Essays book series in reading order

by Jill Conner Browne

Wendell Berry (August 5, 1934 - August 31, 2026) was an American novelist, poet, essayist, farmer, environmental activist and cultural critic closely tied to rural Kentucky. Berry set out agrarian themes in The Unsettling of America (1977) and The Gift of Good Land (1981). The Port William novels and stories, including A Place on Earth, Jayber Crow and That Distant Land, examine rural community life. Berry received the National Humanities Medal, delivered the 2012 Jefferson Lecture and belonged to the Fellowship of Southern Writers. The catalogue lists 104 books from Nathan Coulter (1960) to Marce Catlett (2025).

Gore Vidal

67 books• 6 series

Gore Vidal, born Eugene Louis Vidal on October 3, 1925, was an American writer and public intellectual noted for a cynical, epigrammatic wit, and died on July 31, 2012. Vidal's novels and essays attacked the social and sexual norms Vidal saw shaping American life. Born into an upper-class political family as grandson of U.S. Senator Thomas Gore, Vidal ran unsuccessfully as a Democrat for the House of Representatives in New York in 1960 and for the Senate in California in 1982. The catalogue lists 67 books from Williwaw (1946) to I Told You So (2012), including In a Yellow Wood (1947), The City and the Pillar (1948) and Death Before Bedtime (1953). Narratives of Empire and Myra and Myron are among the series.

John Angus McPhee, born on 8 March 1931, is an American writer regarded as a pioneer of creative nonfiction. McPhee was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in General Nonfiction four times and won in 1999 for Annals of the Former World, a collection of five books. The George Polk Career Award followed in 2008, and McPhee has held the Ferris Professorship of Journalism at Princeton University since 1974. The catalogue lists 45 McPhee books, from A Sense of Where You Are (1965) to They're in the River (2025), including Oranges (1967), The Pine Barrens (1967) and Encounters with the Archdruid (1971). Subjects include geology, essays and travel.

George Orwell

67 books• 3 series

George Orwell's catalogue divides between fiction and reportage: Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), Burmese Days (1934), The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), Homage to Catalonia (1938) and Animal Farm (1945) stand among the titles. Essays, diaries and correspondence account for much of the rest, gathered in the Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters. Sixty-six titles are catalogued, the earliest A Hanging (1931) and the latest an edition dated 2022.

David Sedaris

22 books• 2 series

David Sedaris writes humorous essays and diaries, filed as American wit and non-fiction rather than as any kind of novel. The catalogue holds 22 books from 1992 to 2026, among them Barrel Fever (1994), Naked (1997), Holidays on Ice and Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000). The Diaries are a separate strand. Collections median 264 pages, and Sedaris publishes on, most recently with The Land and its People.

Joan Didion

30 books

Joan Didion wrote essays and novels about American social conditions, politics and the places she reported from. Run River (1963) is the earliest catalogued title, followed by Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), Play It As It Lays (1970), The White Album (1979), Salvador (1983) and Miami (1987). Thirty books are listed, the newest Notes to John in 2025, at 238 pages on median.

John Updike

83 books• 8 series

John Updike, born March 18, 1932, was an American novelist, short-story writer, poet and critic of art and literature who died on January 27, 2009. Updike won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice, one of only four writers to do so, and the output spans over twenty novels and more than twelve short-story collections, plus poetry, children's books and criticism of art and literature. The New Yorker printed hundreds of Updike stories, reviews and poems from 1954 on, and Updike wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books. The catalogue lists 83 books from The Poorhouse Fair (1958) to Hoping for a Hoopoe (2020), including Rabbit, Run (1960) and The Centaur (1963). Series include Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, Henry Bech, Maples Stories and Eastwick.

Umberto Eco

53 books• 4 series

Umberto Eco, who lived from 5 January 1932 to 19 February 2016, was an Italian novelist, philosopher, medievalist, semiotician and cultural critic. In English, Eco is best known for two novels. The Name of the Rose is a historical mystery that folds semiotics, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory into its plot. Foucault's Pendulum (1988) takes up the history of occultism and how the new age movement reinterprets it. The catalogue lists 53 books, opening with Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (1959) and including The Open Work (1962), A Theory of Semiotics (1978) and The Role of the Reader (1979). Subjects include semiotics, aesthetics, philosophy of language and Italian essays.

