The Private Book Collections Of 4 Famous Writers

Have you ever wondered which books famous writers have in their own libraries? In this post, we share the private book collections of four famous writers.

Have you ever wondered which books famous writers have in their own libraries? In this post, we look at books from the libraries of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, David Foster Wallace, and Charles Darwin.

The Private Book Collections Of 4 Famous Writers

Emily Dickinson

A selection of books from Emily Dickinson’s library.

1. The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
2. The Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne
3. The Poetical Works of George Herbert
4. Confessions of an English opium-eater: and, Suspiria de profundis by Thomas De Quincey
5. The poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
6. The Professor by Charlotte Brontë
7. The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth
8. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
9. The princess; a medley by Baron Alfred Tennyson
10. The Poetical Works by Percy Bysshe Shelley
11. The Comedies, Histories, Tragedies and Poems of William Shakespeare
12. Paradise Lost by John Milton
13. Life of George Washington by Washington Irving
14. Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
15. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
16. The frugal housewife : dedicated to those who are not ashamed of economy by Mrs. Lydia Maria Child
17. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
18. Wuthering Heights by Ellis Bell (Emily Brontë)
19. Prometheus Bound, and Other Poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

David Foster Wallace

Here are some of the books from the 300-odd volumes of Wallace’s personal library, which is housed at the Harry Ransom Center.

1. The Safety of Objects by A.M. Homes
2. Darconville’s Cat by Alexander Theroux
3. The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, the Kabbalah, and the Search for Infinity by Amir D. Aczel
4. Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting by J. Hoberman And Jeffrey Shandler
5. The Principles of Mathematics by Bertrand Russell
6. The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
7. Writing Past Dark : Envy, Fear, Distraction and Other Dilemmas in the Writer’s Life by Bonnie Friedman
8. Myths to Live By by Joseph Campbell ; Foreword By Johnson E. Fairchild
9. Desperate Characters: A Novel by Paula Fox ; With An Afterword By Irving Howe
10. All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
11. Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy
12. Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
13. The Puttermesser Papers: A Novel by Cynthia Ozick
14. Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
15. The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor
16. The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism by Fritjof Capra
17. Metalogic: An Introduction to the Metatheory of Standard First Order Logic by Geoffrey Hunter
18. Insect Biology: A Textbook of Entomology by Howard E. Evans
19. The Ultimate Rip-Off : A Taxing Tale by Iris Weil Collett
20. Play It As It Lays: A Novel by Joan Didion
21. Uses of Infinity by Leo Zippin
22. Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form by Matthea Harvey
23. Compassion and Self Hate: An Alternative to Despair by Theodore I. Rubin
24. Change Your Mind: A practical guide to Buddhist meditation by Paramananda
25. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Translated, and with an introduction, by Burton Raffel ; afterword by Neil D. Isaacs
26. Pretty much all of Don DeLillo