ENGLISH COLLEGE READING


 

HOME PAGE
ENGLISH

 

 

The 43 Books Most Frequently Taught in 5% of More of Public Schools, Grades 7-12

 

Title

Author

Schools %   (n = 322)

 

The Adventures of Huckleberry Fin

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Animal Farm

Antigone

Call of the Wild

Catcher in the Rye

A Christmas Carol

The Crucible

A Day No Pigs Would Die

Death of a Salesman

The Diary of a Young Girl

Fahrenheit 451

The Glass Menagerie

The Grapes of Wrath

Great Expectations

The Great Gatsby

Hamlet

Johnny Tremain

Julius Caesar

The Light in the Forest

Lord of the Flies

Macbeth

The Miracle Worker

1984

The Odyssey

Oedipus Rex

Of Mice and Men

Othello

Our Town

The Outsiders

The Pearl

The Pigman

Pygmalion

The Read Badge of Courage

The Red Pony

Romeo and Juliet

The Scarlet Letter

A Separate Peace

Shane

A Tale of Two Cities

To Kill a Mockingbird

Where the Red Fern Grows

Wuthering Heights

Mark Twain

Mark Twain

George Orwell

Sophocles

Jack London

J.D. Salinger

Charles Dickens

Arthur Miller

Robert Newton Peck

Arthur Miller

Anne Frank

Ray Bradbury

Tennessee Williams

John Steinbeck

Charles Dickens

F. Scott Fitzgerald

William Shakespeare

Esther Forbes

William Shakespeare

Conrad Richter

William Golding

William Shakespeare

William Gibson

George Orwell

Homer

Sophocles

John Steinbeck

William Shakespeare

Thorton Wilder

S.E. Hinton

John Steinbeck

Paul Zindel

George Bernard Shaw

Stephen Crane

John Steinbeck

William Shakespeare

Nathaniel Hawthorne

John Knowles

Jack Shaefer

Charles Dickens

Harper Lee

Wilson Rawls

Emily Bronte

78

32

51

28

51

26

20

47

22

36

56

20

24

28

44

54

56

21

71

24

56

81

32

28

29

21

60

20

44

39

64

38

21

47

31

90

62

48

28

41

74

21

26

Source:  Arthur Applebee, A Study of Book-Length Works Taught in High School English (Albany: Center for the Learning and Teaching of Literature, State University of New York, Albany, Report Series 1.2, 1989), App. 2.


 

Reading List for the College-Bound

 

This reading list for college-bound students is a combination of many lists compiled by colleges and universities for high school reading.  College professors expect incoming students to be familiar with these works; in many cases they will be reread and studied in more depth at college.  Students not planning to attend college should not shy away from this list.

POETRY

 

Beowulf

Chaucer, Geoffrey – Canterbury Tales

Dickinson, Emily – poems

Emerson, Ralph Waldo – poems

Frost, Robert – poems

Homer – The Iliad; The Odyssey

Milton, John – Paradise Lost

Virgil – The Aeneid

Whitman, Walt – Leaves of Grass

 

NONFICTION

 

Adams, Henry – The Education of Henry Adams

Aristotle – Politics; Poetics

Bible

Declaration of Independence

Douglas, Frederick – Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Didion, Joan – essays

Freud, Sigmund – Civilization and Its Discontents

Franklin, Benjamin – The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Johnson, James Weldon – Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man

Kingston, Maxine Hong – The Woman Warrior

King, Martin Luther – I Have a Dream

Machiavelli, Niccolo – The Prince

Marx, K. and F. Engels – Communist Manifesto

Montaigne, Michel de – Selected Essays

Plato – The Republic

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques – Confessions (selected)

St. Augustine – Confessions (selected)

Thoreau, Henry – Walden

Thurber, James – essays

Tocqueville, Alexis de – Democracy in America

 

 

 

 

 

FICTION

(Novels and Short Stories) - continued

 

*Salinger, J.D. – The Catcher in the Rye

* Scott, Sir Walter – Ivanhoe

Steinbeck, John – The Grapes of Wrath

Stendhal – The Red and the Black

Stevenson, Robert Louis – The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Swift, Jonathan – Gulliver’s Travels

Thackeray, William – Vanity Fair

Tolstoy, Leo – War and Peace

*Twain, Mark – Huckleberry Finn; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; Innocents Abroad

Vonnegut, Kurt – Slaughterhouse Five

Waugh, Evelyn – A Handful of Dust

*Wright, Richard – Native Son

 

FICTION

(Novels and Short Stories)

*Austen, Jane – Pride and Prejudice

Baldwin, James – Go Tell It on the Mountain

Bellow, Saul – Humboldt’s Gift

*Bronte, Emily – Wuthering Heights

Camus, Albert – The Stranger

*Cervantes, Miguel de – Don Quixote

*Conrad, Joseph – The Red Badge of Courage

Defoe, Daniel – Robinson Crusoe

Dickens, Charles – David Copperfield; Tale of Two Cities

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor – Crime and Punishment

Eliot, George – Adam Bede

*Ellison, Ralph – Invisible Man

Faulkner, William – The Unvanquished; Intruder in the Dust

Fielding, Henry – Joseph Andrews

*Fitzgerald, F. Scott – The Great Gatsby

Flaubert, Gustave – Madame Bovary

Fowles, John – The French Lieutenant’s Woman

*Golding, William – Lord of the Flies

Hardy, Thomas – The Return of the Native

*Hawthorne, Nathaniel – The Scarlet Letter

Hemingway, Ernest – A Farewell to Arms; The Nick Adams Stories

James, Henry – The Portrait of a Lady

Joyce, James – Dubliners

Kafka, Franz – The Trial

Lewis, Sinclair – Babbitt; Arrowsmith

Malamud, Bernard – The Magic Barrel

Melville, Herman – Moby Dick

Orwell, George – 1984; Animal Farm

*Paton, Alan – Cry, The Beloved Country

Poe, Edgar Allan – The Tell-Tale Heart; The Black Cat; The Pit and the Pendulum