To Marilyn Monroe, books were "a refuge and a companion" - and she collected over 400 volumes in her lifetime.

Marilyn Monroe, photographed by Eve Arnold, 1955.

What is the first photograph that comes to mind when you think of Marilyn Monroe? Sam Shaw’s subway grate photo, or Eve Arnold’s image of the superstar in a playground in Amagansett reading James Joyce’s Ulysses?

Of the two, we know which Monroe herself would have preferred you to remember – thanks to the collection of poems, notes and letters she wrote that have been collated together in Fragments, a book first published in 2010 and edited by Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment.

As Sam Kashner, in a review of Fragments for Vanity Fair, notes:

“If some photographers thought it was funny to pose the world’s most famously voluptuous ‘dumb blonde” with a book—James Joyce! Heinrich Heine!—it wasn’t a joke to her. In these newly discovered diary entries and poems, Marilyn reveals a young woman for whom writing and poetry were lifelines, the ways and means to discover who she was and to sort through her often tumultuous emotional life. And books were a refuge and a companion for Marilyn during her bouts of insomnia.”

Indeed, it quickly becomes apparent, through both Fragments and other essays and articles available online, that Monroe was so much more than this “dumb blonde” image many men – including her husband, the playwright Arthur Miller – seemed to think she could never be more than. And it turns out that, despite “bowling over” novelist Saul Bellow during a dinner for the premiere of Some like it Hot with her intelligence and wit, Miller wrote in his diary that he was “embarrassed” and “disappointed” by her.

Unlike men, however, books do not scrutinize; they do not judge. The cares of the world can melt away as you discover entire new universes. And so it seems that Monroe sought solace in the world of books – becoming close friends with writer Truman Capote and amassing a personal library of some 430 books.

Marilyn Monroe, photographed by Alfred Eisenstaedt.

The photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt would capture Monroe in this happy literary cocoon for Life magazine, dressed in white slacks and a black top, curled up on her sofa in front of a shelf of some hundreds of her own personal books. In another photo, she reads the poetry of Heinrich Heine on a sofa bed.

Now, there’s still possibly something both voyeuristic and essentially condescending about any perceived fascination with photographs of Monroe reading. As Feminist biographer Oline Eaton writes (in a really top rant on her Finding Jackie blog):

“There is, within Monroe’s image, a deeply rooted assumption that she was an idiot, a vulnerable and kind and loving and terribly sweet idiot, but an idiot nonetheless. That is the assumption in which ‘Marilyn Monroe reading’ is entangled. The power of the phrase ‘Marilyn Monroe reading’ lies in its application to Monroe and in our assumption that she wouldn’t know how.”

So, while you’re free to trawl through the some 18.4 million search engine results that you’ll find if looking for pictures of Monroe reading a book (and there are a couple in this article itself, of course), we wanted to focus instead on the literary world of Monroe herself.

There are countless booklists out there; entire sub-reddits full of them. And we all have our own mountainous ‘To be read’ piles of books waiting to be opened, some of which we never will (but may lie about having read anyway). So while we can’t be sure you’ll read every single one of the 430 books in Monroe’s personal library – or even fully sure that she read every single one herself (after all, have you read all the books on your bookshelves?) – we’ve gone through the various resources on the intranet that compile the full list and collated the list here.

The first 390 in the list are taken from auctioneer’s Christie’s, who, in 1999, sold these books from Marilyn’s personal library, a roster of classics ranging from Proust to Hemingway, which publicly solidified her intellectual identity and provided hard evidence against all those who claimed the plentitude of reading photographs were staged.

How many of Monroe’s books have you read? Cross-reference your reading history with Monroe’s books listed here below:

1) Let’s Make Love by Matthew Andrews

2) How To Travel Incognito by Ludwig Bemelmans

3) To The One I Love Best by Ludwig Bemelmans

4) Thurber Country by James Thurber

5) The Fall by Albert Camus

6) Marilyn Monroe by George Carpozi

7) Camille by Alexander Dumas

8) Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

9) The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book by Fannie Merritt-Farmer

10) The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

11) From Russia With Love by Ian Fleming

12) The Art Of Loving by Erich Fromm

13) The Prophet by Kahlil Gilbran

14) Ulysses by James Joyce

15) Stoned Like A Statue: A Complete Survey Of Drinking Cliches, Primitive, Classical & Modern by Howard Kandel & Don Safran, with an intro by Dean Martin

16) The Last Temptation Of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis

17) On The Road by Jack Kerouac

18) Selected Poems by DH Lawrence

19 and 20) Sons And Lovers by DH Lawrence (2 editions)

21) The Portable DH Lawrence

22) Etruscan Places (DH Lawrence?)

