Here are the Biggest Nonfiction Bestsellers of the Last 100 Years
Last week, we published a list of the biggest fiction bestsellers of the past 100 years—and gently compared them to the books we still read and talk about from those very same years. Sometimes the difference was striking, and sometimes, readers of the past, you kind of nailed it. A few of our own, present-day readers wrote in to request that we give nonfiction books the same treatment, and since Publisher’s Weekly also kept lists of the bestselling nonfiction of the past 100 years, those readers are in luck. The data below comes almost entirely from those lists, which count sales of nonfiction books in the United States, and are of course subject to all of the flaws, faults, and inaccuracies of any similar best-seller lists.
As with the fiction list, for each year I also added a few of what I’d consider to be some of the most famous, best, and/or most influential books published in each year—that is, the books we still read and talk about in 2018. Again, these picks are subject to the flaws, faults, and inaccuracies of any list of books made by a human with her own tastes and interests and awarenesses.
Some general takeaways from the nonfiction lists:
1. Certain books counted as nonfiction by Publisher’s Weekly are . . . not exactly nonfiction. Religious texts and books of poetry pop up repeatedly on these lists (the Bible held serious sway in the 50s, a fact which I will not make any comments about), and I’ve left them, but to be true to my own sense of propriety, I haven’t added any of my own in the “also published” lists.
2. As with the fiction list, sometimes it took notable books a cycle or two to “arrive” as bestsellers.
3. Everyone was playing (or at least reading about) Canasta in 1949.
4. Some of the years, like 1950, give a great snapshot of American culture at the time. Others are a little more obscure. And whether demonstrative of the era or not, some of these years do not age well. 1987, I’m looking at you.
5. Diet books have always been popular, and so have self-help books, but in the 80s they begin to really strangle the lists. I wonder if this is a primarily American phenomenon. Either way, we all need to learn to accept ourselves and read a good travel narrative or something.
6. On that note, I have to admit that, while there were periods in the fiction list that I found a bit troubling, the nonfiction version is a lot more depressing. I mean, in 1994, three of the top ten bestselling books of the year in this country were Magic Eye books. Three. Three! Maybe this is merely a matter of categorization, but it still made me groan loudly in the Lit Hub office, multiple times. [Ed. note: we thought she was ill.]
Perhaps you will groan too. Perhaps you will cheer. Either way, without any further ado, I now present the biggest nonfiction bestsellers of the last 100 years:
1918
The best-selling nonfiction of the year:
1. Robert W. Service, Rhymes of a Red Cross Man
2. G. H. Clark, Treasury of War Poetry
3. Everard J. Appleton, With the Colors
4. Viscount Morley, Recollections
5. Douglas Fairbanks, Laugh and Live
6. Albert Bigelow Paine, ed., Mark Twain’s Letters
7. Richard Harding Davis, Adventures and Letters of Richard Harding Davis
8. Edgar Guest, Over Here
9. Edith O’Shaughnessy, Diplomatic Days
10. Alan Seeger, Poems of Alan Seeger
Also published that year:
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
1919
The best-selling nonfiction of the year:
1. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
2. Rudyard Kipling, The Years Between
3. Brand Whitlock, Belgium
4. Margaret Cameron, The Seven Purposes
5. John McCrae, In Flanders Fields
6. John Spargo, Bolshevism
Also published that year:
H. L. Mencken, The American Language
1920
The best-selling nonfiction of the year:
1. Philip Gibbs, Now It Can Be Told
2. John M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace
3. Joseph B. Bishop, ed., Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children
4. William Roscoe Thayer, Theodore Roosevelt
5. Frederick O’Brien, White Shadows in the South Seas
6. Cornelia Stratton Parker, An American Idyll
Also published that year:
William Strunk Jr., The Elements of Style (first commercial edition)
1921
The best-selling nonfiction of the year:
1. H. G. Wells, The Outline of History
2. Frederick O’Brien, White Shadows in the South Seas
3. A Gentleman with a Duster (Harold Begbie), The Mirrors of Downing Street
4. Margot Asquith, The Autobiography of Margot Asquith
6. Robert Lansing, Peace Negotiations
Also published that year:
Edward Sapir, Language: an Introduction to the Study of Speech
1922
The best-selling nonfiction of the year:
1. H. G. Wells, The Outline of History
2. Hendrik Willem Van Loon, The Story of Mankind
3. Edward Bok, The Americanization of Edward Bok
