Home › Reading Lists › Books About the American Dream
Reading List · The American DreamThe Best Books About the American Dream
The American Dream is the promise that anyone who works hard enough can rise, own a home and give their children a better life. Writers have tested that promise for a century: through Jazz Age excess, Dust Bowl migration, factory floors, low-wage jobs, racial exclusion and the hopes of new immigrants. Reading about it is a way to understand how the United States sees itself, and who has been left outside the picture.
This list mixes novels, a play and non-fiction: reportage, oral history, biography and memoir. Some books celebrate the drive to get ahead; most ask what it costs and who pays. Classics such as The Great Gatsby sit next to recent books on migration, race and work, so the theme can be read from several sides.
Thirteen books about the American Dream
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1925
Narrated by Nick Carraway, the novel follows his mysterious neighbour Jay Gatsby, a self-made millionaire who throws lavish parties on Long Island in the hope of winning back Daisy Buchanan, the woman he loved before the war. Old money, new money and careless wealth collide over one summer in the 1920s.
Gatsby has reinvented himself entirely to reach a dream that turns out to be hollow. The novel is the classic text on the American Dream as a story of self-invention, and on the class lines that money alone cannot cross.
Read it if you want the book most often taught as the defining novel of the American Dream.
Read my full recommendation →The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck · 1939
The Joad family lose their Oklahoma farm during the Depression and drive west to California, drawn by handbills promising work. What they find is an oversupply of desperate labourers, starvation wages and hostility. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize and remains one of the best-known American novels about poverty and migration.
California is the promised land of the American Dream here, and the novel shows the gap between the advertisement and the reality. It suits readers interested in how economic disaster tests the idea that hard work is always rewarded.
Read it if you want the great Depression-era novel about a family chasing a better life.
Of Mice and Men
John Steinbeck · 1937
Two itinerant ranch workers, the sharp George and the strong but childlike Lennie, travel through California looking for work. They share a plan to save enough money to buy a small farm of their own. On a new ranch, their hopes run into loneliness, cruelty and Lennie’s inability to control his strength.
The farm George and Lennie talk about is the American Dream at its smallest and most human: land, independence and security. The novella is short enough to read in an evening and shows how fragile that dream is for people with no margin for error.
Read it if you want a short, powerful classic about a modest dream and why it stays out of reach.
Death of a Salesman
Arthur Miller · 1949
Willy Loman, an ageing travelling salesman, is losing his job, his grip on the present and his faith in his sons. Moving between the present and memories of the past, the play follows his final days as he clings to the belief that being well liked is the key to success. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Willy has built his whole life on a version of the American Dream that has failed him. The play is the standard reference for the dream as a source of pressure and self-deception, and it reads quickly on the page.
Read it if you want the classic stage portrait of a man undone by the gospel of success.
Killers of the Flower Moon
David Grann · 2017
In the 1920s, members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma became some of the wealthiest people in the world after oil was found beneath their land. Then they began to be murdered. Grann reconstructs the killings, the conspiracy behind them and the investigation that helped shape the early FBI. Martin Scorsese adapted it for film in 2023.
The book shows the American Dream from the other side: settlers and local men who grew rich by killing Osage people for their wealth. It suits readers who want to see how greed and racism shaped who was allowed to keep their fortune.
Read it if you want true crime that exposes the violence behind an American fortune.
Read my full recommendation →The Warmth of Other Suns
Isabel Wilkerson · 2010
Wilkerson tells the story of the Great Migration, the decades-long movement of millions of Black Americans out of the Jim Crow South to cities in the North and West. She follows three people who left at different times and for different places, drawing on extensive interviews to show what they fled and what they found.
For the people in this book, leaving the South was a pursuit of the American Dream that the South denied them. The book shows both the opportunities they gained and the discrimination that followed them north.
Read it if you want a sweeping, people-centred history of migration within the United States.
Working
Studs Terkel · 1974
The full subtitle says it: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. Studs Terkel interviewed Americans in a wide range of jobs and let them speak in their own words about their routines, frustrations and pride. The result is a large, varied portrait of working life in the United States.
The American Dream rests on the idea that work brings reward and dignity. Working lets ordinary people say whether it does. It suits readers who want the dream described from the shop floor rather than the boardroom.
Read it if you want to hear ordinary Americans talk about their jobs in their own words.
Read my full recommendation →Nickel and Dimed
Barbara Ehrenreich · 2001
Journalist Barbara Ehrenreich took a series of low-wage jobs, including waitressing, cleaning houses and working in retail, to find out whether it was possible to live on what they paid. Her subtitle, On (Not) Getting By in America, gives away the answer. The book became widely read and widely debated.
