LITERATURE LIST - BHS Academic Team
LITERATURE LIST
The following list is a comprehensive (or at least close to it) list of the authors and their works that commonly (or even occasionally) appear in academic competition. The list contains authors of novels, novellas and short stories, playwrights, dramatists and poets. Book titles are underlined, short stories and essays are in bold, poems are surrounded by “quotation marks” and dramatic works are italicized. For some authors, their nationality is included in parentheses after their name, as that is often a major clue in a question (for example, Ibsen is the only famous Norwegian playwright in America). The author’s time period and prominent writing style (Romantic, etc.) may also be included in parentheses after the name if it is especially relevant.
Abelard, Peter (12th cent.) – History of My Misfortunes, Sic et Non, Abelard and Heloise
Achebe, Chinua (Nigerian) – Things Fall Apart
Adams, Henry – The Education of Henry Adams
Adams, Richard – Watership Down
Addams, Jane – Twenty Years at Hull-House
Addison, Joseph – The Spectator, Tatler (with Sir Richard Steele)
Aeschylus – The Oresteia Trilogy (includes Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides), Prometheus Bound
Aesop - Fables
Albee, Edward – A Delicate Balance, Three Tall Women, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Albom, Mitch – Tuesdays with Morrie
Alcott, Louisa May – Little Women, Little Men, Jo’s Boys
Alger, Horatio – rags to riches stories (the Luck & Pluck, Ragged Dick, and Tattered Tom series)
Allende, Isabel (Chilean) – The House of the Spirits
Anderson, Hans Christian (Danish)– The Emperor’s New Clothes, The Little Mermaid, The Princess and the Pea, The Ugly Duckling
Angelou, Maya – I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (autobiography), “On the Pulse of Morning”
Aquinas, Thomas (Italian) – Summa Theologica
Aristophanes – The Clouds, The Frogs, Lysistrata
Aristotle – Poetics, Politics
Armstrong, William – Sounder
Asimov, Isaac – I, Robot
Auden, W.H. – “The Age of Anxiety”, “In Time of War”
Audubon, John James – The Birds of America
Augustine, St. – The City of God, Confessions
Austen, Jane – Emma, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility
Bacon, Sir Francis (17th cent.) – Essays, Novum Organum
Baghavad Gita – holy text of Hinduism (originally in Sanskrit); part of national epic, Mahabharata
Baldwin, James – Go Tell It on the Mountain
Balzac, Honoré de – The Human Comedy, Le Père Goriot
Barrie, J.M. – Peter Pan, Peter and Wendy
Bashō, Matsuo (Japanese) – The Narrow Road to the Deep North (considered finest writer of haiku)
Baum, L. Frank – The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Beaumarchais, Pierre – The Barber of Seville, The Marriage of Figaro
Beckett, Samuel – Waiting for Godot
Bede (the Venerable) – Ecclesiastical History of the English People
Bellow, Saul – Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift
Benchley, Peter - Jaws
Benét, Stephen Vincent – The Devil and Daniel Webster, “John Brown’s Body”
“Beowulf” – Oldest English epic poem, written in Old English
Bierce, Ambrose – The Devil’s Dictionary, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Blake, William (Romantic) – “The Tyger”
Blume, Judy – Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret; Superfudge; Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing
Bly, Nellie – 19th / 20th century investigative journalist – insane asylums, child labor, women’s rights
Boccaccio, Giovanni – The Decameron (collection of 100 short stories)
Bolt, Robert – A Man for All Seasons (about Sir Thomas More)
Bombeck, Erma – 3 times weekly “At Wit’s End”, The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank
Book of the Dead – Ancient Egyptian holy book
Boswell, James – The Life of Samuel Johnson
Bradbury, Ray – Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way Comes
Brecht, Bertolt (German) – The Threepenny Opera
Brodsky, Joseph – “The End of a Lovely Era”, “A Halt in the Wilderness”
Brontë, Anne – Agnes Grey
Brontë, Charlotte – Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily – Wuthering Heights
Brontë, Anne, Charlotte & Emily – Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (each male name is a
pseudonym for one of the girls)
Brooks, Gwendolyn – “We Real Cool”
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (Victorian) – “Sonnets from the Portuguese”
Browning, Robert (Victorian) – “My Last Duchess”, “Porphyria’s Lover”
Bryant, William Cullen – “Thanatopsis”, “To a Waterfowl”
Buck, Pearl S. –Dragon Seed, Fairy Tales of the Orient, The Good Earth (all about China)
Bunyan, John – The Pilgrim’s Progress (From This World to That Which Is to Come) (main character Christian visits such places as Vanity Fair)
Burnett, Frances – The Secret Garden
Burns, Robert (Scottish - Romantic) – “Auld Lang Syne”, “My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose”, “To a
Mouse”
Burroughs, Edgar Rice – Tarzan books
Burroughs, William S. – Naked Lunch
Byron, Lord (George Gordon Noel - Romantic) – “Don Juan”, “She Walks in Beauty” – died fighting for
Greek independence in 1824
“Caedmon’s Hymn” – medieval epic poetry originally in Anglo-Saxon
Caldwell, Erskine – God’s Little Acre, Tobacco Road
Camus, Albert – The Fall, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Stranger (French existentialist philosopher)
Čapek, Karel (Czech) – R.U.R. (coined the term “robot”)
Capote, Truman – Breakfast at Tiffany’s, A Christmas Memory, In Cold Blood (Capote is Dill in To
Kill a Mockingbird)
Carré, John le – (spy novels) – The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
Carroll, Lewis (Charles L. Dodgson) – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, “Jabberwocky”, Through the
Looking Glass
Carson, Rachel – Silent Spring (warns of dangers of pesticide use)
Castiglione, Baldassare (Italian) – The Book of the Courtier
Cather, Willa – Death Comes for the Archbishop, My Ántonia, O Pioneers!
