The following is reprinted with permission from Book magazine's July/August 2003 issue.
In honor of America's 227th birthday, we set out to find the twenty novels and nonfiction titles that have had the greatest impact on the history of the country: the ones that led to concrete, definable changes in the way Americans live their lives. We omitted a number of important volumes that existed before the country did; among their number are several seminal religious texts (the Bible, for instance). We also limited our list to books that were released more than twenty-five years ago. It just seems too early to assess the effect of recent efforts — Dinesh D'Souza's 1991 Illiberal Education, which helped codify the country's obsession with political correctness, for instance, or Andrew Weil's 1995 advisory paean to alternative medicine, Spontaneous Healing, or Eric Schlosser's 2001 McDonald's-bashing Fast Food Nation. Here, then, in chronological order, are the books that forever changed the nation. — Jerome Kramer
Common Sense Thomas Paine, 1776 Without Paine's indictment of hereditary monarchy, "there might not have been a U.S.A.," says Fast Food Nation's Eric Schlosser. Before it was published, "a lot of early Americans didn't give a damn about splitting with the Motherland," points out War Letters editor Andrew Carroll. "Paine's book was the ember that sparked the blaze." At least a hundred thousand copies were sold in the first few months after its publication-at a time when the country's opulation was roughly two and a half million.
A Vindication of the Rights of Women Mary Wollstonecraft 1792
With her passionate manifesto, the mother of modern feminism kicked off what would be a centuries-long struggle. The first major literary assertion of women's rights, Vindication paved the way for both 1848's Seneca Falls Convention (the gathering of suffragists organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony) and the 1920 passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted American women the right to vote.
The Book of Mormon 1830 This collection of revelations, given to Joseph Smith by the angel Moroni, launched the country's biggest homegrown religion. Today, Mormonism has eleven million followers around the world; in the United States alone, its adherents outnumber Episcopalians or Presbyterians. The book provides the theological underpinnings for one of the world's most vibrant religions.
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave Frederick Douglass, 1845 Douglass' autobiography opened eyes not only because of the story its title promised, but also because of the very idea that a former slave could write so well. Others recognized that Douglass' point of view was the truly valid one: In a preface to the book, Wendell Phillips referred to a fable in which a lion complains that he would not be so misrepresented if the lions wrote history. "I am glad the time has come when the 'lions write history,'" Phillips wrote. "We have been left long enough to gather the character of slavery from the involuntary evidence of the masters."
