Best books ... chosen by Isabel Wilkerson

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (Penguin, $16). Steinbeck’s masterpiece was an inspiration as I set out to uncover the history of the Great Migration of Southern blacks to the American North and West. Some 6 million African-Americans left the South during the Great Migration, compared with the 300,000 people involved in the Dust Bowl migration. And yet there was no intimate examination of this larger relocation. I wanted to understand the migrant heart, the fears and longings of people who, like Steinbeck’s Joads, left the only place they had known for a place they had never seen. This novel, written by a journalist—as I am—was a kind of sacred text to me.

Blindness by José Saramago (Mariner, $15). This great novelist was perhaps the best psychologist who ever lived. He understood the dark and best sides of the human psyche. He captured the closely observed, everyday manifestations of human fear, paranoia, and goodness, and told a truth larger than fiction.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (Vintage, $15). Ellison’s 1952 novel is one of the most searing and powerful indictments of the racial caste system in America and how it alienates and isolates everyone, of all races. Raw and beautiful, it stands up to the highest standards of our American literary canon.

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The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty (Vintage, $13). The genius of Welty was the subtlety of her depiction of the 20th-century South, a multilayered feudal world that she illuminated here through characters who collide when a revered father and husband dies and those who love him must come to terms with it.

Atonement by Ian McEwan (Anchor, $15). You realize that you are in the hands of a master from the opening paragraphs. And beyond the tightly wound plot and deep inner lives of the characters, it is a reminder of the uncountable forms of loss that come from war.

Beloved by Toni Morrison (Vintage, $9). Perhaps the most disturbing and unforgettable depiction of the pain of slavery in America ever written. So hard you want to turn away, but so gorgeous that the pages will not permit you to.