Cervantes, Miguel de – Don Quixote
Chandler, Raymond – The Big Sleep (detective novels starring Phillip Marlowe)
Chaucer, Geoffrey – The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton (Russian) – The Cherry Orchard, Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya
Christie, Agatha – Death on the Nile, Murder on the Orient Express – main character, Hercule Poirot
Churchill, Sir Winston – Blood, Sweat, and Tears; The Gathering Storm; A History of the English- Speaking Peoples; Their Finest Hour
Clancy, Tom – Clear and Present Danger, The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, Rainbow Six
Clarke, Arthur C. – 2001: A Space Odyssey
Clavell, James – King Rat, Noble House, Shōgun, Tai-pan (all about Japan or Hong Kong)
Cleary, Beverly – Dear Mr. Henshaw, Henry Huggins (series), Ramona (series)
Crichton, Michael – The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Sphere
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (Romantic) – “Kubla Khan”, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
Collodi, Carlo – The Adventures of Pinocchio
Congreve, William – The Way of the World
Connell, Richard – The Most Dangerous Game
Conrad, Joseph – Heart of Darkness (basis for movie “Apocalypse Now’), Lord Jim
Cooper, James Fenimore – The Leatherstocking Tales Series – The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, The Pathfinder, The Deerslayer (main character – Natty Bumppo, a.k.a. Hawkeye)
Copernicus, Nicolaus (Polish) – On The Revolution of the Heavenly Bodies
Cornwell, Patricia –Cruel and Unusual, Postmortem (mystery series; main character – Dr. Kay Scarpetta)
Coward, Noël – Blithe Spirit
Crane, Stephen – The Red Badge of Courage
Crevecouer, Michel de – Letters From an American Farmer
cummings, e.e.- “anyone lived in a pretty how town”, “Buffalo Bill’s”, “next to of course god america i”
Dahl, Roald (Welsh) – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (basis for “Willy Wonka”), James and the Giant
Peach
Dante, Alighieri – “Divine Comedy” (“Inferno”, “Purgatorio”, “Paradiso”)
Darwin, Charles – Descent of Man, On The Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection
De Quincey, Thomas (19th cent.) – Confessions of an English Opium Eater
Defoe, Daniel – Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe
Dekker, Thomas – Old Fortunatus, The Shoemaker’s Holiday
Descartes, René – Discourses on the Method (“Cogito ergo sum” – “I think therefore I am”)
Dick, Philip K. – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (basis for film “Blade Runner”), The Minority
Report (basis for film of same name), We Can Remember It For You Wholesale (basis for film “Total Recall”)
Dickens, Charles – A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (unfinished), The Old Curiosity Shop, Oliver Twist, The Pickwick Papers, A Tale of Two Cities
Dickinson, Emily – “Because I could not stop for Death”, “I heard a Fly buzz— when I died —”, “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?” (The Belle of Amherst; only 2 poems published in her lifetime)
Dinesen, Isak (Danish) – Out of Africa
Disraeli, Benjamin – Vivian Grey (19th century British prime minister)
Donne, John (17th cent.) – “Holy Sonnets” (“death be not proud”), “Meditation XVII” (“no man is an island”)
Dos Passos, John – U.S.A. Trilogy (42nd Parallel, 1919, The Big Money)
Dosteovsky, Feodor (Russian) – The Brothers Karamozov, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot
Douglass, Frederick – Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan – Sherlock Holmes mysteries – 1st: A Study in Scarlet
Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel) – The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, How the Grinch Stole
Christmas
Dreiser, Theodore – An American Tragedy
Dryden, John (17th cent.) – “One Happy Moment”, “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day”
Dubois, W.E.B. – The Souls of Black Folk
Dumas, Alexandre – The Count of Monte Cristo, The Man in the Iron Mask, The Three Musketeers
Dunbar, Paul Laurence – “Lyrics of the Hearthside”, “Lyrics of Love and Laughter” (about slave life)
Eddy, Mary Baker – Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (founder of Christian Science Church)
Edwards, Jonathan – “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (Great Awakening sermon)
Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans) – Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner
Eliot, T.S. – “The Hollow Men”, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, “The Waste Land”