23) DH Lawrence: A Basic Study Of His Ideas by Mary Freeman

24) The Assistant by Bernard Malamud

25) The Magic Barrel by Bernard Malamud

26) Death In Venice & Seven Other Stories by Thomas Mann

27) Last Essays by Thomas Mann

28) The Thomas Mann Reader

29) Hawaii by James Michener

30) Red Roses For Me by Sean O’Casey

31) I Knock At The Door by Sean O’Casey

32) Selected Plays by Sean O’Casey

33) The Green Crow by Sean O’Casey

34) Golden Boy by Clifford Odets

35) Clash By Night by Clifford Odets

36) The Country Girl by Clifford Odets

37) 6 Plays Of Clifford Odets

38) The Cat With 2 Faces by Gordon Young

39) Long Day’s Journey Into Night by Eugene O’Neill

40) Part Of A Long Story: Eugene O’Neill As A Young Man In Love by Agnes Boulton

41) The Little Engine That Could by Piper Watty

42) The New Joy Of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer & Marion Rombauer-Becker

43) Selected Plays Of George Bernard Shaw

44) Ellen Terry And Bernard Shaw – A Correspondence

45) Bernard Shaw & Mrs Patrick Campbell – Their Correspondence

46) The Short Reigh Of Pippin IV by John Steinbeck

47) Once There Was A War by John Steinbeck

48) Set This House On Fire by William Styron

49) Lie Down In Darkness

50) The Roman Spring Of Mrs Stone by Tennessee Williams

51) Camino Real by Tennessee Williams

52) A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

53) The Flower In Drama And Glamour by Stark Young American Literature

54) Tender Is The Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

55) The Story Of A Novel by Thomas Wolfe

56) Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolfe

57) A Stone, A Leaf, A Door

58) Thomas Wolfe’s Letters To His Mother, ed. John Skally Terry

59) A Farewell To Arms by Ernest Hemingway

60) The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

61) Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

62) Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser

63) Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck

64) The American Claimant & Other Stories & Sketches by Mark Twain

65) In Defense of Harriet Shelley & Other Essays

66) The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

67) Roughing It (Mark Twain?)

68) The Magic Christian by Terry Southern

69) A Death In The Family by James Agee

70) The War Lover by John Hersey

71) Don’t Call Me By My Right Name & Other Stories by James Purdy

72) Malcolm by James Purdy Anthologies

73) The Portable Irish Reader (pub. Viking)

74) The Portable Poe – Edgar Allen Poe

75) The Portable Walt Whitman

76) This Week’s Short Stories (New York, 1953)

77) Bedside Book Of Famous Short Stories

78) Short Novels Of Colette

79) Short Story Masterpieces (New York, 1960)

80) The Passionate Playgoer by George Oppenheimer

81) Fancies And Goodnights by John Collier

82) Evergreen Review, Vol 2, No. 6

83) The Medal & Other Stories by Luigi Pirandello Art

84) Max Weber (art book – inscribed to MM by ‘Sam’ – Shaw?)

85) Renoir by Albert Skira

86) Max by Giovannetti Pericle

87) The Family Of Man by Carl Sandburg

88-90) Horizon, A Magazine Of The Arts (Nov 1959, Jan 1960, Mar 1960.)

91) Jean Dubuffet by Daniel Cordier Biography

92) The Summing Up by W. Somerset Maugham

93) Close To Colette by Maurice Goudeket

94) This Demi-Paradise by Margaret Halsey

95) God Protect Me From My Friends by Gavin Maxwell

96) Minister Of Death: The Adolf Eichmann Story by Quentin Reynolds, Ephraim Katz and Zwy Aldouby

97) Dance To The Piper by Agnes DeMille

98) Goodness Had Nothing To Do With It by Mae West

99) Act One by Moss Hart Christian

100) Science And Health With Key To The Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy

101) Poems, Including Christ And Christmas by Mary Baker Eddy Classical Works

102) 2 Plays: Peace And Lysistrata by Aristophanes

103) Of The Nature Of Things by Lucretius

104) The Philosophy Of Plato

105) Mythology by Edith Hamilton

106) Theory Of Poetry And Fine Art by Aristotle

107) Metaphysics by Aristotle

108-111) Plutarch’s Lives, Vols 3-6 only (of 6) by William and John Langhorne Counter-Culture