Susan Sontag

34 books• 4 series

Susan Lee Sontag (January 16, 1933 - December 28, 2004) was an American writer and critic who worked mainly in the essay while also publishing novels. Her first major work was the 1964 essay Notes on 'Camp'. The best-known critical books are Against Interpretation (1966), Illness as Metaphor (1978), On Photography (1977) and Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), beside the short story The Way We Live Now (1986) and the novels The Volcano Lover (1992) and In America (1999). Sontag wrote about and travelled to places in conflict, among them Vietnam during the war and Sarajevo under siege. The catalogue gathers 34 titles, the 1960s the heaviest decade, and Susan Sontag on Women (2023) is the most recent entry.

Toni Morrison

46 books• 11 series

Toni Morrison, born Chloe Ardelia Wofford (1931-2019), was an American novelist and editor and the 1993 Nobel laureate in Literature. The Bluest Eye (1970) was Morrison's first novel. Song of Solomon (1977) won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Beloved (1987) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. Sula (1973) and Recitatif (1983) are further works. Morrison grew up in Lorain, Ohio, and earned a B.A. in English at Howard University in 1953. The catalogue lists 46 books, including non-fiction, plays and short fiction, with Language as Liberation dated 2026.

Virginia Woolf

74 books• 6 series

Modernist writing in English owes a great deal to Virginia Woolf, who lived from 1882 to 1941 and did more than most to establish stream-of-consciousness narration as a working technique. Woolf was born in South Kensington, the seventh child of Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Jackson, and grew up among eight siblings, the painter Vanessa Bell among them. The catalogue collects her diaries, journals, letters and Collected Essays, together with biography and criticism of Woolf herself.

Mary Oliver (1935-2019) was an American poet whose subject was the natural world. The Pulitzer Prize came to Oliver in 1984, and the National Book Award followed in 1992. The catalogue holds 37 titles dated 1972 to 2026, from The River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems to Goldfinches, taking in American Primitive (1983), Dream Work (1986), House of Light (1990) and A Poetry Handbook (1994). The volumes are short, around 80 pages at the median, and essay collections sit beside the poetry.

Jonathan Franzen

23 books• 2 series

Jonathan Franzen, born August 17, 1959, is an American novelist and essayist who has written for The New Yorker since 1994. The Corrections (2001) won the National Book Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist and made the International Dublin Literary Award shortlist. Freedom (2010) put Franzen on the cover of Time under the headline "Great American Novelist". Crossroads (2021) is the first novel of a projected trilogy. Earlier books include The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), Strong Motion (1992), How to Be Alone (2002) and The Discomfort Zone (2006).

Zadie Smith

19 books• 1 series

Zadie Smith is an English novelist and essayist. The debut novel White Teeth (2000) opens a catalogue of 19 books running to 2025, which takes in The Autograph Man (2002), On Beauty (2005), NW (2012), Swing Time (2016) and the essay collections Changing My Mind (2009) and Feel Free (2018). Immigration, ethnic relations, male friendship and social isolation recur as subjects. Smith remains actively publishing.

Chuck Klosterman

76 books• 1 series

American popular culture is Chuck Klosterman's subject, rock music and sport in particular. Born in 1972, Klosterman has been a columnist for Esquire and ESPN.com, wrote The Ethicist column for The New York Times Magazine, and took the ASCAP Deems Taylor award for music criticism in 2002. The catalogue opens with Fargo Rock City (2001) and runs through Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs (2003), Killing Yourself to Live (2005), Downtown Owl (2008) and Eating the Dinosaur (2009) to Football (2026). Heavy metal, essays and American civilization since 1970 recur as subjects.

Norman Mailer

56 books• 1 series

Norman Mailer (January 31, 1923 to November 10, 2007), born Nachem Malech Mailer, was an American writer, journalist and filmmaker. Over more than six decades Mailer produced 11 bestsellers, with at least one in each of the seven decades after the Second World War. The Naked and the Dead (1948) brought early fame. The Armies of the Night (1968), a nonfiction novel, won both the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and the National Book Award, and The Executioner's Song (1979) won the Pulitzer for fiction. An American Dream and The Fight are other well-known works. The catalogue lists 56 titles, including Barbary Shore (1952), The Deer Park (1955) and Advertisements for Myself (1959).