4. Lulu Hunt Peters, Diet and Health
5. James Harvey Robinson, The Mind in the Making
6. J. Arthur Thomson, The Outline of Science
7. Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury, Outwitting Our Nerves
8. Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria
9. Clinton W. Gilbert, Mirrors of Washington
10. A Gentleman with a Duster (Harold Begbie), Painted Windows
Also published that year:
e. e. cummings, The Enormous Room
Albert Einstein, The Meaning of Relativity
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (English translation)
1923
The best-selling nonfiction of the year:
1. Emily Post, Etiquette
2. Giovanni Papini, The Life of Christ
3. Burton J. Hendrick, ed., The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page
4. James Harvey Robinson, The Mind in the Making
5. H. G. Wells, The Outline of History
6. Lulu Hunt Peters, Diet and Health
7. Emile Coué, Self-Mastery Through Conscious Auto-Suggestion
8. Edward Bok, The Americanization of Edward Bok
9. Hendrik Willem Van Loon, The Story of Mankind
10. Edward Bok, A Man from Maine
Also published that year:
Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement
Winston Churchill, The World Crisis (Vols. 1 & 2)
1924
The best-selling nonfiction of the year:
1. Lulu Hunt Peters, Diet and Health
2. Giovanni Papini, The Life of Christ
3. Fannie Farmer, ed. The Boston Cooking School Cook Book
4. Emily Post, Etiquette
5. André Maurois, Ariel
6. Prosper Buranelli et al., The Cross Word Puzzle Books
7. Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Autobiography
8. George Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan
9. Albert E. Wiggam, The New Decalogue of Science
10. Edward Bok, The Americanization of Edward Bok
Also published that year:
Emma Goldman, My Further Disillusionment in Russia
Lowell Thomas, With Lawrence in Arabia
1925
The best-selling nonfiction of the year:
1. Lulu Hunt Peters, Diet and Health
2. Fannie Farmer, ed., The Boston Cooking School Cook Book
3. A. A. Milne, When We Were Very Young
4. Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows
5. Giovanni Papini, The Life of Christ
6. André Maurois, Ariel
7. Edward Bok, Twice Thirty
8. Lord Grey, Twenty-Five Years
9. J. J. Brousson, Anatole France Himself
10. Prosper Buranelli et al., The Cross Word Puzzle Books
Also published that year:
Sarah Bernhardt, The Art of the Theater (English translation)
Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro
1926
The best-selling nonfiction of the year:
1. Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows
2. George A. Dorsey, Why We Behave Like Human Beings
3. Lulu Hunt Peters, Diet and Health
4. Mark Sullivan, Our Times, vol. 1
5. Fannie Farmer, ed., The Boston Cooking School Cook Book
6. Milton C. Work, Auction Bridge Complete
7. Bruce Barton, The Book Nobody Knows
8. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy
9. Edgar A. Guest, The Light of Faith
10. Claude G. Bowers, Jefferson and Hamilton
Also published that year:
T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom
1927
The best-selling nonfiction of the year:
1. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy
2. Emil Ludwig, Napoleon
3. T. E. Lawrence, Revolt in the Desert
4. Alfred Aloysius Horn and Ethelreda Lewis, Trader Horn, vol. 1
5. Charles A. Lindbergh, We
6. Julian Spafford and Lucien Esty, Ask Me Another
7. Richard Halliburton, The Royal Road to Romance
8. Richard Halliburton, The Glorious Adventure
9. George A. Dorsey, Why We Behave Like Human Beings
10. Katherine Mayo, Mother India
Also published that year:
J. W. Dunne, An Experiment With Time
E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
The Tibetan Book of the Dead (first English translation, by Walter Evans-Wentz)
1928
The best-selling nonfiction of the year:
1. André Maurois, Disraeli
2. Katherine Mayo, Mother India
3. Alfred Aloysius Horn and Ethelreda Lewis, Trader Horn, vol. 1
4. Emil Ludwig, Napoleon
5. Eugene O’Neill, Strange Interlude
6. Charles A. Lindbergh, We
7. Lowell Thomas, Count Luckner, the Sea Devil
8. Emil Ludwig, Goethe
9. Richard E. Byrd, Skyward
10. George Bernard Shaw, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism
Also published that year:
Nan Britton, The President’s Daughter
Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa
1929
The best-selling nonfiction of the year:
1. Ernest Dimnet, The Art of Thinking
2. Francis Hackett, Henry the Eighth
3. Joan Lowell, The Cradle of the Deep
4. Lytton Strachey, Elizabeth and Essex
5. Chic Sale, The Specialist
6. Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals
7. Robert L. Ripley, Believe It or Not
8. Stephen Vincent Benét, John Brown’s Body
9. Claude G. Bowers, The Tragic Era
10. Will Durant, The Mansions of Philosophy
Also published that year:
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
