Read On!

100 Classics

I don't claim that the books below are the greatest books ever written.  I don't even claim that I have read them all--yet.  I can tell you, though, that these 100 works, arranged in rough chronological order, are widely regarded as classics of world literature and that reading them will enlighten and enrich you.
  1. The Bible
  2. Homer, The Odyssey
  3. Homer, The Illiad
  4. Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
  5. Sophocles, Antigone
  6. Euripedes, Medea
  7. Vergil, The Aeneid
  8. Ovid, Metamorphoses
  9. Anonymous, Beowulf
  10. Anonymous, Song of Roland
  11. Dante, The Divine Comedy
  12. Boccaccio, Decameron
  13. Malory, Le Morte d'Arthur
  14. Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
  15. More, Utopia
  16. Spenser, The Faerie Queene
  17. Marlowe, Dr. Faustus
  18. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream
  19. Shakespeare, Macbeth
  20. Shakespeare, King Lear
  21. Shakespeare, Othello
  22. Shakespeare, Hamlet
  23. Jonson, Volpone
  24. Donne, poetry
  25. Cervantes, Don Quixote
  26. Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progess
  27. Milton, Paradise Lost
  28. Pope, Essay on Man
  29. Swift, Gulliver's Travels
  30. Johnson, Rasselas
  31. Defoe, Moll Flanders
  32. Franklin, The Autobiography
  33. Moliere, The Misanthrope
  34. Voltaire, Candide
  35. Burns, poetry
  36. Goethe, Faust
  37. Blake, poetry
  38. Coleridge and Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads
  39. Austen, Pride and Prejudice
  40. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
  41. Percy Bysshe Shelley, poetry
  42. Keats, poetry
  43. Byron, Don Juan
  44. Irving, The Sketch Book
  45. Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame
  46. Poe, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque
  47. Emerson, essays
  48. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
  49. Thoreau, Walden
  50. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
  51. Melville, Moby-Dick
  52. Whitman, Leaves of Grass
  53. Dickinson, poetry
  54. Robert Browning, poetry
  55. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, poetry
  56. Bronte, Jane Eyre
  57. Bronte, Wuthering Heights
  58. Dickens, Great Expectations
  59. Baudelaire, poetry
  60. Flaubert, Madame Bovary
  61. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
  62. Tennyson, poetry
  63. Eliot, Middlemarch
  64. Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
  65. Hopkins, poetry
  66. James, Portrait of a Lady
  67. Tolstoy, War and Peace
  68. Chekhov, The Seagull
  69. Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
  70. Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
  71. Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles
  72. Ibsen, A Doll's House
  73. Yeats, poetry
  74. Conrad, Heart of Darkness
  75. Shaw, Major Barbara
  76. Kafka, The Metamorphosis
  77. Eliot, The Waste Land
  78. Auden, poetry
  79. Joyce, Ulysses
  80. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
  81. Camus, The Stranger
  82. Frost, poetry
  83. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
  84. Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
  85. Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
  86. Woolf, To the Lighthouse
  87. Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
  88. Miller, Death of a Salesman
  89. Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire
  90. Wright, Black Boy
  91. O'Neill, Long Day's Journey into Night
  92. Stevens, poetry
  93. Ellison, Invisible Man
  94. Beckett, Waiting for Godot
  95. Nabokov, Lolita
  96. O'Connor, stories
  97. Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
  98. Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
  99. Shepard, Buried Child
  100. Morrison, Beloved
For more suggested books, see Great Books of the Western World, edited by Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.
Mark Twain

School is about the only place where you have to read literature, but all of us confront and interpret the stuff of literature--language, people, nature, and ideas--every day of our lives. Reading great novels and poems, then, can make us better readers of our world. More than a means of education, reading also can entertain, move, even transform us. What follows is a list of some literary works that I have found worthwhile and that I recommend to anyone interested in picking up or continuing the hobby of reading. Many of these works, such as In Cold Blood and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, deeply affected me. I hope they will bring you the same intellectual, emotional, and spiritual satisfaction that they brought me. 

As a slow reader, I recognize the challenge in taking on a difficult piece of literature. I recommend starting with something short and manageable, such as Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Masque of the Red Death" or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem "Nature." Look for works about topics that interest you. If you like movies about young people, for example, try Judith Guest's novel Ordinary People or Richard Wright's autobiography, Black Boy. To help you, I have arranged my recommendations roughly by topic and have compiled several tips for reading and taking notes on a site called Be Your Best. Even if you find that you don't like a work right away, go ahead and finish it and immediately start on another work. Like playing tennis or the piano, reading takes patience and effort, but pays off with satisfaction and enjoyment. Finally, make a habit of reading. If you read only 20 pages a day, you can read a novel in a couple of weeks. If you can read 40 or 50 pages a day--perhaps by reading for an hour over lunch and an hour after dinner--you can read a book every week, more than 50 a year!
 

