Selected by Professor Chris Daly, Boston University.
Essential tools
The Associated Press Stylebook. Goldstein, ed.
Also see the stylebooks of The New York Times and The Washington
Post.
Roget's Thesaurus
Any good (open) dictionary. (I like the American Heritage from
Houghton Mifflin.)
On the writing life
The Writing Life. Annie Dillard.
Bird by Bird. Anne Lamott.
Writing Down the Bones. Natalie Goldberg.
How to Write. Richard Rhodes.
A key reference work
The Writer’s Market.
Guides to proper usage and rhetoric
The Elements of Style. Will Strunk and E. B. White.
The Elements of Grammar. Margaret Shertzer.
The Allyn & Bacon Handbook. Leonard Rosen and Laurence Behrens.
Fowler’s Modern English Usage.
Anthologies and collections
Up in the Old Hotel. Joseph Mitchell.
One Man’s Meat. E. B. White.
Essays. E. B. White.
A Collection of Essays. George Orwell.
The John McPhee Reader.
The Most of A. J. Leibling.
Airing Dirty Laundry. Ishmael Reed.
The Working Press: Special to The New York Times. Ed. Ruth
Adler. G.P. Putnam’s Sons: New York, 1966.
The Best American Essays. Various eds. Houghton Mifflin.
The Reporting of World War II. 2 vols. Library of America.
Also see volumes by Anna Quindlen, Ellen Goodman, et al.
General guides
The Art and Craft of Feature Writing. William Blundell.
The Craft of Interviewing. John Brady.
Words’ Worth: A Handbook on Writing & Selling Non–Fiction. Terri Brooks.
Feature Article and Magazine Article Writing. Janet E. Ramsey.
The Reporter’s Handbook. Steve Weinberg (for Investigative Reporters
and Editors Inc.).
Handbook of Magazine Article Writing. Writer’s Digest.
On Writing Well. William Zinsser.
The great legacy
Mark Twain
H.L. Mencken
Ernest Hemingway
A.J. Leibling, especially The Wayward Pressman, The Press.
Walter Lippman
William Shirer
Some histories
The Kingdom and the Power. Gay Talese.
The Paper. Richard Kluger.
The First Casualty. Philip Knightley.
The Powers That Be. David Halberstam.
Discovering the News. Michael Schudson.
The Girls in the Balcony: Women, Men and the New York Times.
Nan Robertson.
All the President’s Men. Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward.
Some memoirs
The Good Times. Russell Baker.
A Good Life. Ben Bradlee.
A Reporter’s Life. Walter Cronkite.
Laughing in the Dark. Patrice Gaines.
Here at The New Yorker. Brendan Gill.
Personal History. Katherine Graham.
The Drinking Life. Pete Hammill.
Moving Violations. John Hockenberry.
Makes Me Want to Holler. Nathan McCall.
Newspaper Days. H. L. Mencken.
Volunteer Slavery. Jill Nelson.
The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens. Lincoln Steffens.
Some biographies
Citizen Hearst. W. A. Swanberg.
Pulitzer. W. A. Swanberg.
Luce. W. A. Swanberg.
Walter Lippman and the American Century. Ronald Steel.
The Murrow Boys. Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson
Some touchstones
Scoop! Evelyn Waugh.
The Front Page. Ben Hecht. (The stage play that inspired the film His
Girl Friday.)
Citizen Kane, Orson Welles’ film masterpiece, a
fictionalized account of the life of William Randolph Hearst.)
Critical studies
The Media Monopoly. Ben Bagdikian.
Breaking the News. James Fallows.
Media Circus. Howie Kurtz.
The Chain Gang. Richard McCord.
A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper. John Allen Paulos.
The Power of News. Michael Schudson.