Wildeman Book List
Books I Almost Chose for This Talk
Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Showalter, A Literature of Their Own
Eagleton, Literary Theory
Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Schon, The Reflective Practitioner
Elbow, Writing Without Teachers
Lamott, Traveling Mercies
Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Chomsky, Syntactic Structures
Melville, Moby Dick
Twain, Huckleberry Finn
Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom!
Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism
Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962
Percy, The Message in the Bottle
Gibbons, Ellen Foster
Sterne, Tristram Shandy
Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Berry, Home Economics
Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography
Bronte, Jane Eyre
Austen, Emma
Ellison, Invisible Man
Miller, Death of a Salesman
Geertz, Local Knowledge
Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
Voltaire, Candide
Schirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Graff, Literature Against Itself
Knoblauch and Brannon, Rhetorical Traditions and the Teaching of Writing
Williams, The Country and the City
Marx, The Machine in the Garden
Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally
Berlin, Rhetoric and Reality
North, The Making of Knowledge in Composition
Manning, The Signature of Jesus
Ricouer, The Conflict of Interpretations
Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence
Booth, The Rhetoric of Irony
Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination
Brice-Heath, Ways With Words
Steiner, The Scandal of Pleasure
James, The Portrait of a Lady
Dillard, A Writing Life
Dubois, The Souls of Black Folks
Humphreys, Rich in Love
Keillor, Lake Woebegone Days
Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Crevecouer, Letters from an American Farmer
McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics
Scoles, The Rise and Fall of English
Greenblatt, Renaissance Refashioning
Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Wordsworth, The Prelude, Or Growth of a Poet’s Mind
Putnam, Bowling Alone
Vygotsky, Thought and Language
Williams, Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace
**List provided by Dr. Jim Wildeman, in conjunction with his Chapel lecture on “Books That Changed My Life” given October 3, 2007. The book he did choose was Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.