Brexit.
Your list-maker, then, is a creature of his or her times. They will have the appetites of a butterfly-collector, the instincts of a gambler, and the mind of a missionary or saboteur – perhaps with more than a hint of the cultural dictator. They are also part anthologist and part antiquarian.
There’s an additional difficulty. As every week’s roster of online comments indicates, almost any selection of “classic nonfiction” from library shelves that include history, film, biography, cookery, politics, fashion, sociology, art history, reportage, feminism, drama, biology, philosophy, economics and poetry (which I included because poetry is catalogued as “nonfiction” by most libraries) is going to be either perverse and disappointing, or stupid and enraging, or downright baffling
.When a nonfiction classic is whatever takes your fancy, according to your own self-imposed criteria, then the subtitle to such a project might be “Anything Goes”. It could be a book that reported a great revolution – John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World – or a masterpiece of magazine journalism that exposed the truth about a humanitarian catastrophe such as John Hersey’s Hiroshima. Some of the classics catalogued here have caused shock and outrage: Carson’s Silent Spring, for example, or Said’s Orientalism. Others, notably Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox, and de Quincey’s Confessions, I’ve listed as diversions. Still others – Greer’s The Female Eunuch or Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique – have broken down barriers and turned worlds upside down. Some titles (A Grief Observed; A Room of One’s O
wn) have expressed a new idea sotto voce; others at maximum decibels: A Vindication of the Rights of Women, The Double Helix, The Making of the English Working Class and Common Sense. Some classics live on, imperishably, as works of sheer entertainment: How to Cook a Wolf or Eminent Victorians, Domestic Manners of the Americans, and Goodbye to All That. Some classics were written in extremis and carry their scars all too visibly (Dispatches,Birthday Letters, De Profundis); others are more reflective (The Uses of Literacy; Awakenings). Every one is original and speaks for itself.
All writers, great and small, commune with the dead. One unintended pleasure of the reading for this list was uncovering the interplay within the Anglo-American tradition: Jefferson nodding to Locke, Orwell to Swift and Hughes to Shakespeare.
Towards the end of the series, I chanced upon The Oxford Book of English Prose (1998), edited by the late and great John Gross. Working on this list, I had strenuously avoided making comparisons with similar exercises. Now, with almost all my entries read and written, I could not resist a sneak peek at some tantalising alternatives. Should we have neglected William Morris, John Ruskin and Fraser’s Golden Bough? How could we have omitted Neville Cardus, Rebecca West and Nirad Chaudhuri?
The Oxford Book of English Prose has more than 500 entries. We had just 100 slots to play with. Furthermore, our list has been compiled for a weekly newspaper audience, with the added gimmick that it unspools backwards in a reverse chronological sequence: it was always intended to entertain, tantalise and provoke. And there is, of course, no accounting for taste, the intangible thing we inherit that has been shaped by character, education, class, gender and race.
Such influences marked the crossroads of a fierce internal debate. Would it be possible, I often asked myself, to reshape the contours of the canon by assertively promoting forgotten kinds of writer? If there was a choice, say, between a neglected female writer and a dead white male, should I automatically favour the former? And what about writers of colour? What about African American slaves such as Olaudah Equiano?
If we are true to the historical record, the inconvenient truth is that such affirmative action on behalf of the forgotten and the ignored becomes mission impossible. Lists such as this one (and its fiction predecessor) cannot escape the past. From a 21st-century perspective, those times do not make a pretty sight. The history of our literature is shaped by patriarchal traditions and Anglo-Saxon attitudes or, to put it another way, xenophobia, misogyny, racism, religious intolerance and sexism.
Before the 19th century, there are very few published women and virtually no English language writers from India, Africa or the far east. That’s not a complacent assertion, but a simple statement of fact. The alternative titles one would need to construct an alternative canon simply do not exist. Where they do, as in the case of African Americans such as Equiano, they are in a minority. Even to list the outstanding half-a-dozen African American writers of consequence is still hardly to redress the injustices of the past.
