Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Books by American Authors
American nonfiction has a particular quality that I keep returning to: a willingness to go deep into one subject — one person, one crime, one industry, one obsession — and stay there until it gives up something true about the larger world. The best American writers understand that a story about a single fraud case or a single creative life or a single labour researcher is really a story about power, or meaning, or what America does to the people inside it. This list collects the American authors on my bookshelf: writers who work in memoir, journalism, history, and fiction, and who share that quality of sustained, specific attention. Several of them have their own pages on this site if you want to go deeper.
By Lisanne Swart · 12 authors · Fiction · Nonfiction · Memoir · Journalism
Nonfiction & Journalism
Mastery — Robert Greene
Robert Greene spent years working eighty odd jobs — editorial assistant, construction worker, translator, Hollywood story editor — before his first book found a publisher. That book, The 48 Laws of Power, went on to sell millions of copies and made him one of the most widely read strategy writers alive. He works by identifying a theme — power, seduction, war, mastery, human nature — and then building a book around it using historical examples drawn from sources ranging from ancient China to twentieth-century Hollywood. Mastery, his fifth book, argues that greatness in any field is not the product of talent but of a specific kind of sustained, deep practice: the years of immersion in a craft that produce genuine expertise rather than mere competence. It is on my bookshelf.
Greene is the writer I recommend to people who want to understand how power and excellence actually work rather than how they are supposed to work. Mastery in particular is a book that rewards multiple readings: the historical examples accumulate into an argument that feels both practical and philosophically serious. Start with Mastery if you want the most immediately applicable book; start with The 48 Laws of Power if you want the one that will make you look at every room differently.
→ Read my full thoughts on Mastery → Find Mastery on AmazonBad Blood — John Carreyrou
John Carreyrou spent years at the Wall Street Journal before his investigation into Theranos — the Silicon Valley blood-testing startup led by Elizabeth Holmes — became one of the most consequential pieces of American investigative journalism of the decade. Bad Blood, the book that grew from that investigation, is the account of how a company built entirely on fraud maintained the confidence of investors, regulators, and patients for years. Carreyrou reconstructed the story through hundreds of interviews with current and former employees, many of whom had signed aggressive non-disclosure agreements. The result reads like a thriller and functions like a study of how charisma, secrecy, and the mythology of Silicon Valley disruption can combine to suppress inconvenient truths.
Bad Blood is the best business book I have read because it is not really a business book at all. It is a study of what happens when a story becomes more powerful than the facts it is supposedly based on — and of the specific courage it takes to say so in an environment where everyone else has decided to look away. Carreyrou’s reporting is meticulous and his prose is direct; the book is a model of what investigative journalism can do when it has both the evidence and the nerve.
→ Read my full thoughts on Bad Blood → Find Bad Blood on AmazonKillers of the Flower Moon — David Grann
David Grann is a staff writer at The New Yorker whose work consistently does something rare in longform journalism: it uncovers stories that have been deliberately buried. Killers of the Flower Moon is his account of the Osage Indian murders — a systematic campaign of killing carried out in Oklahoma in the 1920s against members of the Osage Nation after oil was discovered on their land. The book operates on multiple levels simultaneously: as a true-crime narrative, as a history of the early FBI, and as an examination of how an entire society can participate in, and then erase, a campaign of organised murder. It was adapted into a film by Martin Scorsese in 2023.
Killers of the Flower Moon is one of the most important American history books of the last decade, and also one of the most readable. Grann’s method — reconstructing a buried story through archival research and on-the-ground reporting — is exactly what investigative nonfiction should do. The final section, where he turns the investigative lens on his own narrative, is one of the more honest moments in recent American nonfiction: an acknowledgement that even the act of telling this story is implicated in the history it describes.
→ Read my full thoughts on Killers of the Flower Moon → Find Killers of the Flower Moon on AmazonThe Creative Act — Rick Rubin
Rick Rubin produced some of the most influential records of the last forty years — the Beastie Boys, Johnny Cash, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jay-Z, Adele, Kanye West — before writing The Creative Act: A Way of Being, a book about the creative process that does not read like anything else in the genre. It is not a how-to manual and not a memoir. It is a sustained meditation on what creativity actually is: where it comes from, what gets in its way, and what it means to make something. Rubin organises the book around short chapters — many under a page — each addressing a single aspect of the creative life with the precision of someone who has spent decades watching how the best artists in the world actually work.
The Creative Act is the book about creativity I recommend to people who have already read The War of Art and want something that goes further into the actual experience of making rather than the resistance to it. Rubin writes from inside the process rather than from outside it, and the result is a book that feels less like advice and more like a companion for the specific loneliness of creative work. It rewards slow reading; a chapter a day is more useful than reading it straight through.
→ Read my full thoughts on The Creative Act → Find The Creative Act on AmazonWhy We Sleep — Matthew Walker
Matthew Walker is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley and the founder of the Center for Human Sleep Science. Why We Sleep synthesises two decades of sleep research into a book aimed at a general audience, making the case that sleep is not a passive state but one of the most active and consequential things the human body does — and that the modern world’s systematic under-valuation of it is producing measurable damage to health, cognition, and longevity. Walker covers what sleep actually does during each of its stages, what happens when it is disrupted, and what the research says about the specific effects of caffeine, alcohol, and artificial light on sleep quality.
