How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor: A Smart, Irreverent Guide to Biography, History, Journalism, Blogs, and Everything in Between

How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor belongs to Thomas C. Foster’s popular How to Read Like a Professor series, which seeks to make academic reading strategies accessible to general audiences. The series begins with How to Read Literature Like a Professor (2003), in which Foster, a longtime English professor, demystifies literary analysis by identifying recurring narrative patterns, symbols, and archetypes. The success of the initial book led to subsequent installments that expanded his mission by examining specific types of literature: How to Read Poetry Like a Professor (2018), How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor (2019), and How to Read Novels Like a Professor (2024). Together, these works promote a unified vision of reading as an active, interpretive practice rather than a passive consumption of text. They emphasize the importance of approaching literature as an integrated body that offers far greater rewards through the connections among various works, ideas, and authors than through reading individual works.

In How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor, Foster adapts his conversational, example-rich method to factual writing. His approach remains pedagogical but shifts from identifying symbolism to evaluating argument, tone, and evidence. Throughout the series, Foster’s humor and directness dismantle the perception that textual interpretation belongs only to scholars. Instead, he positions reading as a civic and ethical responsibility that cultivates empathy, discernment, and cultural awareness. The How to Read Like a Professor books thus operate as both an endeavor in literary education and a public literacy campaign. Each volume teaches readers how to recognize form and intention, but this one, focused on the truth of claims and the art of persuasion, explicitly responds to a 21st-century crisis of misinformation. By expanding his series to nonfiction, Foster reasserts that reading critically is not merely an academic skill but a survival tool for democratic societies.