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Curated Booklists - Business & Economics

Business literature / March 2023

Last spring, the Wall Street Journal put together a quiz about "business literature" -- fictional works that "shed light on leadership, work and life in ways that management texts can’t hope to emulate" (Akst, 2022). Here are 12 of the novels mentioned in that quiz that are available from JMU’s print and electronic collections, just in time for your spring break reading list.

To search for novels in Library Search, click on Advanced Search and search by title in the first field and author in the second.

Roast Beef, Medium

Stories featuring Emma McChesney: smart, savvy, stylish, divorced mother, and Midwest traveling sales representative for T. A. Buck's Featherloom skirts and petticoats.

Death of a Salesman

Pulitzer Prize-winning play concerned with the despair of a 63-year-old traveling salesman when he is forced to face the reality he has evaded all his life.

Buddenbrooks

The story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany.

The Old Wives' Tale

Tells the story of the Baines sisters--shy, retiring Constance and defiant, romantic Sophia--during the mid-Victorian era, through their married lives, to the modern industrial age, when they are reunited as old women.

Philip Roth: the American Trilogy 1997-2000

In American Pastoral, Swede Levov is wrenched from the tranquility of his domestic life and into the turbulent 1960s by his cherished daughter, an antiwar terrorist.

North and South

Draws on Gaskell's own experiences of the poverty and hardship of life in the industrial north of England.

Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street

A strange and haunting fable that continues to resonate a century and a half after it was first published.

The Rise of David Levinsky

Acclaimed by literary critic Carl Van Doren as the most important of all immigrant novels, this book follows a young Hasidic Jew struggling to master the Talmud and seeking his fortune amid the teeming streets of New York's Lower East Side.

Atlas Shrugged

The book depicts a dystopian United States in which private businesses suffer under increasingly burdensome laws and regulations

The Magnificent Ambersons

This epic tale recounts the triumphs and tribulations of an upper-class American clan as they navigate the challenges of life in the aftermath of the Civil War and the birth of the Industrial Revolution.

Nice Work

A government program created to foster mutual understanding between town and gown leads to the hilarious collusion of lifestyles and ideologies and seems unlikely to foster anything besides mutual antipathy.

The Financier

Based on the life of railway tycoon Charles Tyson Yerkes, the epic narrative spans from the aftermath of the Civil War to the Great Chicago Fire and the Panic of 1873.

Roast Beef, Medium

Stories featuring Emma McChesney: smart, savvy, stylish, divorced mother, and Midwest traveling sales representative for T. A. Buck's Featherloom skirts and petticoats.

Death of a Salesman

Pulitzer Prize-winning play concerned with the despair of a 63-year-old traveling salesman when he is forced to face the reality he has evaded all his life.

Buddenbrooks

The story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany.

The Old Wives' Tale

Tells the story of the Baines sisters--shy, retiring Constance and defiant, romantic Sophia--during the mid-Victorian era, through their married lives, to the modern industrial age, when they are reunited as old women.

Philip Roth: the American Trilogy 1997-2000

In American Pastoral, Swede Levov is wrenched from the tranquility of his domestic life and into the turbulent 1960s by his cherished daughter, an antiwar terrorist.

North and South

Draws on Gaskell's own experiences of the poverty and hardship of life in the industrial north of England.

Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street

A strange and haunting fable that continues to resonate a century and a half after it was first published.

The Rise of David Levinsky

Acclaimed by literary critic Carl Van Doren as the most important of all immigrant novels, this book follows a young Hasidic Jew struggling to master the Talmud and seeking his fortune amid the teeming streets of New York's Lower East Side.

Atlas Shrugged

The book depicts a dystopian United States in which private businesses suffer under increasingly burdensome laws and regulations

The Magnificent Ambersons

This epic tale recounts the triumphs and tribulations of an upper-class American clan as they navigate the challenges of life in the aftermath of the Civil War and the birth of the Industrial Revolution.

Nice Work

A government program created to foster mutual understanding between town and gown leads to the hilarious collusion of lifestyles and ideologies and seems unlikely to foster anything besides mutual antipathy.

The Financier

Based on the life of railway tycoon Charles Tyson Yerkes, the epic narrative spans from the aftermath of the Civil War to the Great Chicago Fire and the Panic of 1873.

Roast Beef, Medium

Stories featuring Emma McChesney: smart, savvy, stylish, divorced mother, and Midwest traveling sales representative for T. A. Buck's Featherloom skirts and petticoats.

Death of a Salesman

Pulitzer Prize-winning play concerned with the despair of a 63-year-old traveling salesman when he is forced to face the reality he has evaded all his life.

Buddenbrooks

The story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany.

The Old Wives' Tale

Tells the story of the Baines sisters--shy, retiring Constance and defiant, romantic Sophia--during the mid-Victorian era, through their married lives, to the modern industrial age, when they are reunited as old women.

Philip Roth: the American Trilogy 1997-2000

In American Pastoral, Swede Levov is wrenched from the tranquility of his domestic life and into the turbulent 1960s by his cherished daughter, an antiwar terrorist.

North and South

Draws on Gaskell's own experiences of the poverty and hardship of life in the industrial north of England.