MLA 9 book citation format
Entire book (single author)
Last, First. Title of Book. Publisher, Year.
Example:
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. McClelland and Stewart, 1985.
Entire book (two authors)
Last, First, and First Last. Title of Book. Publisher, Year.
Example:
Strunk, William, and E. B. White. The Elements of Style. Pearson, 2000.
Entire book (three or more authors)
Last, First, et al. Title of Book. Publisher, Year.
Citing a chapter in an edited book
When you cite a specific chapter or essay within an edited collection, the chapter title is the “source” and the book is the “container”:
Last, First. “Title of Chapter.” Title of Book, edited by First Last, Publisher, Year, pp. Page Range.
Example:
Baker, Houston A. “Scene … Not Heard.” Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, edited by Robert Gooding-Williams, Routledge, 1993, pp. 38–48.
Common book citation examples
Book with an edition number
Lunsford, Andrea A. The Everyday Writer. 7th ed., Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2022.
Translated book
Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis. Translated by Stanley Corngold, Bantam Books, 1972.
E-book
Doctorow, Cory. Walkaway. Tor Books, 2017. Kindle ed.
Book with a DOI or URL
Drucker, Johanna. Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production. Harvard UP, 2014, https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674504080.
In-text citation for a book
Include the author’s last name and the page number in parentheses:
(Atwood 45)
If you mention the author in your sentence, include only the page number:
Atwood describes the regime as built on a “theology of patriarchy” (45).
ISBN autocite
Use the ISBN autocite feature on the generator page — paste a 10- or 13-digit ISBN and we retrieve the full metadata from OpenLibrary and Google Books automatically.