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Recommended Books

Here, in their own words, are the answers to the question, What book did you read when you were young that most influenced your life? The answers reflect the wonderfully varied power of books, and remind us of some neglected timeless classics and other works we may want to take into our own lives.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
by Malcolm X and Alex Haley
Recommended by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
R.E. Lee, A Biography
by Douglas Southall Freeman
Recommended by Stephen E. Ambrose, Ph.D.
The Little Grey Men
by B.B. (Denys Watkins-Pitchford)
Recommended by Dame Julie Andrews
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
by Jules Verne
Dubliners
by James Joyce
Recommended by John Banville
The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Recommended by A. Scott Berg
A Wrinkle in Time
by Madeleine L'Engle
Recommended by Jeffrey P. Bezos
Snow Crash
by Neal Stephenson
Recommended by Sergey Brin
A Study of History
by Arnold J. Toynbee
Recommended by J. Carter Brown
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
by James Agee
Recommended by Jimmy Carter
The Third Wave
by Alvin Toffler
Recommended by Stephen M. Case
The Two-Ocean War
by Samuel Eliot Morison
Recommended by Tom Clancy
Mere Christianity
by C.S. Lewis
Miss Susie Slagle’s
by Augusta Tucker
A Streetcar Named Desire
by Tennessee Williams
Recommended by Francis Ford Coppola
The Wizard of Oz
by L. Frank Baum
Recommended by William C. DeVries, M.D.
Arabian Nights
by Sir Richard Burton
Recommended by Rita Dove
Galapagos: World’s End
by William Beebe
Recommended by Sylvia Earle, Ph.D.
The Microbe Hunters
by Paul de Kruif
Napoleon
by Vincent Cronin
Recommended by Larry J. Ellison
David Copperfield
by Charles Dickens
Recommended by Shelby Foote
The Scarlet Plague
by Jack London
Fathers and Sons
by Ivan Turgenev
Recommended by Ernest J. Gaines
A Separate Peace
by John Knowles
Recommended by William H. Gates III
The Road Less Traveled
by M. Scott Peck, M.D.
Recommended by Private: Carlos Ghosn
Profiles in Courage
by John F. Kennedy
Recommended by Rudolph Giuliani
One Two Three…Infinity
by George Gamow
Recommended by Sheldon L. Glashow, Ph.D.
The Voyages of Dr. Dolittle
by Hugh Lofting
Recommended by Dame Jane Goodall
Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox
by James MacGregor Burns
The Little Engine That Could
by Watty Piper
The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck
Recommended by John Grisham
The Reason Why
by Cecil Woodham-Smith
Recommended by David Halberstam
Edmund Dulac’s Picture Book
by Edmund Dulac
The Warlord of Mars
by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Recommended by Sir Edmund Hillary
Amusing Ourselves to Death
by Neil Postman
Recommended by Reid Hoffman
The Name Above the Title
by Frank Capra
Recommended by Ron Howard
Moby-Dick, or The Whale
by Herman Melville
Recommended by John Irving
Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
Recommended by Sir Kazuo Ishiguro
The Origin of Species
by Charles Darwin
The Republic
by Plato
Recommended by Philip C. Johnson
Roughing It
by Mark Twain
Recommended by Chuck Jones
The Song of Hiawatha
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Recommended by James Earl Jones
Nineteen Eighty-Four
by George Orwell
Recommended by Anthony M. Kennedy
Escape From Freedom
by Erich Fromm
Recommended by Henry R. Kravis
My Name is Aram
by William Saroyan
Recommended by Charles Kuralt
The Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner
Recommended by Wynton Marsalis
Oliver Twist
by Charles Dickens
Recommended by Craig O. McCaw
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain
Recommended by Frank McCourt
Reveille in Washington
by Margaret Leech
Recommended by David McCullough
Lost Illusions
by Honoré de Balzac
Recommended by James A. Michener
The Moon is Down
by John Steinbeck
Recommended by George J. Mitchell
Smoky the Cowhorse
by Will James
Leaves of Grass
by Walt Whitman
Recommended by Story Musgrave, M.D.
The Jungle
by Upton Sinclair
Recommended by Ralph Nader
The Cloister and the Hearth
by Charles Reade
Recommended by Paul H. Nitze
The Moviegoer
by Walker Percy
Recommended by Peggy Noonan
The Story of Ferdinand
by Munro Leaf
Recommended by Jessye Norman
Walden and Civil Disobedience
by Henry David Thoreau
Recommended by Joyce Carol Oates
D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths
by Ingri and Edgar Parin D'Aulaire
Recommended by Suzan-Lori Parks
The War of the Worlds
by H.G. Wells
Crime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Recommended by Shimon Peres
The Holy Bible
by World Bible Publishing
Recommended by Dan Rather
The Island Within
by Ludwig Lewisohn
Recommended by Jonas Salk, M.D.
Manchild in the Promised Land
by Claude Brown
Recommended by Barry Scheck
A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
Recommended by Vincent J. Scully, Ph.D.
Arrowsmith
by Sinclair Lewis
Don Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes
Recommended by Sonia Sotomayor
To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee
Recommended by Hilary Swank
The Catcher in the Rye
by J.D. Salinger
Recommended by Amy Tan
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Recommended by Bernie Taupin
The Waste Land
by T.S. Eliot
Recommended by John Updike
Miss Pickerell Goes to Mars
by Ellen MacGregor
Recommended by Bert Vogelstein, M.D.
The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony and Other Stories
by Franz Kafka
Recommended by Elie Wiesel
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
by Betty Smith
Recommended by Oprah Winfrey
Studs Lonigan
by James T. Farrell
Recommended by Tom Wolfe
All the King’s Men
by Robert Penn Warren
Recommended by Bob Woodward