Literature and psychology in date order
Novels, dramas, memoirs, popular syntheses, and foundational psychology monographs ordered by first publication date. Open any work for its edition history, psychological reading, paired academic research, limits, and OpenStax course links.
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1600 to 1899: Early modern drama, nineteenth-century fiction, and the birth of experimental psychology
- 1603England (link to this row)
Hamlet
William Shakespeare · Drama · 1603 publication
A soliloquy makes hesitation audible. Compare thought, conscience and the difficulty of acting.
Interpretive thematic pairing: (Nolen-Hoeksema et al., 2008)
- 1818United Kingdom (link to this row)
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
Mary Shelley · Novel · 1818 publication
A creature asks his creator to listen. Read their encounter through belonging, rejection and responsibility.
Interpretive thematic pairing: (Baumeister & Leary, 1995)
- 1847United Kingdom (link to this row)
Jane Eyre: An Autobiography
Charlotte Brontë · Novel · 1847 publication
From enforced dependence to an independent will: read Jane’s voice alongside autonomy and relatedness.
Interpretive thematic pairing: (Ryan & Deci, 2000)
- 1861United Kingdom (link to this row)
Great Expectations
Charles Dickens · Novel · 1861 publication
Pip learns to be ashamed of his hands. Follow the moment social judgment becomes self-judgment.
Interpretive thematic pairing: (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000)
- 1866Russia (link to this row)
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Novel · 1866 publication
Who gives a person permission to stand above ordinary rules? Examine moral justification in a novel’s debate.
Interpretive thematic pairing: (Bandura, 1999)
- 1872United Kingdom (link to this row)
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
Charles Darwin · Foundational treatise · 1872
Charles Darwin's 1872 treatise on the expressions of emotion in people and animals, which opens with general principles of expression and then works through animals and a series of human expressions.
Read work profile: The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
- 1886United Kingdom (link to this row)
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson · Novella · 1886 publication
Jekyll offers an explanation of his divided self. Does it clarify responsibility or evade it?
- 1890United States (link to this row)
The Principles of Psychology
William James · Foundational treatise · 1890
James describes habit, a flowing stream of thought and the selective work of attention. Read the historical arguments beside the questions psychology still asks.
Direct empirical or theoretical source: (James, 1884)
- 1892United States (link to this row)
The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman · Short story · 1892 publication
A narrator writes in secret while others decide what is good for her. Explore voice, care and authority.
Interpretive thematic pairing: (Rosenhan, 1973)
- 1899Austria (link to this row)
The Interpretation of Dreams
Sigmund Freud · Foundational treatise · 1899 (title page dated 1900)
Freud’s historical theory distinguishes the dream we remember from latent dream thoughts. Explore the difference between interpreting meaning and testing an explanation.
1900 to 1945: modernism, stream of consciousness, and early laboratories
- 1902United States (link to this row)
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature
William James · Foundational treatise · 1902
William James's Gifford Lectures on personal religious experience, which set institutional religion aside and move from healthy-mindedness and the sick soul through conversion and saintliness to mysticism.
Read work profile: The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature
- 1903United States (link to this row)
The Story of My Life
Helen Keller · Memoir · 1903
Helen Keller's 1903 volume combines her memoir, selected letters and a supplementary account edited from Anne Sullivan's reports. This profile reads only the editor's preface and part of Chapter IV.
- 1914Ireland (link to this row)
Dubliners
James Joyce · Short story · 1914 publication
A song recalls a life Gabriel did not know. Read The Dead through memory and the limits of knowing another person.
Interpretive thematic pairing: (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000)
- 1915Austria-Hungary (Prague) (link to this row)
The Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka · Novella · 1915 publication
Gregor worries about work before he can explain his changed body. Examine obligation, usefulness and recognition.
Interpretive thematic pairing: (Major & O’Brien, 2005)
- 1925United Kingdom (link to this row)
Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf · Novel · 1925 publication
The same London moment unfolds differently for different minds. Follow awareness, memory and perspective.