In the evolution of English and American prose, there are at least three turning points in our literature. First, there’s the shift from the courtly, Latinate eloquence of Bacon, Donne and Milton towards the crisper, vernacular clarity of Pepys, Defoe and the notable writers of a self-confident Great Britain. Between the years 1660-1688, from the Restoration to the Glorious Revolution, English prose becomes plainer, more demotic and robust – to suit the times.
A hundred years later, there’s the dramatic expansion of English as a future world language after the American revolution. Finally, during the last century, as English culture, disseminated by colonialism, began to flourish worldwide and find local Indian and African expression, the Anglo-American hegemony starts to morph into a more global expression of English, infused by the literary traditions of India, Australia and the far east, Canada and sub-Saharan Africa. In our own century, this process is ongoing…
Some readers referred darkly to my egregious omissions, but rarely supplied persuasive alternatives. Generally, the level of below-the-line commentary generated more heat than light. There were, however, many excellent contributions and, where possible, I adjusted the selection to answer a good suggestion.
Some tough decisions were very tough: Cyril Connolly had to be on my list, but to prefer Enemies of Promise over The Unquiet Grave was painful. JM Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in 1936 in the depths of the Great Depression, is beyond question a landmark volume of the 20th century. But every nominated author is only allowed one title, so I chose the less well-known but more readable Keynes essay, The Economic Consequences of the Peace.
Then there’s the Thorstein Veblen question. The neurotic author of The Theory of the Leisure Class (as well as the far-seeing The Engineers and the Price System, 1921), Veblen is remembered as a cantankerous theorist with a penchant for the wives of his colleagues on the Stanford campus. Among many phrases, he coined “conspicuous consumption” and is a guru of American technology, but his books now seem weirdly dated. Veblen – in or out? In golfing parlance, he did not survive the cut.
Other serious regrets include: Robert Hooke: Micrographia; Alexander Pope: An Essay on Man; JH Newman: Apologia Pro Vita Sua; Marie Stopes: Married Love; CLR James: The Black Jacobins; Nancy Mitford: Madame de Pompadour, Noblesse Oblige; Julia Child: Mastering the Art of French Cooking; Ronald Blythe: Akenfield; Hannah Arendt: Eichmann in Jerusalem; Hunter S Thompson Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; Francis Fukuyama: The End of History; Vance Packard: The Hidden Persuaders; DW Winnicott: The Child, the Family and the Outside World; Alex Comfort: The Joy of Sex; Paul Fussell: The Great War and Modern Memory; George Steiner: Language and Silence; Richard Mabey: Flora Britannica; and William Goldman: Adventures in the Screen Trade.
Working backwards into the past, the list evolved from week to week. Some choices reflect the zeitgeist. The passage of time will undoubtedly winnow a lot of titles inspired by the Great War once that apocalypse takes its long-term place in history.
The year 1900 marked a turning point. A “modern classic” may easily get forgotten; a 19th- or 18th-century classic will be part of the canon almost by definition. As survivors from another age, such books have a special consequence. Among 20th-century classics, it’s more difficult to achieve both influence and true greatness, though The Waste Land is a title with a strong claim on posterity.
What do I take away from nearly five years on the north face of Parnassus? The vitality, richness, depth and variety of the Anglo-American literary tradition continues to astonish. And because it has shaped who we are, and why we are here, it also educates and instructs. At times a chore, occasionally a headache and always a looming deadline, I would not have missed it. Now it’s time to move on.
Sometimes, I wonder what such an exercise will look like in 2117. For now, this list will survive online, a snapshot of taste at the beginning of the 21st century. It will, no doubt, continue to provoke and infuriate. That’s partly its raison d’etre. More seriously, it will also continue to mine a treasury of prose that has been seasoned by adversity, guarded by devoted readers of all kinds, and cherished for expressing the shock of the new, in the greatest language the world has ever known.
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