Reading List for College-Bound Students*

The 10 Most Recommended Authors by American Colleges and Universities

1. William Shakespeare

2. William Faulkner

3. Charles Dickens

4. Ernest Hemingway

5. Jane Austen

6. Homer

7. Mark Twain

8. Sophocles

9. Nathaniel Hawthorne                  

10. F. Scott Fitzgerald

The 100 Most Recommended Works (plus a few alternate suggestions)

Novels and Short Stories

• Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice; Emma

• Baldwin, James. Go Tell It on the Mountain; Notes to a Native Son.

• Bellow, Saul. Seize the Day.

• Brontë, Charlotte. Wuthering Heights.

• Camus, Albert. The Stranger.

• Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Through the Looking Glass.

• Cather, Willa. My Antonia; Death Comes to the Archbishop.

• Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote.

• Chopin, Kate. The Awakening.

• Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. The Sharer; Lord Jim.

• Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage.

• Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe.

• Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations; David Copperfield; A Tale of Two Cities.

• Dostoevski, Feodor. Crime and Punishment; The Brothers Karamazov.

• Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss; Middlemarch.

• Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man.

• Faulkner, William. The Sound and Fury; “The Bear;” As I Lay Dying; Light in August; Absalom, Absalom.

• Fielding, Henry. Tom Jones; Joseph Andrews.

• Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby.

• Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary.

• Forester, E.M. A Passage to India; A Room with a View; Howard’s End.

• Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude.

• Golding, William. Lord of the Flies.

• Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D’Urbervilles; The Return of the Native.

• Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter.

• Hemingway, Ernest. A Farwell to Arms; The Sun Also Rises.

• Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God.

• Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World.

• James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw; Portrait of a Lady.

• Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses; The Dubliners.

• Kafka, Franz. The Trial; Metamorphosis.

• Lawrence, D.H. Sons and Lovers; Women in Love.

• Lewis, Sinclair. Babbitt; Main Street.

• Malamud, Bernard. The Assistant.

• Mann Thomas. Death in Venice.

• Melville, Herman. Moby Dick.

• Morrison, Toni. Sula; Beloved.

• O’Connor, Flannery. A Good Man is Hard to Find.

• Olsen, Tillie. Tell Me a Riddle.

• Orwell, George. Animal Farm; 1984.

• Paton, Alan. Cry, the Beloved Country.

• Poe, Edgar Allan. Great Tales and Poems.

• Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye.

• Scott, Sir Walter. Ivanhoe; Heart of Midlothian.

• Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein.

• Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath; Of Mice and Men; Cannery Row; The Pearl.

• Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels.

• Thackery, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair.

• Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace; Anna Karenina.

• Turgenev, Ivan. Fathers and Sons.

• Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

• Updike, John. Rabbit, Run.

• Voltaire. Candide.

• Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse Five; Cat’s Cradle.

• Walker, Alice. The Color Purple.

• Welty, Eudora. Thirteen Stories.

• Wharton, Edit. The Age of Innocence; The House of Mirth; Ethan Frome.

• Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse; A Room of One’s Own.

• Wright, Richard. Native Son.

Drama

• Aeschylus. Orestia.

• Aristophanes. Lysistrata.

• Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot.

• Brecht, Bertolt. Mother Courage and Her Children.

• Chekhov, Anton. The Cherry Orchard; The Three Sisters.

• Euripides. Medea; TheBacchae.

• Goethe, Johann von. Faust, Part I.

• Ibsen, Henrik. A Doll’s House.

• Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus.

• Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman.

• Molière. The Misanthrope; Tartuffe.

• O’Neill, Eugene. Desire Under the Elms; The Emperor Jones; The Hairy Ape.

• Shakespeare, William. Hamlet.

• Shaw, George Bernard. Pygmalion; Saint Joan; Arms and the Man.

• Sophocles. Oedipus Rex; Antigone.

• Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Earnest; Lady Windermere’s Fan.

• Wilder, Thornton. Our Town.

• Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie.

Poetry

• Allison, Alexander, ed. Norton Anthology of Poetry (Shorter Edition).

• Anonymous. Beowulf.

• Anonymous. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

• Chaucer, Geoffrey. Canterbury Tales.

• Dante. Inferno.

• Homer. The Odyssey; The Iliad.

• Milton, John. Paradise Lost.

• Vergil. The Aeneid.

• Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass.

Miscellaneous

• Aristotle. Poetics.

• Augustine, Saint. Confessions.

• Bible.

• Darwin, Charles. Origin of Species; The Voyage of the Beagle.

• Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar” in Essays; “Self-Reliance.”

• Franklin, Benjamin. Autobiography.

• Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents.

• Hamilton, Edith. Mythology.

• Machiavelli, Noccolò. The Prince.

• Marx, Karl. Communist Manifesto.

• Montaigne, Michel de. Selected Essays.

• Plato. Republic; Apology.

• Thoreau, Henry David. Walden; Civil Disobedience.

*Source: Reading Lists for the College-Bound Students, 3^rd edition, by Doug Estell, Michele L. Satchwell and Patricia S. Wright. (2000.) Lawrenceville, NJ: ARCO/Thomson Learning.