theLeftAhead Literary Canon

Fiction

(In Reverse Chronological Order):

Jane Anne Phillips - Night Watch (2023)

Gabrielle Zevin - Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (2022)

Charles Yu - Interior Chinatown (2020)

Madeline Miller - Circe (2018)

Andrew Sean Greer - Less (2017)

Colson Whitehead - The Underground Railroad (2016)

Harper Lee - Go Set a Watchman (2015)

Viet Thanh Nguyen - The Sympathizer (2015)

Phil Klay - Redeployment (2014)

Salman Rushdie - Joseph Anton: A Memoir (2012)

Gillian Flynn - Gone Girl (2012)

Stephen King - 11/22/63 (2011)

Jason Mott - The Returned (2011)

Jess Walter - The Financial Lives of the Poets (2009)

John Updike - Terrorist (2006)

Jeff Lindsay - Darkly Dreaming Dexter (2004)

Jen Banbury - Like a Hole in the Head (1998)

Norman Mailer - The Gospel According to the Son (1997)

Ethan Hawke - The Hottest State (1996)

Mona Simpson - A Regular Guy (1996)

David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest (1996)

John Updike - Rabbit at Rest (1990)

Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses (1988)

Toni Morrison - Beloved (1987)

Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale (1985)

Bret Easton Ellis - Less Than Zero (1985)

John Updike - Rabbit Is Rich (1981)

Norman Mailer - The Executioner's Song (1979)

Stephen King - The Shining (1977)

John Updike - Rabbit Redux (1971)

Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Norman Mailer - An American Dream (1965)

Jack Kerouac - Big Sur (1962)

Philip K. Dick - The Man in the High Castle (1962)

John Updike - Rabbit, Run (1960)

Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)

Jack Kerouac - On the Road (1957)

James Baldwin - Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

J. D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

Ernest Hemingway - For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)

James Joyce - Finnegans Wake (1939)

John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

J. R. R. Tolkien - The Hobbit (1937)

Zora Neale Hurston - Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Ernest Hemingway - A Farewell to Arms (1929)

Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse (1927)

Ernest Hemingway - The Sun Also Rises (1926)

F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby (1925)

James Joyce - Ulysses (1922)

James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

D.H. Lawrence - The Rainbow (1915)

Arthur Conan Doyle - The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)

Joseph Conrad - Lord Jim (1900)

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)

Mark Twain - Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace (1869)

Louisa May Alcott - Little Women (1868)

Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment (1866)

Charles Dickens - Great Expectations (1861)

Charles Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels (1726)

John Bunyan - The Pilgrim's Progress (1678)

Non-Fiction

(In Reverse Chronological Order):

William J. Barber II & Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove - White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy (2024)

Naomi Klein - Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (2023)

Matthew Perry - Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir (2022)

Tim Street & Dave Lane - The Brentford Revolution: The Bees’ Rise From the Basement to the Premier League (2022)

Joe Burns - Class Struggle Unionism (2022)

Barack Obama - A Promised Land (2020)

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio - The Undocumented Americans (2020)

Edward Snowden - Permanent Record (2019)

Michelle Obama - Becoming (2018)

Bob Woodward - Fear: Trump in the White House (2018)

Ta-Nehisi Coates - We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (2017)

Bernie Sanders - Bernie Sanders Guide to Political Revolution (2017)

Neil deGrasse Tyson - Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (2017)

Timothy Snyder - On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017)

Michael Eric Dyson - Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White People (2017)

Bernie Sanders - Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In (2016)

Alice Y. Walker - Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, & the Foundations of a Movement (2015)

Gloria Steinem - My Life on the Road (2015)

Bernie Sanders- Outsider in the White House (2015)

Ta-Nehisi Coates - Between the World and Me (2015)

David McCullough - The Wright Brothers (2015)

Bryan Stevenson - Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

Suki Kim - Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea's Elite (2014)

Naomi Klein - This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (2014)

Hillary Clinton - Hard Choices: A Memoir (2014)

Elizabeth Warren - A Fighting Chance (2014)

Michael Lewis - Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt (2014)

