Classic Considerations
Classical Foundations
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Egyptian Book of the Dead
Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus
The Prose Edda by Snurri Sturlson
Oedipus the King by Sophocles
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Metamorphoses by Ovid
Dante to Faust (1321-1832)
A play by William Shakespeare (not R&J or Julius Caesar)
“The Jew of Malta” or “Tamburlaine the Great”–Christopher Marlowe
Le Morte D’Arthur by Thomas Malory
Faust, Parts one and Two by Johann Wolfgang van Goethe
The Decameron by Giovanni Boccacio
Paradise Lost by John Milton
The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster
Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding
Tartuffe by Moliere
Candide by Voltaire
The Democratic Age (1832-1900)
Les Misérables or Notre-Dame of Paris by Victor Hugo
The Red and the Black by Stendahl
Madame Bovary; by Gustave Flaubert
Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen
Pride and Prejudice or Persuasion by Jane Austen
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Middlemarch by George Elliot
David Copperfield or Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Vanity Fair by William Thackeray
A Sportsman’s Notebook by Ivan Turgenev
Notes from the Underground or Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
War and Peace or Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Little Women by Louis May Alcott
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
The Bostonians by Henry James
The Modern Era (1900-2005)
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis or Blindness by Jose Saramago
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
The Garlic Ballads by Mo Yan
White Noise; Libra or Underworld by Don DeLillo
Song of Solomon or Beloved by Toni Morrison
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Dubliners or Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
1984 by George Orwell
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
Native Son by Richard Wright
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
The Plague by Albert Camus
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erick M. Remarque
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Heart is a Lonley Hunter by Carson McCullers
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Enigma of Arrival by V.S. Naipaul
Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
Clear Light of Day by Anita Desai
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver
Other Reading Lists
- The Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels in the English Language
- Books Commonly Appearing on the AP Exam
- The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time
- Time Magazine’s 100 Best Novels 1923-2005
- The Best Novels You’ve Never Read
- Essential Great Books by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren
- The Western Canon by Harold Bloom
- The Guardian’s Top 100 Books of All Time
- The Top 100 Science Fiction Books