- 1930Austria (link to this row)
Civilization and Its Discontents
Sigmund Freud · Scholarly monograph · 1930
Freud's late essay on what civilization asks of the individual, centered in the English text on the restraint of aggression and the sense of guilt.
- 1932United Kingdom (link to this row)
Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology
Frederic C. Bartlett · Scholarly monograph · 1932
Frederic C. Bartlett's 1932 monograph presents remembering as reconstruction guided by schemas, illustrated through story retelling, according to the Cambridge University Press description.
Interpretive thematic pairing: (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000)
Read work profile: Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology
- 1938United States (link to this row)
The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis
B. F. Skinner · Scholarly monograph · 1938 (Foundation reprints 1991 and 1999)
B. F. Skinner's first book, in which he proposes rate of responding as the basic datum of a science of behavior and lays out a research program to identify what behavior is a function of.
Read work profile: The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis
- 1941United States (link to this row)
Escape from Freedom
Erich Fromm · Scholarly monograph · 1941
Erich Fromm's 1941 study of why people may give up freedom for authority, which one publisher describes as a classic account of the psychological appeal of fascism.
- 1942France (link to this row)
The Stranger
Albert Camus · Novel · 1942
Meursault’s account of events in French Algeria raises questions about judgment, perspective, and the expectations brought to another person’s story.
1946 to 1969: postwar authority, institutions, and the cognitive turn
- 1946Austria (link to this row)
Man's Search for Meaning
Viktor E. Frankl · Memoir · 1946 (German original)
Viktor E. Frankl's account of his time as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps, with an outline of logotherapy, his method built on finding meaning.
- 1948United States (link to this row)
The Lottery
Shirley Jackson · Short story · 1948
An annual village gathering turns familiar civic routines into a disturbing question: when does keeping a tradition become a way to stop questioning it?
Interpretive thematic pairing: (Bandura, 1999)
- 1949United Kingdom (link to this row)
Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell · Novel · 1949
Winston Smith rewrites public records for the Party, inviting questions about authority, language, and who controls an account of events.
- 1949Canada / United States (link to this row)
The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory
Donald O. Hebb · Scholarly monograph · 1949 (reissued 2002)
Donald Hebb’s 1949 theoretical book links behavior with the organization of neural networks. The reissue’s publisher description identifies the cell assembly, Hebb synapse, and Hebb rule among its ideas.
Read work profile: The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory
- 1950United States (link to this row)
Childhood and Society
Erik H. Erikson · Scholarly monograph · 1950
Erik Erikson's 1950 book on the social significance of childhood, which a catalog description says combines clinical psychoanalysis with cultural anthropology.
- 1954United States (link to this row)
Motivation and Personality
Abraham H. Maslow · Scholarly monograph · 1954 (second edition 1970)
Abraham Maslow's 1954 book on motivation and self-actualization, which a secondary reference describes as addressing human fulfillment and personal relationships.
- 1954United States (link to this row)
The Nature of Prejudice
Gordon W. Allport · Scholarly monograph · 1954 (25th anniversary edition 1979)
Gordon Allport's 1954 study of prejudice, which publisher and catalog descriptions present as a wide survey of research on the roots and nature of racial, religious, ethnic, economic and sexual prejudice.
- 1956United Kingdom / United States (link to this row)
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
Erving Goffman · Scholarly monograph · 1956 (U.S. edition 1959)
Erving Goffman's account of how people behave in social settings and how they come across to others, using theatrical performance as its framework.
Read work profile: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
- 1957United States (link to this row)
A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance
Leon Festinger · Scholarly monograph · 1957
Leon Festinger's 1957 monograph proposes that inconsistent cognitions produce psychological discomfort that motivates efforts to reduce the inconsistency.
- 1958Nigeria (link to this row)
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe · Novel · 1958
Okonkwo’s story puts personal standing and fear alongside the disruption of a community under British colonialism.
- 1960United States (link to this row)
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee · Novel · 1960
Atticus Finch’s defense of a wrongly accused Black man invites questions about prejudice, social judgment, and what a legal process can reveal about a community.
