The Grapes of Wrath
1939 · 464 pages
The Joads lose their Oklahoma farm and drive west to California, where the promised work is a lie. Steinbeck's fury at what was done to them still comes off the page.
★ 9.0
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Oliver Twist
1838 · 416 pages
Born in a workhouse, Oliver asks for more, is sold off, and runs to London, where Fagin's gang of child pickpockets takes him in. Dickens made child poverty impossible to ignore.
★ 7.1
A Tale of Two Cities
1859 · 488 pages
Eighteen years in the Bastille have left Doctor Manette making shoes in the dark. Dickens carries his daughter's household from London into the Terror, where Madame Defarge knits a death list.
★ 7.0
Down and Out in Paris and London
1933 · 213 pages
Seventeen-hour shifts in a Paris restaurant kitchen, then the tramps' road between London workhouses. Orwell went into poverty himself and came back able to describe what hunger does to a mind.
★ 7.0
Independent People
1934 · 482 pages
Eighteen years of hired labor buy Bjartur a stretch of Icelandic moorland, and he defends his independence against weather, debt, and his own family. Laxness makes stubbornness heroic and ruinous at once.
★ 7.0
A Modest Proposal
1729 · 59 pages
No other satire cuts this cleanly. A reasonable gentleman proposes that the infants of the Irish poor be fattened and sold as food to landlords, and calculates the savings to the shilling.
★ 7.0
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
1941 · 432 pages
Sent to Alabama in 1936 to report on cotton tenancy, Agee returned with an act of devotion: three sharecropping families recorded down to the nails in their shoes, alongside Walker Evans's photographs.
★ 7.0
Cannery Row
1945 · 192 pages
Mack and his friends, unemployed and unhurried, decide to repay Doc the marine biologist with a party. Steinbeck writes a Monterey street of bums and grocers and whores as a functioning society.
★ 6.9
The Hour of the Star
1977 · 81 pages
Macabéa is a half-starved typist from Brazil's Northeast, and the writer narrating her keeps stopping to ask what right he has to her poverty. Lispector makes that discomfort the whole book.
★ 6.8
Behind the Beautiful Forevers
2012 · 288 pages
Boo spent three years in Annawadi, a slum beside the Mumbai airport, following a teenage garbage trader, a woman scheming her way to power, and the neighbor whose self-immolation puts them on trial.
★ 6.7
The Street
1946 · 448 pages
Lutie Johnson believes what Benjamin Franklin promised about work and thrift, and rents an apartment on 116th Street to raise her son. The men who watch her climb the stairs have other plans.
★ 6.7
Christ Stopped at Eboli
1945 · 288 pages
Banished by Mussolini to a village in the Italian south, a Turin doctor found peasants convinced Christ had stopped short of them. The book made postwar Italy confront a region it had abandoned.
★ 6.5
Angela's Ashes
A Memoir
1996 · 363 pages
McCourt's father drank the wages and his mother begged for coal in a Limerick lane, and three of his siblings died before he turned seven. He tells it laughing.
★ 6.3
Rickshaw Boy
1937 · 320 pages
Xiangzi pulls a rented rickshaw through 1920s Beijing and wants a cart of his own. Soldiers seize the first he buys, a policeman takes his savings, and Lao She grinds him to nothing.
★ 6.2
Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories
1962 · 117 pages
Three Palestinian men pay a driver to smuggle them from Iraq into Kuwait inside a water tanker. Kanafani turned those hours in the metal into the defining image of Palestinian exile.
★ 6.2
Ask the Dust
1939 · 165 pages
Arturo Bandini starves in a Bunker Hill hotel in Depression Los Angeles, wanting to be a great writer and loving a Mexican waitress he cannot stop insulting. Bukowski called Fante his god.
★ 6.2
Untouchable
1935 · 176 pages
One day in the life of Bakha, who cleans latrines in a small Indian town and is slapped for brushing against a high-caste man. Anand renders caste from its lowest rung.
★ 6.2
The Famished Road
1991 · 500 pages
Azaro is an abiku, a spirit child who keeps refusing to die, and Okri sets him loose in a Nigerian slum where ghosts crowd the bar and political thugs hand out poisoned milk.
★ 5.7
The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists
1914 · 624 pages
The philanthropists of the title are house painters who give their labor away and defend the system that ruins them. Owen, the socialist, cuts up bread to demonstrate the money trick.
★ 5.7
Hard Times
An Oral History of the Great Depression
1970 · 462 pages
Evicted tenants, migrant pickers, stockbrokers, and a man who ran for president tell Terkel what the Depression did to them. What comes through hardest is how many took the collapse as personal failure.
★ 5.7