If the dream says hard work leads to security, this book tests that claim directly. It suits readers who want a concrete, numbers-based account of why full-time work does not always cover rent and food.
Read it if you want an undercover look at whether hard work still pays the bills.
American Prometheus
Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin · 2005
This biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer follows the physicist from his privileged New York childhood to his leadership of the Los Alamos laboratory that built the atomic bomb, and to his later public humiliation, when his security clearance was revoked during the anti-communist climate of the 1950s. It won the Pulitzer Prize and was the basis of Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer (2023).
Its link to the theme is the arc of an American success story and its reversal: a national hero brought down by the politics of the Cold War. It suits readers interested in ambition, power and how quickly a country can turn on its own.
Read it if you want a long, detailed life of a celebrated American who fell from grace.
Read my full recommendation →Hell’s Angels
Hunter S. Thompson · 1966
Hunter S. Thompson spent around a year riding with the Hells Angels motorcycle club in California in the mid-1960s, and this book is his account of it. He describes the members, their runs and their reputation, and contrasts the sensational press coverage of the time with what he saw. The experience ended with Thompson being beaten by several of the bikers.
It is not a book about the American Dream in the usual sense. It belongs on this list as a portrait of men living outside respectable 1960s America, and of how the media turned them into a national threat.
Read it if you want early Hunter S. Thompson and a view of 1960s America from its outer edges.
Read my full recommendation →Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates · 2015
Written as a letter to his teenage son, this short book reflects on what it means to grow up Black in the United States, from Coates’s childhood in Baltimore to his years at Howard University and his life as a writer and father. It won the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Coates writes directly about the Dream and the people he calls "the Dreamers", questioning who has been able to live it and at whose expense. It suits readers who want a personal, sharply argued challenge to the idea.
Read it if you want a short, intense book that questions the Dream from the inside.
Behold the Dreamers
Imbolo Mbue · 2016
Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant in New York, gets a job as chauffeur to a Lehman Brothers executive, and his wife Neni dreams of becoming a pharmacist. When the 2008 financial crisis hits, both families are shaken, and the Jongas must decide whether their future is in America. The novel won the 2017 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
The title points straight at the theme. The novel follows immigrants who believe in the American Dream and asks what happens when the system they are counting on collapses around them.
Read it if you want a contemporary immigrant story set against the 2008 crash.
Americanah
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 2013
Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love as teenagers in Nigeria. Ifemelu leaves for the United States, where she encounters race as an American category for the first time and later writes a blog about it, while Obinze’s path takes him elsewhere. Years later, both return to Lagos and to each other.
The novel looks at the American Dream through the eyes of a newcomer who achieves a version of success but questions what she gave up. It suits readers who want the immigrant experience told with humour and sharp social observation.
Read it if you want a love story that is also a sharp look at race and immigration in America.
Which book should you read first?
The best starting point depends on what you want from a book.
- For a first classic — The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
- For a short read — Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (1937)
- For true crime — Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann (2017)
- For working life — Working by Studs Terkel (1974)
- For the immigrant experience — Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue (2016)
- For race and history — The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson (2010)
Where to go next
Frequently asked questions
What is the best book about the American Dream?
The Great Gatsby is often taught as the defining novel of the American Dream. For a non-fiction view, The Warmth of Other Suns and Nickel and Dimed show how the dream works out for real people.
Which classic novels are about the American Dream?
The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men are the classic novels most often read for this theme, along with Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman.
Are there non-fiction books about the American Dream?
Yes. Working collects interviews with Americans about their jobs, Nickel and Dimed tests whether low-wage work pays enough to live on, and The Warmth of Other Suns tells the story of the Great Migration.
Which books show the dark side of the American Dream?
Killers of the Flower Moon describes the murders of Osage people for their oil wealth, and Death of a Salesman shows a man destroyed by his belief in success. Between the World and Me questions who the Dream has been available to.
What books about immigrants and the American Dream are there?
Behold the Dreamers follows a Cameroonian family in New York during the 2008 financial crisis, and Americanah follows a young Nigerian woman who moves to the United States.
What is a short book about the American Dream?
Of Mice and Men is a short novella that can be read in an evening, and Between the World and Me is a brief book-length essay. Death of a Salesman also reads quickly as a play.
Pick the book that answers the question you are asking right now. The rest of the list will still be here when you are ready for the next one.
See my bookshelf Browse every reading list