112) Bound For Glory by Woody Guthrie

113) The Support Of The Mysteries by Paul Breslow

114) Paris Blues by Harold Flender

115) The Shook-Up Generation by Harrison E. Salisbury Foreign-Language Texts And Translations

116) An Mands Ansigt by Arthur Miller

117) Independent People by Halldor Laxness

118) Mujer by Lina Rolan (inscribed to MM by author)

119) The Havamal, ed. D.E. Martin Clarke

120) Yuan Mei: 18th Century Chinese Poet by Arthur Waley

121) Almanach: Das 73 Jahr by S. Fischer Verlag French Literature

122) Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

123) The Works Of Rabelais

124) The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust

125) Cities Of The Plain by Marcel Proust

126) Within A Budding Grove by Marcel Proust

127) The Sweet Cheat Gone by Marcel Proust

128) The Captive by Marcel Proust

129) Nana by Emile Zola

130) Plays by Moliere Freud

131) The Life And Work of Sigmund Freud by Ernest Jones

132) Letters Of Sigmund Freud, ed. Ernest L. Freud

133) Glory Reflected by Martin Freud

134) Moses And Monotheism by Sigmund Freud

135) Conditioned Reflex Therapy by Andrew Salter Gardening & Pets

136-137) The Wise Garden Encyclopedia, ed. E.L.D. Seymour (2 editions)

138) Landscaping Your Own Home by Alice Dustan

139) Outpost Nurseries – publicity brochure

140) The Forest And The Sea by Marston Bates

141) Pet Turtles by Julien Bronson

142) A Book About Bees by Edwin Way Teale

143) Codfish, Cats & Civilisation by Gary Webster Humor

144) How To Do It, Or, The Art Of Lively Entertaining by Elsa Maxwell

145) Wake Up, Stupid by Mark Harris

146) Merry Christmas, Happy New Year by Phyllis McGinley

147) The Hero Maker by Akbar Del Piombo & Norman Rubington

148) How To Talk At Gin by Ernie Kovacs

149) VIP Tosses A Party, by Virgil Partch

150) Who Blowed Up The House & Other Ozark Folk Tales, ed. Randolph Vance

151) Snobs by Russell Lynes Judaica (MM officially converted to Judaism upon her marriage to Miller).

152) The Form of Daily Prayers

153) Sephath Emeth (Speech Of Truth): Order Of Prayers For The Wholes Year In Jewish and English

154) The Holy Scriptures According To The Masoretic Text Literature

155) The Law by Roger Vailland

156) The Building by Peter Martin

157) The Mermaids by Boros

158) They Came To Cordura by Glendon Swarthout

159) The 7th Cross by Anna Seghers

160) A European Education by Romain Gary

161) Strike For A Kingdom by Menna Gallie

162) The Slide Area by Gavin Lambert

163) The Woman Who Was Poor by Leon Bloy

164) Green Mansions by W.H. Hudson

165) The Contenders by John Wain

166) The Best Of All Worlds, Or, What Voltaire Never Knew by Hans Jorgen Lembourn

167) The Story Of Esther Costello by Nicholas Montsarrat

168) Oh Careless Love by Maurice Zolotow

169) Add A Dash Of Pity by Peter Ustinov

170) An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

171) The Mark Of The Warrior by Paul Scott

172) The Dancing Bear by Edzard Schaper

173) Miracle In The Rain by Ben Hecht

174) The Guide by R.K. Narayan

175) Blow Up A Storm by Garson Kanin

176) Jonathan by Russell O’Neill

177) Fowlers End by Gerald Kersh

178) Hurricane Season by Ralph Winnett

179) The un-Americans by Alvah Bessie

180) The Devil’s Advocate by Morris L. West

181) On Such A Night by Anthony Quayle

182) Say You Never Saw Me by Arthur Nesbitt

183) All The Naked Heroes by Alan Kapener

184) Jeremy Todd by Hamilton Maule

185) Miss America by Daniel Stren

186) Fever In The Blood by William Pearson

187) Spartacus by Howard Fast

188) Venetian Red by L.M. Pasinetti

189) A Cup Of Tea For Mr Thorgill by Storm Jameson

190) Six O’Clock Casual by Henry W. Cune

191) Mischief by Charlotte Armstrong

192) The Gingko Tree by Sheelagh Burns

193) The Mountain Road by Theodore H. White

194) Three Circles Of Light by Pietro Di Donato

195) The Day The Money Stopped by Brendan Gill

196) The Carpetbaggers by Harold Robbins

197-198) Justine by Lawrence Durrell (2 editions, possibly read during filming of The Misfits)

