50 Fun Facts About Nonfiction Books

Which author took friend Harper Lee to Kansas to research the murders behind In Cold Blood?

Truman Capote called the 1966 book a nonfiction novel: the true story of the Clutter family killings, told with the pacing of fiction.

Which 1962 book by biologist Rachel Carson warned that pesticides such as DDT were harming the environment?

Silent Spring swayed public opinion so strongly that it led to a US ban on DDT for farm use, despite fierce opposition from chemical companies.

Anne Frank addressed most entries in the diary she kept in hiding to a character with which name?

Kitty began as one of several imagined pen pals in the first notebook, but by November 1942 Anne Frank was writing to her alone.

Which word for an idea that spreads through a culture did Richard Dawkins coin in The Selfish Gene?

Meme was coined in 1976 as a unit of cultural evolution that copies itself much as a gene does, long before the word came to mean a joke shared online.

Which magazine gave its entire August 31, 1946 issue to John Hersey's report on the Hiroshima bombing?

The New Yorker had planned to spread John Hersey's article over four issues, then gave a whole edition to it instead.

Rebecca Skloot's 2010 bestseller is about which woman, whose cancer cells became the first immortal human cell line?

Henrietta Lacks died in 1951, yet the HeLa cells grown from her tumor are still used in medical research, and her family did not learn of them until 1975.

Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air recounts a 1996 storm that killed eight climbers on which mountain?

Mount Everest was at first a purely professional trip for Jon Krakauer, who went as a journalist for the adventure magazine Outside.

Whose 2004 biography by Ron Chernow inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda to write a hit Broadway hip-hop musical?

Alexander Hamilton returned to the bestseller list in 2015 on the back of the musical, for which Ron Chernow served as historical consultant.

Which Malcolm Gladwell bestseller popularized the idea that mastery takes about 10,000 hours of practice?

Outliers points to the Beatles and Bill Gates as proof, though the authors of the original study have disputed how Malcolm Gladwell used their findings.

Which 2018 memoir by Michelle Obama sold more than two million copies within 15 days of its release?

Becoming opens with her childhood in an apartment above the great-aunt who gave her piano lessons, and it was the top-selling book published in the US that year.

Which memoir by Tara Westover follows her from a survivalist family in rural Idaho to a Cambridge PhD?

Educated recounts how she started college at 17 without ever having had any formal schooling.

Which physicist was warned that every equation would halve the readership of A Brief History of Time?

Stephen Hawking need not have worried: the book became a bestseller and has sold more than 25 million copies in 40 languages.

Which Yuval Noah Harari bestseller on human history grew out of his university lectures in Jerusalem?

Sapiens first appeared in Hebrew in 2011 and only reached English readers three years later.

Which author's 1936 self-help classic How to Win Friends and Influence People has sold over 30 million copies?

Dale Carnegie had been running business courses in New York since 1912, long before the book made his name.

Cheryl Strayed's memoir Wild recounts her 1,100-mile solo hike in 1995 along which long-distance route?

Pacific Crest Trail hiking began for Cheryl Strayed in the Mojave Desert, and her account of the journey became the first selection for Oprah's Book Club 2.0.

Which activist's memoir, co-written with Christina Lamb, recounts being shot by the Taliban at age 15?

Malala Yousafzai was attacked in October 2012 after campaigning for girls' schooling in Pakistan's Swat Valley, where her father ran schools.

Which comedian's memoir Born a Crime describes his childhood in South Africa during the apartheid era?

Trevor Noah took the title from his own birth: his parents' interracial relationship was illegal under apartheid.

Which chef's 2000 bestseller Kitchen Confidential grew out of a magazine essay submitted by his mother?

Anthony Bourdain's mother, a New York Times copy editor, got the essay to a magazine editor through a colleague, and it launched his media career.

Which ancient Chinese strategist is credited with The Art of War, a military treatise of 13 chapters?

Sun Tzu means Master Sun, and the treatise attributed to him dates from roughly the 5th century BC.

Which Florentine wrote The Prince, a guide to ruling that was not printed until five years after his death?

Niccolò Machiavelli had already seen the work stir controversy in manuscript; the printed version of 1532 needed the permission of the Medici pope Clement VII.

Which thinker co-wrote The Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx for the Communist League in 1848?

Friedrich Engels and his co-author wrote it as a political pamphlet, and it was first published not in Germany but in London.

Which economist used the metaphor of an invisible hand in the 1776 treatise The Wealth of Nations?

Adam Smith used the phrase only once in the whole book, yet it became the best-known image of self-interest serving the public good in a free market.

Which novelist based the essay A Room of One's Own on two 1928 lectures at Cambridge women's colleges?

Virginia Woolf argued that a woman needs money and a private space of her own if she is to write fiction.

Which Betty Friedan book grew out of a 1957 survey of her former Smith College classmates?

The Feminine Mystique found that many of those classmates were unhappy as housewives, and it is widely credited with sparking second-wave feminism in the US.

Which writer spent two years in a self-built cabin on Ralph Waldo Emerson's woodland, then wrote Walden?

Henry David Thoreau was no hermit: the cabin stood within walking distance of his family home in Concord, and his mother and sisters often brought him food.