Doris Kearns Goodwin - The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt and the Golden Age of Journalism (2013)

Malala Yousafzai - I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban (2013)

Malcolm Gladwell - David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (2013)

Reza Aslan - Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (2013)

Ray Kurzweil - How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (2012)

Nate Silver - The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - but Some Don't (2012)

Rachel Maddow - Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power (2012)

Jon Ronson - The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (2011)

Walter Issacson - Steve Jobs (2011)

Philip Dray - There Is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America (2010)

Michelle Alexander - The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010)

Bill Simmons - The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to The Sports Guy (2009)

Edward M. Kennedy - True Compass: A Memoir (2009)

Fareed Zakaria - The Post-American World (2008)

Thomas L. Friedman - Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution - and How It Can Renew America (2008)

David Plouffe - The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory (2009)

Malcolm Gladwell - Outliers: The Story of Success (2008)

Scott McClellan - What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception (2008)

Naomi Klein - The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007)

Barack Obama - The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006)

Doris Kearns Goodwin - Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005)

Ray Kurzweil - The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005)

Marcus J. Borg - The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith (2003)

Hillary Clinton - Living History (2003)

John Feinstein - The Punch: One Night, Two Lives, and the Fight That Changed Basketball Forever (2002)

Robin D. G. Kelley - Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002)

Alan Dershowitz - Supreme Injustice: How the High Court Hijacked Election 2000 (2001)

William Shaw - Westside: Young Men and Hip Hop in L.A. (2000)

Jennifer Harbury - Bridge of Courage: Life Stories of the Guatemalan Compañeros and Compañeras (1993)

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. - A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (1965)

Barack Obama - Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

Joyce Johnson - Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir (1983)

Howard Zinn - A People's History of the United States (1980)

John Wooden - They Call Me Coach (1972)

Eduardo Galleano - Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (1971)

Saul D. Alinsky - Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971)

Abbie Hoffman - Steal This Book (1971)

Alex Haley & Malcolm X - The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)

Martin Luther King, Jr. - Why We Can't Wait (1964)

Henry Kraus - The Many and the Few: A Chronicle of the Dynamic Auto Workers (1947)

Frederick Douglass - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845)

Thomas Jefferson - Notes on the State of Virginia (1785)

Poetry

(In Reverse Chronological Order):

Anne Carson - Wrong Norma (2024)

Gregory Pardlo - Spectral Evidence: Poems (2024)

Kevin Coval - A People's History of Chicago (2017)

Tyehimba Jess - Olio (2016)

Tony Hoagland - Application for Release from the Dream (2015)

Amy Gerstler - Scattered at Sea (2015)

Peter Balakian - Ozone Journal (2015)

James Franco - Directing Herbert White: Poems (2014)

Rae Armantrout - Money Shot (2011)

Charles Bukowski - The People Look Like Flowers At Last: New Poems (2007)

Saul Williams - Said the Shotgun to the Head (2003)

Frank Marshall Davis - Black Moods: Collected Poems (2002)

Tupac Shakur - The Rose that Grew from Concrete (1999)

Donald Hall - Without: Poems (1998)

Maya Angelou - And Still I Rise (1978)

Jack Kerouac - Heaven and Other Poems (1977)

Seamus Heaney - North (1975)

Shel Silverstein - Where the Sidewalk Ends (1974)

Maya Angelou - Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie (1971)

Gary Snyder - The Back Country (1967)

Sylvia Plath - The Colossus and Other Poems (1960)

Allen Ginsberg - Howl and Other Poems (1956)

T.S. Eliot - Four Quartets (1941)

Fernando Pessoa - Poesia Inglesa (1) (1921)

Ezra Pound - Personae (1909)

Alfred Tennyson - Idylls of the King (1859)

Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass (1855)

Edgar Allan Poe - The Raven (1845)

George Gordon Byron - Don Juan (1819)

William Blake - Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794)

Phillis Wheatley - Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773)

John Milton - Paradise Lost (1667)

William Shakespeare - Shakespeare's Sonnets (1609)

Homer - The Odyssey (1488)

Homer - The Iliad (550)