199) Balthazar by Lawrence Durrell

200) Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

201) The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

202) The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett

203) Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Dog by Dylan Thomas

204) Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, by Malcolm Lowry Modern Library

205) The Sound And The Fury/As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner

206) God’s Little Acre by Erskine Caldwell

207) Anna Christie/The Emperor Jones/The Hairy Ape by Eugene O’Neill

208) The Philosophy Of Schopenhauer by Irwin Edman

209) The Philosophy Of Spinoza by Joseph Ratner

210) The Dubliners by James Joyce

211) Selected Poems by Emily Dickinson

212) The Collected Short Stories by Dorothy Parker

213) Selected Works by Alexander Pope

214) The Red And The Black by Stendhal

215) The Life Of Michelangelo by John Addington

216) Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham

217) Three Famous French Romances

218) Napoleon by Emil Ludwig

219) Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (a second copy?)

220) The Poems And Fairy-Tales by Oscar Wilde

221) Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland/Through The Looking Glass/The Hunting Of The Snark, by Lewis Carroll

222) A High Wind In Jamaica by Richard Hughes

223) An Anthology Of American Negro Literature, ed. Sylvestre C. Watkins Music

224) Beethoven: His Spiritual Development by J.W.N. Sullivan

225) Music For The Millions by David Ewen

226) Schubert by Ralph Bates

227) Men Of Music by Wallace Brockaway and Herbert Weinstock Plays

228) The Potting Shed by Graham Greene

229) Politics In The American Drama by Caspar Nannes

230) Sons Of Men by Herschel Steinhardt

231) Born Yesterday by Garson Kanin

232) Untitled & Other Radio Drams by Norman Corwin

233) Thirteen By Corwin, by Norman Corwin

234) More By Corwin, by Norman Corwin

235) Long Day’s Journey Into Night by Eugene O’Neill (a second copy)

236) Best American Plays: Third Series, 1945-1951

237) Theatre ’52 by John Chapman

238) 16 Famous European Plays, by Bennett Cerf and Van H. Cartmell

239) The Complete Plays Of Henry James

240) 20 Best Plays Of The Modern American Theatre, by John Glassner

241) Elizabethan Plays by Hazelton Spencer

242) Critics’ Choice by Jack Gaver

243) Modern American Dramas by Harlan Hatcher

244) The Album Of The Cambridge Garrick Club European Poetry

245) A Shropshire Lad by A.E. Houseman

246) The Poetry & Prose Of Heinrich Heine by Frederich Ewen

247) The Poetical works Of John Milton, by H.C. Beeching

248) The Poetical Works Of Robert Browning (H.C. Beeching)

249) Wordsworth by Richard Wilbur

250) The Poetical Works Of Shelley (Richard Wilbur?)

251) The Portable Blake, by William Blake

252) William Shakespeare: Sonnets, ed. Mary Jane Gorton

253) Poems Of Robert Burns, ed. Henry Meikle & William Beattie

254) The Penguin Book Of English Verse, ed. John Hayward

255) Aragon: Poet Of The French Resistance, by Hannah Josephson & Malcolm Cowley

256) Star Crossed by Margaret Tilden American Poetry

257 and 258) Collected Sonnets by Edna St Vincent Millay (2 editions)

259) Robert Frost’s Poems by Louis Untermeyer (Marilyn befriended Untermeyer during her marriage to Arthur)

260) Poe: Complete Poems by Richard Wilbur (a 2nd copy?)