Why We Sleep is the book that changed my actual behaviour more than almost any other. The evidence Walker presents is not abstract: it connects sleep deprivation directly to Alzheimer’s disease, cancer risk, cardiovascular disease, and mental health in ways that are specific enough to be impossible to dismiss. The book is occasionally alarming, which is the point. If there is a single book on this list that will change something about how you live within a week of reading it, this is probably the one.
→ Read my full thoughts on Why We Sleep → Find Why We Sleep on AmazonThe War of Art — Steven Pressfield
Steven Pressfield spent decades in obscurity — working as a truck driver, bartender, copywriter, and screenwriter — before Gates of Fire made him famous in his fifties. His nonfiction, particularly The War of Art, has sold millions of copies and is consistently cited by writers, filmmakers, and entrepreneurs as the book that changed how they work. The central concept — Resistance, the internal force that opposes every act of creative work — is one of the most useful ideas in contemporary writing about the creative life. The book is divided into three parts: the first identifies Resistance in all its forms; the second argues for a professional rather than amateur orientation toward creative work; the third presents a more spiritual framework about the source of creative inspiration.
The War of Art is the American book on creative work I return to most often. It is short enough to read in an afternoon and specific enough to be immediately applicable. Pressfield’s fiction — Gates of Fire in particular — is among the finest military fiction ever written in English. I have written about him at length; the full list of his books is on this site.
→ Read my full thoughts on The War of Art → All books by Steven Pressfield → Find The War of Art on AmazonNonviolent Communication — Marshall Rosenberg
Marshall Rosenberg was a psychologist and mediator who spent decades working in conflict zones — schools, prisons, war-torn communities across Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe — using a communication framework he developed called Nonviolent Communication, or NVC. The framework is built around a deceptively simple premise: that most human conflict arises not from incompatible needs but from the strategies people use to meet those needs, and that most of those strategies involve forms of judgment, demand, or coercion that trigger defensiveness rather than cooperation. Nonviolent Communication teaches how to express observations, feelings, needs, and requests in ways that create genuine connection rather than resistance. The book is practical, structured, and illustrated throughout with worked examples from real conversations.
Nonviolent Communication is one of the most practically useful books I have read — not because it offers a system to follow, but because it reframes the question of why conversations fail. Once you have read it, you begin to notice the difference between observations and evaluations, between feelings and thoughts disguised as feelings, between requests and demands. Those distinctions are simple to state and surprisingly difficult to apply consistently, which is why the book rewards rereading. I keep returning to it before any situation where what I say is likely to matter.
→ Read my full thoughts on Nonviolent Communication → Find Nonviolent Communication on AmazonWorking — Studs Terkel
Studs Terkel was a Chicago radio broadcaster and oral historian who spent fifty years recording the voices of ordinary Americans. Working, published in 1974, is his masterwork: a collection of interviews with people across the full spectrum of American employment — gravediggers, washroom attendants, stockbrokers, farm workers, telephone operators, baseball players — each talking about what their work means to them, or fails to mean. Terkel does not editorialize. He lets the voices speak, and the cumulative effect is a portrait of American life that no single narrative could produce. The book is now over fifty years old and reads as fresh as anything published this year, because the questions it asks about work, dignity, and meaning have not been answered.
Working is one of the books I recommend most consistently to people who want to understand America and Americans — not the America of politicians or pundits but the America of people trying to get through the day with some sense of purpose intact. Terkel’s method is deceptively simple: ask people about their work and then get out of the way. The complexity comes from what people say when given the space to be honest. There is no equivalent of this book in any other national literature.
→ Read my full thoughts on Working → Find Working on AmazonHell’s Angels — Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter S. Thompson invented a form of journalism — Gonzo — in which the reporter does not stand outside the story but inside it, often as its most chaotic element. Hell’s Angels, published in 1967, is the book where that method first fully appeared: Thompson spent a year riding with the Angels, attending their runs and parties, and produced the most credible account of the organisation ever written, ending with the beating that severed the relationship. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas came later and is better known, but Hell’s Angels is the book where Thompson’s journalism is most disciplined — and most revealing about the gap between the myth of American freedom and the reality of people who actually tried to live it.
Thompson matters because he understood that objectivity is a pose — that every journalist has a position, and that pretending otherwise produces a flatter and less honest account than admitting it. Hell’s Angels is the book I recommend first because it shows that method working on material that genuinely deserves it: a story about people the mainstream press had already decided to caricature, told by someone who got close enough to complicate the picture. I have written about all his books; the full list is on this site.
→ Read my full thoughts on Hell’s Angels → All books by Hunter S. Thompson → Find Hell’s Angels on AmazonMemoir
Educated — Tara Westover
Tara Westover grew up in rural Idaho in a survivalist family that did not register births, did not send children to school, and did not seek medical care. She had no formal education until she was seventeen, when she taught herself enough to pass the ACT and gain admission to Brigham Young University. Educated is the memoir of that journey — from a childhood shaped entirely by her father’s apocalyptic beliefs and her brother’s violence, through the disorienting process of learning that the world she had been given was not the world as it is, to a doctorate from Cambridge and the rupture with her family that all of this required. Westover writes about memory itself as her subject: about what it means to reconstruct a past when the people who shared it remember it differently, and when the version they remember is the one that keeps them together.
