The 100 best memoirs from the United States

Maus is widely taught in schools and universities as a central Holocaust text and as the key work of the graphic novel, and it won a Pulitzer Prize special award in 1992 for the combined work. It is now standard in comics studies and memory studies.

It is widely taught in American history and literature courses, is named among Time's most important nonfiction books of the century, and is an essential text in African American studies.

Thoreau moved to a cabin on a pond for two years and wrote a book that made solitude, bean-counting, and the observation of thawing mud into acts of radical philosophy. Walden supplied the intellectual template for civil disobedience, environmentalism, and voluntary simplicity — three movements that still run on its sentences.

Taught in virtually every American high school and across university courses in African American literature, women's studies, and autobiography. One of the American Library Association's most frequently challenged books — a perverse testament to its ubiquity — and named among the most important American autobiographies of the 20th century on lists from the Modern Library and TIME.

The most anthologised chapter of Walden and a fixture of American school reading.

Widely taught in universities and high schools as the defining Holocaust graphic memoir, Maus appears on hundreds of literature and history syllabi worldwide. It is listed on virtually every major 'essential reading' and 'greatest books' compilation that includes graphic literature, from the Modern Library to Time's All-TIME 100 Novels. While not on syllabi at the scale of Fitzgerald or Austen, it holds unique canonical status as the book that forced academia to take comics seriously.

The Bell Jar is required reading in virtually every American women's literature and confessional writing course, and appears widely in high school curricula addressing mental health and mid-century American life. It holds a secure place on Modern Library and similar essential reading lists, and remains one of the most assigned novels in discussions of feminist literary history.

The Woman Warrior is one of the most-taught memoirs in American university curricula, appearing on syllabi for American literature, Asian-American studies, women's studies, creative nonfiction, and multicultural education courses. It has been continuously in print since 1976 and appears on virtually every list of essential Asian-American literature. The Open Syllabus Project ranks it among the most frequently assigned texts in the humanities.

The Autobiography is among the most assigned texts in American literature and history courses at both high school and university level, serving as the foundational document of the American self-made-man tradition. No awards data is available in the database, but the work appears on virtually every syllabus of early American literature and is regularly included in surveys of American nonfiction. It is universally treated as essential reading for understanding American culture and civic ideology.

Black Boy is a fixture in American secondary and university curricula, routinely assigned in courses on African American literature, autobiography, and twentieth-century American history. It appears on widely used reading lists alongside Native Son and Frederick Douglass's Narrative. The book has maintained continuous institutional presence since its 1945 publication and Book-of-the-Month Club selection.