The Prairie Winnows Out its Own is a history of a county western South Dakota from 1920 through the depression, showing how the townsfolk tried to build up their community, had a few good years that brought in more, and then things went to hell in spite of their boosterism. I grew up in a similar small town in eastern South Dakota and immediately recognized the “every body is above average” self-promotion that’s rampant in that part of the country (sorry Mr. Keillor). Although I recognize and appreciate the hard work those people went through (setting up a privately-owned electric company, grading the prairie to establish some roads), one has to wonder what the hell they were thinking and can predict that it’s all for naught. It’s the predecessor book also by Paula Nelson that is the story from 1900 to 1917 After The West that I have yet to read.
No, it’s not. 
Mine … Ancient Lights, by Davis Grubb. He also wrote the better known “The Night of the Hunter” but this is much better and more magical.
I was perhaps ten years old and on a rainy day was rummaging through some stuff in the attic when I came across my father’s old trunk from his college days. There was miscellaneous flotsam and jetsam inside, along with a well-worn paperback book The Blind Spot by Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint. It was a mashup of a serial published in Argosy magazine in the 1920s and very representative of the sci fi of that period. Not particularly well written and with an unbelievable plot, it still served to ignite a lifelong interest in science fiction. That was my first exposure to sci fi in any form.
There’s a famous review of The Blind Spot by Damon Knight in which he rips it to pieces.
The collection of Damon Knight’s reviews -* In Search of Wonder* – was a big influence on me. When I started writing sf, I used it by vowing to avoid the things he criticized.
The Conquest of Happiness, by Bertrand Russell, once helped me through a very bad time. Forget all the other self-help books, this is it.
The Twisted Dream by Douglas Dowd was not unknown when it was published in 1977 but I would think it is pretty obscure today.
Walden II by BF Skinner - it’s about a utopian commune, but not in a hippy way. Read it in high school and I think about it still. Do I disagree with the system because it wouldn’t work or only because it’s a different environment than what I was raised in? I still don’t know.
I’ve not read too many non-fiction books of this type, but I rated ‘the art of the soluble’ by Peter Medawar as pretty special. It’s a collection of his writing, rather than one big piece. Beautifully written meditations on the nature of scientific enquiry.
The title is his definition (with a nod to Bismarck) of science. Thinking of science in these terms is something I’ve found very helpful - whether it’s planning research or trying to figure out why a project might not be going well. He also emphasises the value of applied research, and how it should be integral to problem-solving.
Medawar is probably not that well known nowadays, but he was a giant of twentieth century science - Nobel prize in medicine in 1960 for organ transplantation, and then became very active as a writer and advocate for science. He suffered a stroke in his late 50s and had to take a step back - huge loss as he commanded great influence in the UK at that time.
MFK Fisher’s compilation , “The Art of Eating”’ kept mealive during my deceased lover’s failed Bone Marrow Transplant and subsequent death. She wrote about life, death, hunger, feasts and food and the slow, agonizing demise of her own lover.m