Books of the Century

Daniel Immerwahr, a history graduate student at the University of California-Berkeley, has created a web directory of twentieth-century bestselling fiction and non-fiction books. Gleaned from Publishers Weekly and Book-of-the-Month club selections, as well as from The Modern Library and Hollinger and Capper's The American Intellectual Tradition, Immerwahr's lists convey what readers were buying and presumably reading by decade, broken down by year. He has also included listings under the category "Critically Acclaimed and Historically Significant." For those interested in the history of architects/architecture, urban/social planning, & related, you may want to look for the following fiction and non-fiction books:

1904. Henry Adams, Mt-St. Michel and Chartres

1910. Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House

1913. Hugo Munsterberg, Psychology and Industrial Efficiency

1915. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland

1919. Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages

1920. Sinclair Lewis, Main Street

1923. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture

1926. Franz Kafka, The Castle

1936. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

1938. Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities

1943. Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

1948. B.F. Skinner, Walden Two

1950. Hubbard H. Cobb, Your Dream House: How to Build it for Less than $3,500

1952. Howard Spring, The Houses in Between

1953. Polly Adler, A House is Not a Home

1961. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Lewis Mumford, The City in History

1962. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

1972 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas

To read the lists, click here.