261) The Life And Times Of Archy And Mehitabel by Don Marquis

262) The Pocketbook Of Modern Verse by Oscar Williams

263) Poems by John Tagliabue

264) Selected Poems by Rafael Alberti

265) Selected Poetry by Robinson Jeffers

266) The American Puritans: Their Prose & Poetry, by Perry Miller

267) Selected Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke

268) Poet In New York by Federico Garcia Lorca

269) The Vapor Trail by Ivan Lawrence Becker

270) Love Poems & Love Letters For All The Year

271) 100 Modern Poems, ed. Selden Rodman

272) The Sweeniad, by Myra Buttle

273) Poetry: A Magazine Of Verse, Vol.70, no. 6 Politics

274) The Wall Between by Anne Braden

275) The Roots Of American Communism by Theodore Draper

276) A View Of The Nation – An Anthology : 1955-1959, ed. Henry Christian

277) A Socialist’s Faith by Norman Thomas

278-279) Rededication To Freedom by Benjamin Ginzburg (2 copies)

280) The Ignorant Armies by E.M. Halliday

281) Commonwealth Vs Sacco & Vanzetti, by Robert P. Weeks

282) Journey To The Beginning by Edgar Snow

283) Das Kapital by Karl Marx

284) Lidice by Eleanor Wheeler

285) The Study Of History by Arnold Toynbee

286) America The Invincible by Emmet John Hughes

287) The Unfinished Country by Max Lerner

288) Red Mirage by John O’Kearney

289) Background & Foreground – The New York Times Magazine: An Anthology, ed. Lester Markel

290) The Failure Of Success by Esther Milner

291) A Piece Of My Mind by Edmund Wilson

292) The Truth About The Munich Crisis by Viscount Maugham

293) The Alienation Of Modern Man by Fritz Pappenheim

294) A Train Of Powder by Rebecca West

295) Report From Palermo by Danilo Dolci

296) The Devil In Massachusetts by Marion Starkey

297) American Rights: The Constitution In Action, by Walter Gellhorn

298) Night by Francis Pollini

299) The Right Of The People by William Douglas

300) The Jury Is Still Out by Irwin Davidson and Richard Gehman

301) First Degree by William Kunstler

302) Democracy In America by Alexis De Tocqueville

303) World Underworld by Andrew Varna Prayer

304) Catechism For Young Children

305) Prayer Changes Things

306) The Prophet by Kahlil Bibran

307) The Magic Word L.I.D.G.T.T.F.T.A.T.I.M. by Robert Collier

308) The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran (it seems Monroe had multiple copies of this book)

309) His Brother’s Keeper by Milton Gross

310) Christliches ergissmeinnicht by K. Ehmann

311) And It Was Told Of A Certain Potter by Walter C. Lanyon

312) Bahai Prayers Psychology

313) Man Against Himself by Karl A. Menninger

314) The Tower And The Abyss by Erich Kahler

315) Something To Live By, by Dorothea S. Kopplin

316) Man’s Supreme Inheritance by Alexander F. Matthias

317) The Miracles Of Your Mind by Joseph Murphy

318) The Wisdom Of The Sands by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

