Books That Shaped America

For all you bookworms out there, what would be your list of the top 3 books that helped shape your view of America? Not so much that they are your 3 favorite books, but rather books that you believe had a profound impact on how people here and abroad views America? Fiction or non-fiction. Fiction because it can help shape the views of people if the stories have realistic scenarios. That's why I included The Stand in my list

Here's a list the Govt. came up with and you can add your own here or on their blog.

blog.usa.gov...

( They're not tied together, I'm just saying)

My List:

1. "Of Mice And Men"

2. "The Uncommon Wisdom Of JFK"

3. "The Stand"

In no particular order,
Emersons essays
Leaves of grass - Whitman
As I lay dying - Faulkner
Walden - Thoreau
Tom Sawyer - Twain

3 books! That's insane..I'll do three for the founding and three for today...

Wealth of Nation (Adam Smith), Two Treatise of Government (John Locke), Principlas Mathematica (Issac Newton)

All Brits, if I'm not mistaken.


Origin of Species (Darwin), Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown), Harry Potter Series cheated again sorry (JK Rowling)

2/3 Brits.

Can't shake the crown!

They've set it up so that most of the sheeple will never read books. They pride themselves on it. Over 80 percent of college graduates say they've never cracked a book after graduation.

TV is what is shaping everyone's worldview. Here is the problem. Snooky has more say in the mass of dimwits' lives and attitudes than, say, Thomas Paine. Sad.

reply to post by CaptChaos


I honestly don't believe that.

Book sales are higher than ever, and that's not including Ebooks like for Kindles and stuff. I'm 23 and I have a veritable library in my house.

Top three would have to be:

The Jungle Upton Sinclair
Main Street Sinclair Lewis
The Sojourner Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Lesser examples:

Sister Carrie Theodore Dreiser
Babbitt Sinclair Lewis
The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald

Twain is up there, I mean how can I say a top 3, there are way more.

Originally posted by CaptChaos
They've set it up so that most of the sheeple will never read books. They pride themselves on it. Over 80 percent of college graduates say they've never cracked a book after graduation.

TV is what is shaping everyone's worldview. Here is the problem. Snooky has more say in the mass of dimwits' lives and attitudes than, say, Thomas Paine. Sad.

There will always be people who love books. Not enough? Has there ever been enough?

Moby Dick ~ I first tried reading this when I was about 14. Failed to get very far. Then tried again, every couple of years until I got to just before my 38th birthday. I was in a situation where Moby Dick was the only book there was to read. So I read it. And I was so glad I did.

It's the first American book I ever read that I considered to be "proper literature" (That sounds a bit pretentious, but I'm British, so . . . .) Anyway I've re-read it many times since then, and each time, there's some new angle to it, that I'm seeing for the first time. Last time it was the fact that if you start at Chapter one, then skip two, read three, skip four, and carry on, just reading every odd numbered chapter, you'll find there's two different books here.

One, a pacy, deep, plot driven novel, exploring the inner demons that drive men to extremes, and the concessions that other, lesser mortals are prepared to grant Men such as Ahab. And how far a man will follow another man, through love, knowing that they are both being led to their doom by a madman who is himself, in love with death.

The other book, (Even Chapters) is almost a handbook of Whaling, the economics behind it, how to make a raincoat from the foreskin of a Sperm Whale, and pretty much a day to day account of a working Nantucket Spermacetti Crew. "National Geographic" without pictures of nude Pygmies. But yeah, that's one great book.

Next, another book I'd put off reading for years. "To Kill a Mockingbird" From when I first picked it up, it had me from page one, and I read it in one sitting. It described a quite dark time during America's short, but turbulent social History. But I cannot remember ever reading a more honest and un-contrived account, of a subject that usually cannot help but polarise the reader into the moral dilemmas of racism.

It helps that it's all from the viewpoint of a child. But not because the child has a naive or more "dumbed down" view of the dynamics behind institutionalised racism. That would be too easy. What Harper Lee does is strips away the emotional aggregation of "white man's guilt", and the simmering resentment of life under segregation for black Americans, and without making any concessions to political correctness, shows how just one or two good men, who do the right things, for the right reasons, at the right time, can make such a huge difference to the general, background grinding low level evil that creeps past us every day.

Oh, and Boo Radley.