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.
The Making of the English Working Class
1963 · 848 pages
Thompson follows English weavers, artisans, and radicals from the 1780s to the 1830s and shows them making themselves into a class. He wrote to rescue them from the enormous condescension of posterity.
★ 7.9
The Golden Ass
170 · 267 pages
Meddling with magic, Lucius turns himself into a donkey and is beaten from owner to owner across Greece. The tale of Cupid and Psyche sits at the center, and the ending turns holy.
★ 7.3
Germinal
1885 · 546 pages
Etienne Lantier takes work in a French coal pit and talks the starving miners into striking. Zola went down a real mine to write this, and you feel the rock overhead.
★ 7.3
The Communist Manifesto
1848 · 287 pages
A spectre is haunting Europe, Marx and Engels announce, then read all recorded history as class struggle and hand the workers of the world a program. No pamphlet has moved more people.
★ 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
USA Trilogy
1936 · 1288 pages
No American novel takes in more of the country. Dos Passos cuts fictional lives against newspaper headlines, song lyrics, and portraits of Henry Ford and Woodrow Wilson, covering the century's first three decades.
★ 7.0
Of Mice and Men
1937 · 107 pages
George looks after Lennie, huge and slow-witted, across the California ranches, and the two of them keep describing a farm they mean to buy. Steinbeck presses the Depression into that dream.
★ 7.0
The Uses of Literacy
1957 · 384 pages
Hoggart set down working-class Leeds as he had lived it, then indicted the slick magazines displacing it. Seven years later he founded the Birmingham center that made popular culture an academic discipline.
★ 6.6
Working
1974 · 589 pages
Terkel put a tape recorder before a gravedigger, a receptionist, a steelworker, and asked what the day costs them. Work is violence to the spirit as well as the body, he writes.
★ 6.5
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
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
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
The Collected Stories
1994 · 386 pages
Paley wrote as people talk, in the Bronx Yiddish and Greenwich Village argument of women raising children alone, and got more life into three slim collections than most novelists manage in a career.
★ 5.5
A Man's Place
1983 · 90 pages
Ernaux's father ran a café and grocery in Normandy, terrified all his life of using the wrong word. Educated out of his class, she writes him in flat sentences that never condescend.
★ 5.4
Studs Lonigan Trilogy
1935 · 988 pages
On the Irish Catholic South Side of Chicago, a boy leaves eighth grade certain he is somebody. Farrell tracks Studs through poolrooms, gangs, and drink into the Depression, withholding every consolation.
★ 5.3
Learning to Labour
1977 · 336 pages
Working-class boys are not pushed into working-class jobs, Willis found: they choose them. Twelve lads at a Midlands comprehensive laugh their way through school and hand themselves to the factory floor.
★ 5.2
A Manual for Cleaning Women
Selected Stories
2015 · 432 pages
Berlin cleaned houses, worked emergency rooms, raised four sons, and drank. Forty-three stories out of that life, Alaska to Mexico City, written so plainly and fast you miss how much is inside them.
★ 4.8