Restlessly creative, in a constant state of reinvention, artist David Bowie defies simple labels. As a musician, actor, painter and composer, his influence spans decades and continents. But how did young David Robert Jones from Brixton, South London become the force behind Ziggy Stardust, plastic soul and glam rock?

He read. Voraciously.

It’s easy to chart the androgynous Ziggy Stardust to Bowie’s well-worn copy of “The Life and Times of Little Richard.” From mythical heroes in Homer’s Iliad to the Beat icons in Jack Keroac’s On the Road, David Bowie’s favorite protagonists are as eclectic as his public personae. He was drawn to counter culture writers such as William Burroughs, at one point emulating Burroughs method of “cutting up” words and fashioning them randomly into lyrics. Bowie composed 2/3rd of a rock opera based on George Orwell’s 1984, only to discover he could not secure the rights to the dystopian novel. He loved the poetry of T.S. Elliot and the Pop Art-influenced graphic design of Tadanori Yokoo. 

Thankfully, in 2013, David Bowie published a list of his 100 favorite reads. (Republished here on the DavidBowie.com site, now only accessible through the Wayback Machine.) We are happy to share them with you in this Internet Archive Collection “David Bowie’s Favorite Books”–84 of which are readily available for free through the Internet Archive.

1. Interviews With Francis Bacon by David Sylvester
2. Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse
3. Room At The Top by John Braine
4. On Having No Head by Douglass Harding
5. Kafka Was The Rage by Anatole Broyard
6. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
7. City Of Night by John Rechy
8. The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
9. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
10. Iliad by Homer
11. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
12. Tadanori Yokoo by Tadanori Yokoo
13. Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin
14. Inside The Whale And Other Essays by George Orwell
15. Mr. Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood
16. Halls Dictionary Of Subjects And Symbols In Art by James A. Hall
17. David Bomberg by Richard Cork
18. Blast by Wyndham Lewis
19. Passing by Nella Larson
20. Beyond The Brillo Box by Arthur C. Danto
21. The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
22. In Bluebeard’s Castle by George Steiner
23. Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd
24. The Divided Self by R. D. Laing
25. The Stranger by Albert Camus
26. Infants Of The Spring by Wallace Thurman
27. The Quest For Christa T by Christa Wolf
28. The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin
29. Nights At The Circus by Angela Carter
30. The Master And Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
31. The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
32. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
33. Herzog by Saul Bellow
34. Puckoon by Spike Milligan
35. Black Boy by Richard Wright
36. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
37. The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea by Yukio Mishima
38. Darkness At Noon by Arthur Koestler
39. The Waste Land by T.S. Elliot
40. McTeague by Frank Norris
41. Money by Martin Amis
42. The Outsider by Colin Wilson
43. Strange People by Frank Edwards
44. English Journey by J.B. Priestley
45. A Confederacy Of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
46. The Day Of The Locust by Nathanael West
47. 1984 by George Orwell
48. The Life And Times Of Little Richard by Charles White
49. Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock by Nik Cohn
50. Mystery Train by Greil Marcus
51. Beano (comic, ’50s)
52. Raw (comic, ’80s)
53. White Noise by Don DeLillo
54. Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm And Blues And The Southern Dream Of Freedom by Peter Guralnick
55. Silence: Lectures And Writing by John Cage
56. Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews edited by Malcolm Cowley
57. The Sound Of The City: The Rise Of Rock And Roll by Charlie Gillete
58. Octobriana And The Russian Underground by Peter Sadecky
59. The Street by Ann Petry
60. Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon
61. Last Exit To Brooklyn By Hubert Selby, Jr.
62. A People’s History Of The United States by Howard Zinn
63. The Age Of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby
64. Metropolitan Life by Fran Lebowitz
65. The Coast Of Utopia by Tom Stoppard
66. The Bridge by Hart Crane
67. All The Emperor’s Horses by David Kidd
68. Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
69. Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess
70. The 42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos
71. Tales Of Beatnik Glory by Ed Saunders
72. The Bird Artist by Howard Norman
73. Nowhere To Run The Story Of Soul Music by Gerri Hirshey
74. Before The Deluge by Otto Friedrich
75. Sexual Personae: Art And Decadence From Nefertiti To Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia
76. The American Way Of Death by Jessica Mitford
77. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
78. Lady Chatterly’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
79. Teenage by Jon Savage
80. Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
81. The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard
82. The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
83. Viz (comic, early ’80s)
84. Private Eye (satirical magazine, ’60s – ’80s)
85. Selected Poems by Frank O’Hara
86. The Trial Of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens
87. Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes
88. Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont
89. On The Road by Jack Kerouac
90. Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler
91. Zanoni by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
92. Transcendental Magic, Its Doctrine and Ritual by Eliphas Lévi
93. The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
94. The Leopard by Giusseppe Di Lampedusa
95. Inferno by Dante Alighieri
96. A Grave For A Dolphin by Alberto Denti di Pirajno
97. The Insult by Rupert Thomson
98. In Between The Sheets by Ian McEwan
99. A People’s Tragedy by Orlando Figes
100. Journey Into The Whirlwind by Eugenia Ginzburg

EDITOR’s NOTE: Thank you to the scores of libraries around the world who donate their extra copies to be preserved and scanned by the Internet Archive.

This article would not be possible without the dedicated work of engineers, librarians, collections staff and the Open Library community! Thank you to Mek Karpeles, Andrea Mills, Brittany Bunk, Drini Cami and Jeff Kaplan for making the David Bowie Favorite Books collection possible.

To support our work please DONATE HERE. Or SPONSOR A BOOK at our site for readers, Open Library.

With more than 3.1 million views to date, “Night of the Living Dead” is among the most popular feature films on the Internet Archive. The 1968 movie is also generally acknowledged as one of the landmark films of the horror genre, as well as the work that single handedly created the modern conception of the zombie. But none of that would have been possible without a mistake—one that landed the film firmly in the public domain.

Legends about zombies date back to 19th-century Haitian folklore, and originally featured corpses (or even living people) that were enslaved by powerful sorcerers. However, George Romero—who co-wrote and directed “Night of the Living Dead”—created something quite different for his film. Romero’s monsters were cannibals who craved human flesh, serving nobody and nothing except their mindless hunger. They were victims of disease, transformed by being bitten, whose sudden appearance caused entire societies to collapse. In fact, these creatures were so unique that the movie never even called them “zombies”—Romero referred to his creations as “ghouls.”

At one point, this innovative work-in-progress with its innovative monsters was called “Night of the Flesh Eaters,” but the production company decided to change the title to avoid confusion with a preexisting film. The title card was switched to rename the film “Night of the Living Dead,” accidentally omitting the copyright symbol in the process. Under US intellectual property law at the time, the film immediately entered the public domain. Not only could the film be legally copied, shared, and redistributed—which led to its rapid dissemination through American pop culture—but anybody was free to adapt, change, or borrow from it.

What followed was not only a revolution within the horror genre, but an explosion of zombie-related content. “Night of the Living Dead” spawned nine direct sequels and several unofficial ones, as well as hundreds of works taking advantage of an uncopyrighted new monster. Works ranging from “The Walking Dead” to “World War Z,” “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” to “Game of Thrones,” or “Resident Evil” to “Shaun of the Dead” all rely on Romero-type zombies or their derivatives.

Zombies dominate pop culture like few monsters have before or since, in large part because artists and authors can reuse, remix, or adapt them without fear. Night of the Living Dead is a shining example of what happens when quality works come into the public domain, joining the marketplace of ideas. If you want to watch this cinematic masterpiece for yourself, download or stream it here!

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