Creative Non-fiction Book List ·

Aquamarine Blue 5

Personal Stories of College Students with Autism

This is the first book to be written by autistic college students about the challenges they face. Aquamarine Blue 5 details the struggle of these highly sensitive students and shows that there are gifts specific to autistic students that enrich the university system, scholarship, and the world as a whole.…

Body Story

Something other than a memoir of a life well lived, Body Story conveys Julia K. De Pree's troubling journey from adolescence to adulthood and from anorexia to health. For De Pree, between being a girl and being a woman, there was starvation.…

Booking Pleasures

“The covetous foraging for old and rare books,” is how Matthews defines “booking.” It is an act which leads naturally to the pleasures of adding them to one's personal library, then reading them as instruments of light and measure in a murky and chaotic world.…

Closing Arguments

Clarence Darrow on Religion, Law, and Society

Clarence Darrow, son of a village undertaker and coffinmaker, rose to become one of America's greatest attorneys—and surely its most famous. The Ohio native gained renown for his central role in momentous trials, including his 1924 defense of Leopold and Loeb and his defense of Darwinian principles in the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial.…

DeVoto’s West

History, Conservation, and the Public Good

Social commentator and preeminent western historian Bernard DeVoto vigorously defended public lands in the West against commercial interests. By the time of his death in 1955, DeVoto had published criticism, history, and fiction.…

Disarming Manhood

Roots of Ethical Resistance

Masculine codes of honor and dominance often are expressed in acts of violence, including war and terrorism. In Disarming Manhood: Roots of Ethical Resistance, David A. J. Richards examines the lives of five famous men—great leaders and crusaders—who actively resisted violence and presented more humane alternatives to further their causes.…

Expecting Teryk

An Exceptional Path to Parenthood

The period just prior to the birth of a child is a time of profound personal transformation for expectant parents. Expecting Teryk: An Exceptional Path to Parenthood is an intimate exploration, written in the form of a letter from a parent to her future son, that reclaims a rite of passage that modern society would strip of its magic.

Ghost Towns of the American West

The story of the American mining frontier can be traced in the ghost towns- from the camps of California's forty-niners to the twentieth-century ruins in the Nevada desert. They mark an epoch of high adventure, of quick wealth and quicker poverty, of gambling and gun-slinging and hell-raising.…

The Golden Dream

Seekers of El Dorado

One of the most persistent legends in the annals of New World exploration is that of the Land of God. Its mythical site was located over vast areas of South American (and later, North America); it drove some men mad with greed and, often as not, to their deaths.…

The Heritage

A Daughter's Memoir of Louis Bromfield

Louis Bromfield, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, established one of the most significant homesteads in Ohio on his Malabar Farm. Today it receives thousands of visitors a year from all over the world; once the site of the wedding of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, it was a successful prototype of experimental and conservation farming.…

Hired Pens

Professional Writers in America's Golden Age of Print

Just as mass-market magazines and cheap books have played important roles in the creation of an American identity, those skilled craftsmen (and women) whose careers are the subjects of Ronald Weber's narrative profoundly influenced the outlook and strategies of the high-culture writers who are generally the focus of literary studies.…

Lit from Within

Contemporary Masters on the Art and Craft of Writing

Lit from Within offers creative writers a window into the minds of some of America’s most celebrated contemporary authors. Witty, direct, and thought–provoking, these essays offer something to creative writers of all backgrounds and experience.…

The Longest Voyage

Circumnavigators in the Age of Discovery

Robert Silverberg’s The Longest Voyage captures the drama and danger and personalities in the colorful story of the first voyages around the world. In only a century, circumnavigators in small ships charted the coast of the New World and explored the Pacific.…

Memphis Tennessee Garrison

The Remarkable Story of a Black Appalachian Woman

As a black Appalachian woman, Memphis Tennessee Garrison belonged to a demographic category triply ignored by historians. The daughter of former slaves, she moved to McDowell County, West Virginia, at an early age and died at ninety-eight in Huntington.…

The Mound Builders

In Illinois, the one-hundred-foot Cahokia Mound spreads impressively across sixteen acres, and as many as ten thousand more mounds dot the Ohio River Valley alone. The Mound Builders traces the speculation surrounding these monuments and the scientific excavations which uncovered the history and culture of the ancient Americans who built them.…

Nightmare

The Underside of the Nixon Years

This extraordinary book had an extraordinary genesis. In July 1973, for the first time in its history, The New York Times Magazine devoted a full issue to a single article: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anthony Lukas's account of the Watergate story to date.…

The Realm of Prester John

Robert Silverberg, whose work is well known to science fiction fans, originally published The Realm of Prester John in 1972. The first modern account of the genesis of a great medieval myth—which was perpetuated for centuries by European Christians who looked to Asia and Africa for a strong ruler out of the east—Silverberg's romantic and fabulous tale is now available in paperback for the first time.…

Red, White, Black & Blue

A Dual Memoir of Race and Class in Appalachia

Red, White, Black, and Blue began as a collaborative memoir by William M. “Bill” Drennen, a European American, and Kojo (William T.) Jones, an African American. These Appalachian men grew up in the South Hills section of Charleston, West Virginia.…

The River Home

A Memoir

The death of her father begins Dorothy Weil’s search for what causes the family’s “spinning of in all directions like the pieces of Chaos.” She embarks on a river odyssey, traveling the Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi Rivers by steamboat, towboat, and even an old-fashioned flatboat.…

The Secret of the Hardy Boys

Leslie McFarlane and the Stratemeyer Syndicate

The author of the Hardy Boys Mysteries was, as millions of readers know, Franklin W. Dixon. Except there never was a Franklin W. Dixon. He was the creation of Edward Stratemeyer, the savvy founder of a children's book empire that also published the Tom Swift, Bobbsey Twins, and Nancy Drew series.…