- 1961United States (link to this row)
Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates
Erving Goffman · Scholarly monograph · 1961 (reissued 2022)
Four linked essays by sociologist Erving Goffman on total institutions, from prisons and boarding schools to mental hospitals, and on how institutional life is organized around the inmate. Paired with Rosenhan's 1973 article on psychiatric hospitals.
Interpretive thematic pairing: (Rosenhan, 1973)
Read work profile: Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates
- 1962United States (link to this row)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Ken Kesey · Novel · 1962
Chief Bromden narrates a mental ward’s conflict between Nurse Ratched and the newly arrived McMurphy, opening questions about institutional authority.
- 1963United Kingdom / United States (link to this row)
The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath · Novel · 1963
Esther Greenwood’s ambitions and distress invite a reading of how a restricted set of possible futures can feel like confinement.
Interpretive thematic pairing: (Hoag, 2024a)
- 1966United States (link to this row)
Flowers for Algernon
Daniel Keyes · Novel · 1966
An imagined operation to increase intelligence raises questions about ability, dignity, and the ethics of research participation.
- 1969United States (link to this row)
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut · Novel · 1969
Billy Pilgrim’s disrupted sequence of experiences turns war, time, and the way a life is narrated into questions for the reader.
1970 to 1989: memory, social identity, trauma, and clinical tales
- 1974United States (link to this row)
Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View
Stanley Milgram · Scholarly monograph · 1974
Stanley Milgram's 1974 book about his obedience experiments, in which volunteers were told to give electric shocks to a learner. Paired with his own 1963 journal report of the procedure.
Direct empirical or theoretical source: (Milgram, 1963)
Read work profile: Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View
- 1979United States (link to this row)
Kindred
Octavia E. Butler · Novel · 1979
Dana moves between 1970s California and a slaveholding ancestor’s world, making power, kinship, and constrained choices difficult to separate.
- 1981United States (link to this row)
The Mismeasure of Man
Stephen Jay Gould · History and critique · 1981
Stephen Jay Gould's history and critique of efforts to rank people by a single measure of intelligence, including skull measurement and mental testing.
Published critique or methodological audit: (Lewis et al., 2011)
- 1983United States (link to this row)
Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences
Howard Gardner · Scholarly monograph · 1983
Howard Gardner's 1983 book challenges the idea that intelligence is a single general capacity and proposes several distinct kinds. Paired with a 2006 critical review of the theory's empirical support.
Published critique or methodological audit: (Waterhouse, 2006)
Read work profile: Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences
- 1985Canada (link to this row)
The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Atwood · Novel · 1985
Offred’s recollections of her former life confront the identity and role imposed on her by a totalitarian theocracy.
- 1985United Kingdom / United States (link to this row)
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
Oliver Sacks · Clinical case narrative · 1985
A collection of neurological case narratives. Use it to ask what a single case can show and what a description of symptoms can leave out.
- 1987United States (link to this row)
Beloved
Toni Morrison · Novel · 1987
Sethe's haunted home brings the aftermath of enslavement into a family story about remembering, love, and survival.
1990 to 2009: memoirs, affective neuroscience, and positive psychology
- 1990United States (link to this row)
Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
William Styron · Memoir · 1990
William Styron's short memoir of his own severe depression, which began as a 1989 magazine essay.
- 1990United States (link to this row)
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi · Popular psychology · 1990
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's 1990 book presents his research on optimal experience and names flow, the state of total involvement in an activity.
Read work profile: Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
- 1993United States (link to this row)
Girl, Interrupted
Susanna Kaysen · Memoir · 1993
Susanna Kaysen's memoir of about two years at McLean Hospital, beginning in 1967 when she was 18, and of how people are sorted into sane and insane.
Interpretive thematic pairing: (Rosenhan, 1973)
- 1995United States (link to this row)
An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
Kay Redfield Jamison · Memoir · 1995
Kay Redfield Jamison, a clinician and researcher of manic-depressive (bipolar) illness, writes about living with the illness herself.
