The Best of Non-Fiction Since the Beginning of TIME

Now for your reading pleasure: a list of the top 100 best and influential works of non-fiction published since 1923. And how do we know these are the best? Why, TIME said so, so -- obviously -- it must be true:

Politics and war, science and sports, memoir and biography — there's a great big world of nonfiction books out there just waiting to be read. We picked the 100 best and most influential written in English since 1923, the beginning of TIME ... magazine.

TIME breaks their list into categories very similar in nature to the way January Magazine has divided these things. Here are TIME’s: Autobiography/Memoir, Biography, Business, Culture, Essays, Food Writing, Health, History, Ideas, Non-Fiction Novels, Politics, Science, Self-Help, Social History, Sports and War.

We won’t publish the whole list, though you can see that here. We thought that we would, however, share a single list, just to give you a healthy taste.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY / MEMOIR

• The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, by Gertrude Stein
• Black Boy, by Richard Wright
• Dreams from My Father, by Barack Obama
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou
• Manchild in the Promised Land, by Claude Brown
• Maus, by Art Spiegelman
• A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway
• Notes of a Native Son, by James Baldwin
• On Writing, by Stephen King
• Speak, Memory, by Vladimir Nabokov
• A Walk in the Woods, by Bill Bryson