In Honor of her 100th Birthday, Here is Marilyn Monroe's Personal Library of 400+ Books

Last edited Tue Jun 2, 2026, 03:21 AM - Edit history (1)

Literary figures were a large part of Monroe’s life. She crossed paths with writers from Vladimir Nabokov to John Steinbeck and was married to the playwright Arthur Miller. Her library, meanwhile, included hefty texts by authors from Marcel Proust to Albert Camus, as well as poetry by William Blake and Walt Whitman, biographies of Sigmund Freud, and more. 

In 1951, just as her career was taking off, Monroe enrolled in two 10-week literature classes at UCLA. Some people called this a publicity stunt, an accusation that continued to plague Monroe. Many people also had trouble believing she actually was reading the book Ulysses by James Joyce after being photographed in the park with it, even though the photographer later confirmed Monroe had been reading for a while before the photos were taken. 

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Marilyn Monroe's Personal Library:
Literary Fiction and Classics
Winesburg, Ohio — Sherwood Anderson
The Unnamable — Samuel Beckett
The Woman Who Was Poor — Léon Bloy
God’s Little Acre — Erskine Caldwell
The Fall — Albert Camus
The Rebel — Albert Camus
Mr. Roberts — Joyce Cary
The Secret Agent — Joseph Conrad
The American Claimant & Other Stories & Sketches — Mark Twain
The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn — Mark Twain
In Defense Of Harriet Shelley & Other Essays — Mark Twain
Roughing It — Mark Twain
The Sound And The Fury / As I Lay Dying — William Faulkner
Invisible Man — Ralph Ellison
Camille — Alexandre Dumas
Justine — Lawrence Durrell
Balthazar — Lawrence Durrell
Madame Bovary — Gustave Flaubert
From Russia With Love — Ian Fleming
Spartacus — Howard Fast
Tender Is The Night — F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald
A European Education — Romain Gary
Brighton Rock — Graham Greene
A Farewell To Arms — Ernest Hemingway
The Sun Also Rises — Ernest Hemingway
The War Lover — John Hersey
Green Mansions — W.H. Hudson
Ulysses — James Joyce
The Last Temptation Of Christ — Nikos Kazantzakis
On The Road — Jack Kerouac
Fowlers End — Gerald Kersh
Independent People — Halldór Laxness
The Best Of All Worlds, Or, What Voltaire Never Knew — Hans Jørgen Lembourn
Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place — Malcolm Lowry
The Assistant — Bernard Malamud
The Magic Barrel — Bernard Malamud
The Deer Park — Norman Mailer
Death In Venice & Seven Other Stories — Thomas Mann
Last Essays — Thomas Mann
The Thomas Mann Reader — Thomas Mann
The Magic Christian — Terry Southern
Hawaii — James Michener
The Story Of Esther Costello — Nicholas Monsarrat
The Guide — R.K. Narayan
Jonathan — Russell O’Neill
The Contenders — John Wain
The Carpetbaggers — Harold Robbins
The Mark Of The Warrior — Paul Scott
The 7th Cross — Anna Seghers
The Dancing Bear — Edzard Schaper
Strike For A Kingdom — Menna Gallie
The Building — Peter Martin
The Mermaids — Boros
The Story Of A Novel — Thomas Wolfe
Look Homeward, Angel — Thomas Wolfe
A Stone, A Leaf, A Door — Thomas Wolfe
Thomas Wolfe’s Letters To His Mother — Thomas Wolfe
The Devil’s Advocate — Morris L. West
Miss America — Daniel Stren
The Cat With 2 Faces — Gordon Young
The Rains Came — Louis Bromfield
Lust For Life — Irving Stone
The Little Prince — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Swann’s Way — Marcel Proust
The Guermantes Way — Marcel Proust
Cities Of The Plain — Marcel Proust
Within A Budding Grove — Marcel Proust
The Sweet Cheat Gone — Marcel Proust
The Captive — Marcel Proust
Nana — Émile Zola
Crime And Punishment — Fyodor Dostoevsky
The House Of The Dead — Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoevsky
Smoke — Ivan Turgenev
Redemption & Other Plays — Leo Tolstoy

Poetry

Selected Poems — Rafael Alberti
The Portable Blake — William Blake
Poems Of Robert Burns — Robert Burns
Poe: Complete Poems — Edgar Allan Poe
Poet In New York — Federico García Lorca
The Poetry & Prose Of Heinrich Heine — Heinrich Heine
Selected Poetry — Robinson Jeffers
Aragon: Poet Of The French Resistance — Hannah Josephson & Malcolm Cowley
Selected Poems — D.H. Lawrence
The Vapor Trail — Ivan Lawrence Becker
Collected Sonnets — Edna St. Vincent Millay
The Poetical Works Of John Milton — John Milton
Poems — John Tagliabue
The Portable Walt Whitman
Robert Frost’s Poems — Robert Frost
Selected Poems — Rainer Maria Rilke
The Poetical Works Of Shelley — Percy Bysshe Shelley
William Shakespeare: Sonnets — William Shakespeare
Wordsworth — Richard Wilbur
Poems Of W.B. Yeats — W.B. Yeats

Much more...
https://www.mentalfloss.com/books/literature/marilyn-monroe-personal-library-books