Short Stories and Novelettes

Humorous Stories

  • "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," by Mark Twain
  • "The Big Bear of Arkansas," by T.B. Thorpe
  • "The Captain Attends a Camp Meeting," by Johnson Jones Hooper

Stories of Mystery, Horror, or Suspense

Stories Beautifully Told

  • "Barn Burning," by William Faulkner
  • "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed," by Mark Twain
  • "The Ugliest Pilgrim," by Doris Betts
  • "The Open Boat," by Stephen Crane
  • "The Blue Hotel," by Stephen Crane

Poems

  • Beowulf, anonymous
  • Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, anonymous
  • Sonnets by William Shakespeare
  • "The Rape of the Lock," by Alexander Pope
  • "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  • The Complete English Poems, by John Donne
  • The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
  • Evangeline and Other Poems, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
  • Poems, by Gerard Manley Hopkins
  • Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman
  • Selected Poems of Langston Hughes

Novels

Novels About Young People

  • To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
  • Ordinary People, by Judith Guest
  • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain
  • Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
  • The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane

Novels of Adventure

  • Dracula, by Bram Stoker
  • The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Edgar Allan Poe
  • Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
  • Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe
  • The Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper
  • The Pathfinder, by James Fenimore Cooper

Novels with Fascinating Characters

  • One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey
  • In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
  • The Awakening, by Kate Chopin
  • The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Just Plain Great Novels

  • Beloved, by Toni Morrison
  • Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner

Plays

Humorous Plays

  • True West, by Sam Shepard
  • The Way of the World, by William Congreve
  • The Rivals, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Dramatic Plays

  • Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller
  • Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett
  • Long Day's Journey Into Night, by Eugene O'Neill
  • Curse of the Starving Class, by Sam Shepard
  • A Man for All Seasons, by Robert Bolt
  • A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams
  • The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams
  • A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry

Nonfiction Books

Autobiography

  • Black Boy, by Richard Wright
  • The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston
  • The Autobiography, by Benjamin Franklin

Books About Science

  • The Dragons of Eden, by Carl Sagan
  • Searching for Memory, by Daniel Schacter
  • Touched with Fire, by Kay Redfield Jamison

Books About History

  • China Men, by Maxine Hong Kingston
  • The Endurance, by Caroline Alexander

Classics

"I don't believe any of you have ever read Paradise Lost, and you don't want to," Mark Twain told an audience in 1900. "That's something that you just want to take on trust. It's a classic, just as Professor Winchester says, and it meets his definition of a classic--something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read."

Some classic literary works, including many of the ones in the list above, are accessible to people who have not read a lot of literature. As Twain points out, however, other classics are so challenging that they scare off potential readers. While you probably don't want to dive into one of the works below immediately after your first college course in literature, you may try to tackle one after you have warmed up with some easier works. Often a great challenge pays off with great rewards.

Novels

Plays

Nonfiction

A Reading List for Scholars of American Literature

I have assembled the following list of suggested reading to help you continue your education after this course. While I think this list will prove especially useful to English majors interested in strengthening their backgrounds in American literature, the works listed here can provide rich, interesting reading experiences for anyone with an active, open mind. Like the course itself, this list is organized by period and genre. Most of the dates that appear in parentheses are the years of publication; if the work was not published until many decades after its composition, I have given the approximate date of composition instead.

Cultural Contact and Exploration (1500-1600)

Native American Literature

Exploration Narratives

Settlement (1600-1700)

Puritan Writings

Colonial Period (1700-1783)

Personal Writings

Independence (1783-1817)

Early Belles-Lettres

Development (1817-1848)

Sentimentalism

Humor of the Old Southwest

Transcendentalism

American Romanticism

History Writing

Conflict and Civil War (1849-1865)

Slave Narratives

Poetry of the American Renaissance

Reconstruction (1865-1877)

Regionalism

Age of Industry (1877-1914)

Popular Fiction

Popular Poetry

Realism

Naturalism

Nonfiction

World Wars (1914-1945)

Modernism

Nonfiction

Harlem Renaissance

Cold War and Fin de Siecle (1945-today)

Modern Drama

Contemporary Poetry

Contemporary Fiction

Contemporary Nonfiction