David Foster Wallace

25 books• 1 series

David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist and professor. Infinite Jest (1996), his second novel, is the book he is best known for, and the Los Angeles Times critic David Ulin called him one of the most influential and innovative writers of the previous twenty years. Wallace grew up in Illinois and studied at Amherst College and the University of Arizona; his Amherst thesis on philosophy and modal logic became his first novel, The Broom of the System (1987). Twenty-four catalogued titles include the essay collections and the tennis writing.

Isaac Asimov

553 books• 31 series

Isaac Asimov (c. January 2, 1920 – April 6, 1992) was an American writer who also taught biochemistry at Boston University. Hard science fiction is the core of Asimov's reputation, and the Foundation series about a fallen space empire is the most famous work; Asimov ranked with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke as one of the "Big Three" of the genre. The output also covers mysteries, fantasy and popular science, with non-fiction lines such as How Did We Find Out and the Library of the Universe. Asimov wrote or edited more than 500 books. This catalogue opens with the story Marooned Off Vesta (1939) and names Asimov on 400 of the listed books.

Ursula K. Le Guin

121 books• 18 series

Ursula K. Le Guin (born Ursula Kroeber, 21 October 1929 to 22 January 2018) was an American writer of speculative fiction, including science fiction set in the Hainish universe and the Earthsea fantasy series. First published in 1959, Le Guin wrote for nearly sixty years, producing more than twenty novels and over a hundred short stories alongside poetry, criticism, translations and children's books. Catalogued titles include April in Paris (1962), Rocannon's World (1966), A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) and The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). Le Guin series include Hainish Cycle, Catwings, Orsinia and Annals of the Western Shore.

Joyce Carol Oates

180 books• 8 series

Joyce Carol Oates, born June 16, 1938, is an American writer of novels, short stories, poetry, plays and nonfiction. The catalogue holds 180 books, beginning with By the North Gate (1963) and reaching The Frenzy: Stories (2026). Oates took the National Book Award for the novel Them (1969), and later honours include two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal and the Jerusalem Prize in 2019. Black Water, What I Lived For, Blonde and the collection Lovely, Dark, Deep were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Oates taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014.

Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay in 1947 to a Kashmiri family, and his 27 catalogued books run from Grimus (1975) to The Eleventh Hour (2025). He won the Booker Prize in 1981, the year Midnight's Children appeared. Much of the fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent and mixes magical realism with historical fiction, returning to migration and rupture between East and West. The catalogue holds essays and short stories as well as novels, among them Imaginary Homelands (1991) and East, West (1994), alongside The Satanic Verses (1988) and The Moor's Last Sigh (1995). Rushdie continues to publish.

Alice Walker

50 books• 1 series

Alice Walker is an American novelist, poet, short story writer and social activist. Walker's 50 catalogued books run from The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) to Sweet People Are Everywhere (2021). The Color Purple (1982) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Walker the first African-American woman to take that award, and it heads a Color Purple sequence. Poetry such as Revolutionary Petunias (1973) and essays such as In Search of Our Mother's Garden (1983) sit beside the novels. African American women authors, biography and poetry recur as subject headings. No new title has appeared since 2021.

Rebecca Solnit

30 books• 1 series

Rebecca Solnit is an American writer and activist, born in 1961, whose subjects include feminism, the environment, politics, place and art. River of Shadows won the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. A Paradise Built in Hell (2009, revised 2020) examines how communities help one another after disasters, The Faraway Nearby (2013) is a memoir, and Men Explain Things to Me (2014) collects essays on feminism and women's writing. The catalogue lists 30 titles, beginning with Secret Exhibition (1991) and including Savage Dreams (1994), Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2001) and A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005). The Beginning Comes After the End (2026) is the newest.

Lewis Grizzard was an American humorist who wrote about the South. Grizzard began as a newspaper sports writer and became sports editor of the Atlanta Journal at 23, then built a following with humour columns in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, plus stand-up and lecture work. The 26 catalogued books, a good many of them collections of those columns, open with Kathy Sue Loudermilk, I Love You (1979) and carry long comic titles throughout, Elvis is Dead And I Don't Feel So Good Myself (1984) among them. The list closes in 2001.