Read work profile: An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
- 1995United States (link to this row)
Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ
Daniel Goleman · Popular psychology · 1995
Daniel Goleman's trade book argues that self-awareness, self-discipline and empathy help explain why some high-IQ people struggle and others do well, and that these skills can be developed in adulthood.
Read work profile: Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ
- 1998United States (link to this row)
Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind
V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee · Clinical case narrative · 1998
V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee use simple experiments on patients with unusual neurological conditions to ask how the brain builds body image and the sense of self.
Direct empirical or theoretical source: (V. S. Ramachandran, 1996)
Read work profile: Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind
- 2001United States (link to this row)
The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
Andrew Solomon · Memoir · 2001
Andrew Solomon examines depression in personal, cultural and scientific terms, drawing on his own illness and on interviews.
Interpretive thematic pairing: (Kessler et al., 2003)
Read work profile: The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
- 2005United Kingdom (link to this row)
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro · Novel · 2005
Kathy looks back on her childhood at Hailsham, where friendship and belonging develop within rules the pupils do not fully understand.
- 2006United States (link to this row)
The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom
Jonathan Haidt · Popular psychology · 2006
Jonathan Haidt takes ten Great Ideas about a good life from ancient traditions and sets them against psychological research.
Read work profile: The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom
2010 to 2026: dual-process bestsellers, replication debates, and contemporary voices
- 2011United States / Israel (link to this row)
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman · Popular psychology · 2011
Daniel Kahneman's 2011 trade synthesis presents decades of collaborative research with Amos Tversky on judgment heuristics, cognitive biases, and decision-making using the expository metaphor of fast intuitive and slow deliberative thinking.
Direct empirical or theoretical source: (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974a)
- 2012United States (link to this row)
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
Susan Cain · Popular psychology · 2012
Susan Cain's 2012 book argues that introverts are undervalued. Compare that cultural argument with how introductory psychology treats extraversion and introversion as a trait dimension.
Read work profile: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
- 2012United States (link to this row)
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
Charles Duhigg · Self-help and advice · 2012
Charles Duhigg draws on research about how habits form and change, with stories from business, sports and the civil rights movement.
Read work profile: The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
- 2014United States (link to this row)
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
Bessel van der Kolk · Popular psychology · 2014
A trauma researcher's argument that trauma changes both brain and body, followed by an account of treatments he discusses; its causal and treatment claims are disputed.
Published critique or methodological audit: (Scheeringa, 2025)
Read work profile: The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
- 2015United States (link to this row)
The Fifth Season
N. K. Jemisin · Novel · 2015
A world of recurring catastrophe makes secrecy and survival inseparable. Jemisin’s speculative premise opens a route into stigma, threat, and the costs of concealing a devalued identity.
Interpretive thematic pairing: (Major & O’Brien, 2005)
- 2018United States (link to this row)
Atomic Habits
James Clear · Self-help and advice · 2018
James Clear's 2018 self-help book presents habit advice built around systems, environment and identity. Compare it with one longitudinal study of self-reported habit automaticity.
Interpretive thematic pairing: (Lally et al., 2009)
- 2018United States (link to this row)
Educated: A Memoir
Tara Westover · Memoir · 2018
Tara Westover’s account of entering education after an isolated childhood raises questions about family loyalty, authority, and identity.
- 2024United States (link to this row)
The Anxious Generation
Jonathan Haidt · Popular psychology · 2024
A 2024 book makes a strong causal argument about smartphones and adolescent distress. Compare its public framing with a Nature book review whose standfirst calls the evidence equivocal.
Published critique or methodological audit: (Odgers, 2024)
About this timeline
The timeline holds the same 60 works as the Directory, ordered by original publication year. Where a work was written in another language or compiled posthumously, the record gives both the original publication year and the English translation or edition history.How pairings, evidence, and sources are checked.
Literary fiction, first-person memoirs, popular syntheses, and academic monographs serve different roles in a psychology education. Fiction and memoirs offer rich depictions of subjective experience and social context; they are never treated here as diagnostic cases or clinical trial evidence.
Course connections use OpenStax Psychology 2e. They show where each work's themes or theories sit in an introductory psychology syllabus.See the full course map.