319) A Prison, A Paradise by Loran Hurnscot

320) The Magic Of Believing by Claude M. Bristol

321) Peace Of Mind by Joshua Loth Liebman

322) The Use Of The Self by Alexander F. Matthias

323) The Power Within You by Claude M. Bristol

324) The Call Girl by Harold Greenwald

325) Troubled Women by Lucy Freeman

326) Relax And Live by Joseph A. Kennedy

327) Forever Young, Forever Healthy by Indra Devi

328) The Open Self by Charles Morris

329) Hypnotism Today by Leslie Lecron & Jean Bordeaux

330) The Masks Of God: Primitive Mythology, by Joseph Campbell

331) Some Characteristics Of Today by Rudolph Steiner Reference

332) Baby & Child Care by Dr Benjamin Spock

333) Flower Arranging For Fun by Hazel Peckinpaugh Dunlop

334) Hugo’s Pocket Dictionary: French-English And English-French

335) Spoken French For Travellers And Tourists, by Charles Kany & Mathurin Dondo

336) Roget’s Pocket Thesaurus, by C.O. Mawson & K.A. Whiting Religion

337) What Is A Jew? by Morris Kertzer

338) A Partisan Guide To The Jewish Problem, by Milton Steinberg

339) The Tales Of Rabbi Nachman, by Martin Buber

340) The Saviours Of God: Spiritual Exercises, by Nikos Kazantzakis

341) The Prophet by Kahlil Gilbran

342) The Dead Sea Scrolls by Millar Burrows

343) The Secret Books Of The Egyptian Gnostics, by Jean Doresse

344) Jesus by Kahlil Gilbran

345) Memories Of A Catholic Girlhood, by Mary McCarthy

346) Why I Am Not A Christian, by Bertrand Russell Russian Literature

347) Redemption & Other Plays by Leo Tolstoy

348) The Viking Library Portable Anton Chekhov

349) The House Of The Dead, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

350) Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

351) Best Russian Stories: An Anthology, ed. Thomas Seltzer

352) The Plays Of Anton Chekhov

353) Smoke by Ivan Turgenev

354) The Poems, Prose & Plays Of Alexander Pushkin

355) The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky Science

356) Our Knowledge Of The External World, by Bertrand Russell

357) Common Sense And Nuclear Warfare, by Bertrand Russell

358) Out Of My Later Years by Albert Einstein

359) Men And Atoms by William Laurence

360) Man Alive by Daniel Colin Munro (inscribed to Renna Campbell from Lorraine?)

361) Doctor Pygmalion by Maxwell Maltz

362) Panorama: A New Review, ed. R.F. Tannenbaum

363) Everyman’s Search by Rebecca Beard

364) Of Stars And Men by Harlow Shapley

365) From Hiroshima To The Moon, by Daniel Lang

366) The Open Mind by J. Robert Oppenheimer

367) Sexual Impotence In The Male, by Leonard Paul Wershub

Scripts And Readings

368) Medea by Jeffers Robinson

369) Antigone by Jean Anouilh

370) Bell, Book And Candle by John Van Druten

371) The Women by Clare Boothe

372) Jean Of Lorraine by Maxwell Anderson Travel

373) The Sawbwa And His Secretary by C.Y. Lee

374) The Twain Shall Meet by Christopher Rand

375) Kingdom Of The Rocks by Consuelo De Saint-Exupery

376) The Heart Of India by Alexander Campbell

377) Man-Eaters Of India by Jim Corbett

378) Jungle Lore by Jim Corbett

379) My India by Jim Corbett

380) A Time In Rome by Elizabeth Bowen

381) London by Jacques Boussard

382) New York State Vacationlands

383) Russian Journey by William O. Douglas

384) The Golden Bough by James G. Frazer Women Authors

385) The Portable Dorothy Parker

386) My Antonia by Willa Cather

387) Lucy Gayheart by Willa Cather

388) The Ballad Of The Sad Cafe by Carson McCullers

389) The Short Novels Of Colette

390) The Little Disturbances Of Man by Grace Paley Here are a few other books which weren’t included on her shelves, but Monroe was reported either to have read or owned them. Most on the list are cited in the Unabridged Marilyn.

391) The Autobiography Of Lincoln Steffens

392-403) Carl Sandburg’s 12-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln

404) The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupery

405) Poems Of W.B. Yeats (Marilyn read his poems aloud at Norman Rosten’s house)

406) Mr Roberts by Joyce Cary

407) The Thinking Body by Mabel Elsworth Todd

408) The Actor Prepares by Konstantin Stanislavsky

409) The Bible

410) The Biography Of Eleanora Duse, by William Weaver

411) De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Study Of Human Bone Structure) by Andreas Vesalius

412) Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

413) Gertrude Lawrence As Mrs A, by Richard Aldrich

414) Goodnight Sweet Prince by Gene Fowler

415) Greek Mythology by Edith Hamilton

416) How Stanislavsky Directs by Mikhail Gorchakov

417) I Married Adventure by Olso Johnson

418) The Importance Of Living by Lin Yutang

419) Letters To A Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

420) Psychology Of Everyday Life by Sigmund Freud

421) The Rains Came by Louis Broomfield

422) The Rights Of Man by Thomas Paine

423) Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust

424) To The Actor by Michael Chekhov

425) Captain Newman, M.D.

426) Songs For Patricia by Norman Rosten

427) A Lost Lady by Willa Cather (Marilyn hoped to film this with her production company. But an earlier adaptation was so disappointing to the author, that she withdrew the film rights.)

428) Lust For Life by Irving Stone

429) The Deer Park by Norman Mailer (Marilyn commented on the book, ‘He’s too impressed by power, in my opinion.’)

430) The Rebel by Albert Camus

Finally, we’ll end with a quote from Monroe on how she came to choose the books that she stacked on her shelves:

“[On] nights when I’ve got nothing else to do I go to the Pickwick bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard,” she explained to a friend. “And I just open books at random—or when I come to a page or a paragraph I like, I buy that book.”

Perhaps an approach we could all take the next time we’re in a bookstore to help fill our lives with a little more literature.

Big thanks to the Everlasting Star community for pulling this list together.