Educated is one of the finest American memoirs of the last decade because it is honest about something most memoirs avoid: the cost of becoming who you needed to become. Westover does not present her escape from her family as a straightforward liberation. She presents it as a loss — a necessary one, but a loss nonetheless — and that honesty makes the book more useful and more true than most accounts of self-invention. It is the memoir I recommend to anyone who has had to choose between their family’s version of reality and their own.
→ Read my full thoughts on Educated → Books like Educated → Find Educated on AmazonFiction
The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby in 1925, when he was twenty-eight years old, and never quite matched it again — a fact he was aware of and which shaped the rest of his life. The novel is set in Long Island and New York in the summer of 1922, and is narrated by Nick Carraway, a bond salesman who becomes entangled with his neighbour Jay Gatsby, a man of mysterious wealth and a fixed obsession with recovering the past. The novel is short — under two hundred pages — and operates at a pitch of prose intensity that almost no American novel has sustained before or since. It has been called the Great American Novel more often than any other book, and it earns the designation not by being the largest or most comprehensive portrait of America but by being the most precise about the specific American belief that the past can be undone.
The Great Gatsby is one of those novels that changes depending on when you read it. The first time, it is a story about obsession and class and beautiful parties. Later, it is about the particular cruelty of living inside a myth about yourself. Later still, it is about America — the gap between what the country promises and what it delivers — rendered in sentences so well-made they seem inevitable. I have written about it at length on this site.
→ Read my full thoughts on The Great Gatsby → All books by F. Scott Fitzgerald → Find The Great Gatsby on AmazonThe Lottery — Shirley Jackson
Shirley Jackson published “The Lottery” in The New Yorker in June 1948, and the response was unlike anything the magazine had received before: hundreds of letters, almost all of them angry, many demanding to know where exactly this lottery takes place and how to avoid it. The story is short — under four thousand words — and describes the annual lottery of a small American town with the matter-of-fact precision of a community notice. What it is actually about is the ease with which violence becomes ritual and ritual becomes tradition, and the specific social mechanisms by which people who know better participate anyway. It is one of the most formally perfect pieces of short fiction in the American canon.
The Lottery is the short story I recommend when people ask for something that will stay with them. It works because it does not announce its intentions: Jackson writes the opening pages as though she is describing any ordinary town event, and by the time the reader understands what is happening, it is too late to look away. The story is freely available online and takes twenty minutes to read. Start there, then go to We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which is her masterwork in the longer form.
→ Read my full thoughts on The Lottery → Find The Lottery & Other Stories on AmazonFrequently asked questions about American authors
Who are the best American nonfiction authors to read?
The American nonfiction writers I return to most often are David Grann for narrative history and investigative journalism, John Carreyrou for business reporting, Hunter S. Thompson for Gonzo journalism, Studs Terkel for oral history, Marshall Rosenberg for practical communication, and Steven Pressfield and Rick Rubin for writing about the creative life. Each works in a distinct mode, but all share a quality of sustained attention to a single subject that distinguishes the best American nonfiction from more general overviews.
What is the best American novel to start with?
The Great Gatsby is the American novel I recommend most consistently as a starting point — not because it is the greatest, but because it is short, immediately readable, and extraordinarily precise about its subject. It takes less than three hours to read and gives you more to think about than most novels ten times its length. After Fitzgerald, Shirley Jackson’s short fiction is the most immediately impactful American writing I know: start with The Lottery, which is freely available online and takes twenty minutes.
What makes American nonfiction distinctive?
The best American nonfiction has a specific quality that I associate with the magazine tradition — The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Esquire — that developed in the twentieth century: a willingness to take a single subject and go very deep into it, using the tools of narrative fiction to make an argument about something larger. David Grann, John Carreyrou, and Hunter S. Thompson all work in this tradition, which treats journalism not as a record of events but as an act of interpretation that has to earn its conclusions through the quality of its evidence and its prose.
Which American authors write about creativity and the creative process?
The three American writers on creativity I recommend most consistently are Steven Pressfield (The War of Art — on Resistance and the professional orientation toward creative work), Rick Rubin (The Creative Act — on the nature of creativity from inside a lifetime of making), and Robert Greene (Mastery — on deep practice and the development of genuine expertise). They approach the subject from different angles; read all three and they form a complete picture of what sustained creative work actually requires.
What are the best American memoirs to read?
The American memoirs on my bookshelf that I recommend most consistently are Educated by Tara Westover (a memoir about escaping a survivalist childhood and building a life through self-education) and Working by Studs Terkel (an oral history that is the closest thing to a collective American memoir ever assembled). Both are honest in different ways and about different dimensions of American life — one intimate and particular, the other vast and polyphonic.
More from the shelf
From the bookshelf
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald
More hand-picked recommendations on my personal bookshelf — books that stay with you long after the last page.
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