Charles Darwin's 1839 travel book made his name by describing a survey expedition aboard which ship?

HMS Beagle gave the book the title it is known by today; it was first published as Journal and Remarks and brought its author considerable fame.

Which writer's pamphlet Common Sense, published anonymously in January 1776, rallied Americans behind independence?

Thomas Paine's pamphlet became an immediate sensation and was read aloud in taverns and meeting places, six months before the Declaration of Independence.

Which abolitionist's 1845 memoir of his years in slavery carried a preface by William Lloyd Garrison?

Frederick Douglass wrote it while living in Lynn, Massachusetts, and its two introductions vouched that a former slave really was the author.

Which poet's 1969 book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings begins with her childhood in Stamps, Arkansas?

Maya Angelou wrote it after her friend James Baldwin and her editor challenged her to write a life story that was also a piece of literature.

Which journalist shaped Malcolm X's life story from interviews held between 1963 and 1965, then wrote its epilogue?

Alex Haley finished the book after his subject was assassinated in February 1965, and it was published that October.

Which newspaper employed Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, whose Watergate reporting became All the President's Men?

The Washington Post pair followed the story from the June 1972 break-in through the resignations of Nixon aides to the discovery of the Oval Office tapes.

Which author interviewed test pilots, astronauts and their wives to write the 1979 book The Right Stuff?

Tom Wolfe set the first Americans chosen for Project Mercury beside the pilots who had flown experimental rocket planes before them.

Which Thoroughbred racehorse is the subject of Laura Hillenbrand's bestseller that became a 2003 feature film?

Seabiscuit also won Laura Hillenbrand the William Hill Sports Book of the Year, and one edition was subtitled The True Story of Three Men and a Racehorse.

Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City pairs a serial killer with the 1893 World's Fair in which city?

Chicago hosted the World's Columbian Exposition, whose architect Daniel Burnham shares the book with a man widely considered America's first serial killer.

Michael Lewis's Moneyball follows general manager Billy Beane building which low-budget baseball team with statistics?

Oakland Athletics management used sabermetrics to stay competitive on a small budget, a story retold in a 2011 film starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill.

Which author won a 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Guns, Germs, and Steel, a study of the fates of human societies?

Jared Diamond's book was sold in Britain under a different subtitle: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years.

Which astronomer wrote the 1980 book Cosmos as a companion to his own PBS television series?

Carl Sagan matched the book's 13 illustrated chapters to the 13 episodes, aiming to explain complex science to anyone interested in learning.

Which psychologist contrasted fast, instinctive System 1 with slow, logical System 2 in a 2011 bestseller?

Daniel Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel prize in economics despite being a research psychologist, and much of his work was done with Amos Tversky.

Which psychiatrist drew on his years as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps to write Man's Search for Meaning?

Viktor Frankl observed that the inmates who survived were those who held on to a purpose, the idea at the heart of the therapy he called logotherapy.

Which leader's memoir Long Walk to Freedom covers his 27 years in prison, many of them on Robben Island?

Nelson Mandela published it in 1994, the same year he became South Africa's first democratically elected president.

Which 2005 bestseller by Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner explores the hidden side of everything?

Freakonomics grew out of articles applying economic theory to subjects economists usually ignore, and it had sold over 4 million copies by late 2009.

Frank McCourt's Pulitzer-winning memoir Angela's Ashes focuses mainly on his early life in which Irish city?

Limerick is where the family settled after his earliest years in Brooklyn, New York, where he was born in 1930.

David Grann's Killers of the Flower Moon links the birth of the FBI to murders in which Native American nation?

Osage poet Elise Paschen wrote the poem that gave the book its title, and Martin Scorsese directed the film adaptation released in 2023.

The Boys in the Boat follows a University of Washington team to gold in which sport at the 1936 Berlin Olympics?

Rowing gold came in the men's eight, and the book grew out of author Daniel James Brown's conversation with crew member Joe Rantz about the Great Depression.

Margot Lee Shetterly's Hidden Figures follows Black women mathematicians who worked as human computers at which agency?

NASA and its forerunner NACA employed Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson; the author's childhood Sunday school teacher had been a computer at Langley too.

John Carreyrou's Bad Blood charts the rise and fall of which biotech startup headed by Elizabeth Holmes?

Theranos was once a multibillion-dollar company, and its founder was later played by Amanda Seyfried in the limited series The Dropout.

Jennette McCurdy's 2022 memoir about her mother recalls her years as a child star of which Nickelodeon sitcom?

iCarly made her famous as Sam Puckett, and the memoir sold out within 24 hours at retailers including Amazon, Target and Barnes & Noble.

Which royal's 2023 memoir Spare takes its title from an aristocratic saying about an heir and a backup?

Prince Harry's book was named by Guinness World Records as the fastest-selling nonfiction book of all time on the day it was released.

Which system for shelving library books by subject was developed at the Amherst College library and published in 1876?

Dewey Decimal shelving sorts books into ten classes, each divided into ten divisions, each with ten sections, using three-digit numbers for the main classes.

Which alphabetical list of specialized terms and their definitions is often placed at the end of a nonfiction book?

Glossary comes from the Ancient Greek word glossa, meaning language or speech, and the list is also known as a vocabulary or clavis.