250 for 250 Booklist

 

Brooklyn Public Library is celebrating our country’s 250th anniversary the best way we know how: with a thoughtful, surprising, irresistible booklist. Organized by genre and category of interest, this all-ages list is a deep dive on the stories, voices and moments that shaped America. Selected by our expert librarians—with help from a few notable New Yorkers!—here are the 250 most influential books in United States history.

 

American Grammar: Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation

Buffalo Hunter Hunter

Death in the Jungle: Murder, Betrayal, and the Lost Dream of Jonestown

Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization

Marsha : The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson

The War of Art: A History of Artists' Protest In America

We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution

When the Tides Held the Moon

49 Days

Compound Fracture

Dungeons and Dragons Player's Handbook

Martyr!

The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It

A Flag for Juneteenth

Love is loud: How Diane Nash Led the Civil Rights Movement

My Powerful Hair

Only this Beautiful Moment

The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market

A Seed in the Sun

Ain't Burned All the Bright

All My Rage

Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor

Hollow Fires

It Was All a Dream: Biggie and the World that Made Him

Phasers on Stun!: How the Making (and Remaking) of Star Trek Changed the World

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

42 Today: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy

1619 Project: A New Origin Story

Endorsed by: Ilana Glazer

Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence

Detransition, Baby

Hear My Voice: The Testimonies of Children Detained at the Southern Border of the United States

Huda F Are You

I is for Immigrants

Las Biuty Queens

Last Night at the Telegraph Club

The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History

The Taste of Sugar

All Boys Aren't Blue

Disability Visibility: First-person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

Lizzie Demands a Seat!: Elizabeth Jennings Fights for Streetcar Rights

The Undocumented Americans

We Are Not Here to Be Bystanders: A Memoir of Love and Resistance

When No One is Watching

Dolores Huerta: Get to Know the Voice of Migrant Workers

Gender Queer

Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese who Built the Transcontinental Railroad

Moonshot

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Rebel

The British are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

The Deep

The Proudest Blue: A Story of Hijab and Family

They Called Us Enemy

When Brooklyn was queer

Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen

Dreamers

Enough!: 20 protesters who Changed America

The Poet X

There There

What is the Constitution?

Devotions: Selected Poetry

I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter

The Hate U Give

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

The Story of Barbie and the Woman who Created Her

This Is the Rope: A Story from the Great Migration

Hamilton: The Revolution

Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race

Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

We the People: The Modern-day Figures who have Reshaped and Affirmed the Founding Fathers' Vision of America

Amazing Fantastic Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir

Between the World and Me

The Fifth Season

War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

Citizen: An American Lyric

Just Mercy

Braiding Sweetgrass

Five Days at Memorial

March. Book One

I Survived the Attacks of September 11, 2001

Saga. Vol 1

Inside Out & Back Again

Just Kids

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

George Gershwin: An Intimate Portrait

Graffiti Lives: Beyond the Tag in New York's Urban Underground

How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America

The Hunger Games

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Greg Heffley's Journal

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

American Born Chinese

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

It's Kind of a Funny Story

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief

Team of Rivals: the Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

Gilead

Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

The DaVinci code

Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

A People's History of the Supreme Court

Esperanza Rising

Kitchen Confidential

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Monster

Speak

The Birchbark House

The Coldest Winter Ever

Words that Built a Nation: A Young Person's Collection of Historic American Documents

Holes

American Pastoral

Brokeback Mountain

Gods and Generals

Lies My Teacher Told Me

The Battle of Brooklyn, 1776

The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to his White Mother

Breath, Eyes, Memory

Parable of the Sower

Stone Butch Blues

The Giver

The Pelican Brief

The Secret History

American Psycho

How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

Maus

Tar Beach

The Gilda Stories

The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe

Jurassic Park

Oh, the Places You'll Go!

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

The Joy Luck Club

Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic

Blood meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West

White Noise

Neuromancer

Sister Outsider

The House on Mango Street

Haven: The Dramatic Story of 1,000 World War II Refugees and How They Came to America

The Color Purple

Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

The People's History of the United States

Contract with God: And Other Tenement Stories

Orientalism

The Westing Game

Ceremony

On Photography

Interview with the Vampire

Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry

Roots

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts

Dhalgren

The Power Broker

All the President's Men

Angela Davis: An Autobiography

Carrie

Where the Sidewalk Ends

Frog and Toad Together

The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge

The Exorcist

The Monster at the End of this Book

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret

Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee

Our Bodies, Ourselves

The Bluest Eye

Unbought and Unbossed

Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Slaughterhouse-Five

Stevie

The Godfather

The Left Hand of Darkness

One Crazy Summer

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

The Outsiders

Cotton Comes to Harlem

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Last Exit to Brooklyn

Letter from Birmingham Jail

The Feminine Mystique

The Fire Next Time

Where the Wild Things Are

Silent Spring

The Other America: Poverty in the United States

The Snowy Day

The Wrinkle in Time

Mastering the Art of French Cooking

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

To Kill a Mockingbird

Brown Girl, Brownstones

Atlas Shrugged

On the Road

Twelve Angry Men

Fahrenheit 451

The Crucible

Charlotte's Web

Invisible Man

The Irony of American History

The Price of Salt

Catcher in the Rye

The Lottery and Other Stories

Hiroshima

Black Boy

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

For Whom the Bell Tolls

The Grapes of Wrath

Our Town

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Gone with the Wind

How to Win Friends and Influence People

The Miseducation of the Negro

Little House in the Big Woods

Maltese Falcon

The Secret of the Old Clock

Coming of Age in Samoa

The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes

The Great Gatsby

The Waste Land

The Elements of Style

My Antonia

The Jungle

The Souls of Black Folk

The Varieties of Religious Experience

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

The Theory of the Leisure Class

Sears, Roebuck & Co.: Consumer's Guide for 1894

How the Other Half Lives

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Little Women

Leaves of Grass

Walden

Uncle Tom's Cabin

The Narrative of Sojourner Truth

The Scarlet Letter

The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Common Sense

Complete Writings

https://www.bklynlibrary.org/america-250/booklist