`In Cold Blood” caused most of the trouble. Over lunch in the Bertlesmann-Random House executive dining room in Manhattan last October, a group of prominent scholars and authors reflected on the last 100 years of literature. That’s where the tranquility ended.
Soon an argument broke out, sparked by the suggestion that Truman Capote’s 1966 account of a gruesome murder in Kansas should be included in the Century’s Best Non-fiction Books ( in English).
“Many people didn’t believe it was non-fiction,” said David Ebershoff, publishing director of the Modern Library, which sponsored the list.
In the end, Capote stayed, scraping in at No. 96, but other highly debated books didn’t, including Dr. Spock’s landmark “Baby and Child Care.”
“One judge said, `Dr. Spock doesn’t need us,’ ” Ebershoff explained.
The list was released Thursday night at Los Angeles’ BookExpo America, the publishing in-dustry’s largest trade show.
Albert Madansky, professor of business administration at the University of Chicago, devised the rating system for the ranking. In contrast to last summer’s list of the “100 Best Novels,” which was criticized for its seemingly capricious or biased voting methods, Madansky said the non-fiction list is statistically sound.
After laboring for several months, Madansky was paid in an unusual way: in books. The first title he requested, he said, was “The Education of Henry Adams,” a book he admits he has never read. Soon he will receive another request, a 10-volume set of the Steinsalz Talmud, valued at around $1,000.
Of course there were a few surprises, including the conspicuous absence of Norman Mailer, John McPhee and John Hersey.
“The point is that all lists like this that we feel compelled to do at the end of a century have to be seen as provisional, not written in stone,” said judge Charles Johnson.
The Top 10
From the Modern Library’s 100 best non-fiction books of the 20th Century
1. The Education of Henry Adams, Henry Adams
2. The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James
3. Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington
4. A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf
5. Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
6. Selected Essays, 1917-1932, T.S. Eliot
7. The Double Helix, James D. Watson
8. Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov
9. The American Language, H.L. Mencken
10. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, John Maynard Keynes
11. The Lives of a Cell, Lewis Thomas
12. The Frontier in American History, Frederick Jackson Turner
13. Black Boy, Richard Wright
14. Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster
15. The Civil War, Shelby Foote
16. The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman
17. The Proper Study of Mankind, Isaiah Berlin
18. The Nature and Destiny of Man, Reinhold Niebuhr
19. Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin
20. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein
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21. The Elements of Style, William Strunk and E.B. White
22. An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal
23. Principia Mathematica, Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell
24. The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould
25. The Mirror and the Lamp, Meyer Howard Abrams
26. The Art of the Soluble, Peter B. Medawar
27. The Ants, Bert Hoelldoble and Edward O. Wilson
28. A Theory of Justice, John Rawls
29. Art and Illusion, Ernest H. Gombrich
30. The Making of the English Working Class, E.P. Thompson
31. The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois
32. Principia Ethica, G.E. Moore
33. Philosophy and Civilization, John Dewey
34. On Growth and Form, D’Arcy Thompson
35. Ideas and Opinions, Albert Einstein
36. The Age of Jackson, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
37. The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes
38. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West
39. Autobiographies, W.B. Yeats
40. Science and Civilization in China, Joseph Needham
41. Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves
42. Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell
43. The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Mark Twain
44. Children of Crisis, Robert Coles
45. A Study of History, Arnold J. Toynbee
46. The Affluent Society, John Kenneth Galbraith
47. Present at the Creation, Dean Acheson
48. The Great Bridge, David McCullough
49. Patriotic Gore, Edmund Wilson
50. Samuel Johnson, Walter Jackson Bate
51. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Alex Haley and Malcolm X
52. The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe
53. Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey
54. Working, Studs Terkel
55. Darkness Visible, William Styron
56. The Liberal Imagination, Lionel Trilling
57. The Second World War, Winston Churchill
58. Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen
59. Jefferson and His Time, Dumas Malone
60. In the American Grain, William Carlos Williams
61. Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner
62. The House of Morgan, Ron Chernow
63. The Sweet Science, A.J. Liebling
64. The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper
65. The Art of Memory, Frances, A. Yates
66. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, R.H. Tawney
67. A Preface of Morals, Walter Lippman
68. The Gate of Heavenly Peace, Jonathan D. Spence
69. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn
70. The Strange Career of Jim Crow, C. Vann Woodward
71. The Rise of the West, William H. McNeil
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72. The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels
73. James Joyce, Richard Ellmann
74. Florence Nightingale, Cecil Woodham-Smith
75. The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell
76. The City in History, Lewis Mumford
77. Battle Cry of Freedom, James M. McPherson
78. Why We Can’t Wait, Martin Luther King Jr.
79. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Edmund Morris
80. Studies in Iconology, Erwin Panofsky
81. The Face of Battle, John Keegan
82. The Strange Death of Liberal England, George Dangerfield
83. Vermeer, Lawrence Gowing
84. A Bright Shining Lie, Neil Sheehan
85. West with the Night, Beryl Markham
86. This Boy’s Life, Tobias Wolff
87. A Mathematician’s Apology, G.H. Hardy
88. Six Easy Pieces, Richard P. Feynman
89. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard
90. The Golden Bough, James George Frazer
91. Shadow and Act, Ralph Ellison
92. The Power Broker, Robert A. Caro
93. The American Political Tradition, Richard Hofstadter
94. The Contours of American History, William Appleman Willians
95. The Promise of American Life, Herbert Croly
96. In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
97. The Journalist and the Murdered, Janet Malcolm
98. The Taming of Chance, Ian Hacking
99. Operating Instructions, Anne Lamott
100. Melbourne, Lord David Cecil
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The Modern Library judges were: A.S. Byatt, Caleb Carr, Christopher Cerf, Shelby Foote, Stephen Jay Gould, Vartan Gregorian, Charles Johnson, Jon Krakauer, Edmund Morris, Elaine Pagels, John Richardson, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Carolyn See.
Your turn: What should have been on the list? What shouldn’t? Write to Tempo, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago IL 60611. Or e-mail us at: [email protected]