Ellison, Ralph – Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo – The Conduct of Life, Nature, Self-Reliance (transcendentalist)
Epic of Gilgamesh – Mesopotamian literature (3200 B.C.) – contains the flood story
Erasmus, Desiderius – The Praise of Folly
Euripedes – Hippolytus, Medea, Orestes, The Trojan Women, Works
Everyman – medieval morality play
Faulkner, William – Absalom, Absalom!; As I Lay Dying; The Reivers; The Sound and The Fury;
Go Down Moses (novels set in mythical Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi)
The Federalist Papers – a series of 85 essays written by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James
Madison to convince New Yorkers to ratify the Constitution
Ferber, Edna – Cimarron, Giant, Show Boat, So Big
Fielding, Henry – Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott – The Great Gatsby, The Last Tycoon (unfinished), Tender Is the Night
Flaubert, Gustave – Madame Bovary
Fleming, Ian – James Bond books
Foote, Horton – The Young Man From Atlanta
Forbes, Esther – Johnny Tremain
Forester, C.S. – The African Queen, Horatio Hornblower (series)
Forster, E.M. – Howards End, A Passage to India, A Room with a View
Frank, Anne – The Diary of a Young Girl
Franklin, Benjamin – Poor Richard’s Almanack
Freidan, Betty – The Feminine Mystique
Freud, Sigmund – A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, The Interpretation of Dreams, Studies on Hysteria
Frost, Robert – “Mending Wall”, “The Road Not Taken”, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
Fugard, Athol (South African) – Master Harold…and the Boys, The Road to Mecca
Galsworthy, John – The Forsyte Saga
Gardner, Erle Stanley – Perry Mason mystery novels
Gibbon, Edward – The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Ginsburg, Allen – “Howl” (Beat poet)
Giovanni, Nikki – “Knoxville, Tennessee”
Gipson, Fred – Old Yeller
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von – Faust
Golding, William – Lord of the Flies
Goldsmith, Oliver (18th cent.) – She Stoops To Conquer
Grafton, Sue – alphabetical mysteries, such as A is for Alibi, B is for Burglar, etc.
Grahame, Kenneth – The Wind in the Willows
Gray, Thomas (18th cent.) – “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”
Grey, Zane – Riders of the Purple Sage (westerns)
Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm – Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, Rumpelstiltskin, Snow
White
Grisham, John – The Client, The Firm, A Time to Kill, The Chamber
Gunther, John – Death Be Not Proud (title taken from sonnet of same title by John Donne)
Haggard, Sir H. Rider – Allan Quatermain (Sean Connery in “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen”), King
Solomon’s Mines, She
Hale, Edward Everett – The Man Without a Country (title character – Phillip Nolan)
Haley, Alex – Queen, Roots (Kunta Kinte)
Hammett, Dashiell – The Maltese Falcon (Sam Spade), The Thin Man (Nick & Nora Charles)
Hansberry, Lorraine – A Raisin in the Sun
Hardy, Thomas – Far from the Madding Crowd, Jude the Obscure, The Return of the Native,
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Harris, Joel Chandler – Uncle Remus stories
Harte, Bret – The Luck of Roaring Camp, The Outcasts of Poker Flat (westerns)
Hawthorne, Nathaniel – The House of the Seven Gables, The Scarlet Letter, Twice-Told Tales
Hazlitt, William (19th cent.) – An Essay on the Principles of Human Action
Heller, Joseph – Catch-22
Hellman, Lillian – The Children’s Hour, The Little Foxes, Watch on the Rhine
Hemingway, Ernest – A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea,
The Snows of Kilimanjaro, The Sun Also Rises
Henry, O. (William Sydney Porter) – The Gift of the Magi, The Ransom of Red Chief
Herbert, George (17th cent.) – religious poetry, considered the greatest of the Metaphysical poets
Herodotus – The Persian Wars (The father of history)
Herrick, Robert (17th cent.) – “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” (Gather ye rosebuds while ye may)
Hersey, John – A Bell for Adano
Hesse, Hermann – Siddhartha, Steppenwolf
Heyerdahl, Thor – Kon-Tiki
Hilton, James – Goodbye, Mr. Chips; Lost Horizon
Hinton, S.E. – The Outsiders
Hitler, Adolf – Mein Kampf (My Struggle)
Hobbes, Thomas (17th cent.) – Leviathan (The life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.)
Holmes, Oliver Wendell – “The Chambered Nautilus”, “Old Ironsides”
Homer – “Iliad”, “Odyssey”
Hopkins, Gerard Manley (20th cent.) – “Pied Beauty”, “The Windhover”
Horace – “Ars Poetica” (the rules for writing poetry), “Odes” (carpe diem)
Housman, A.E. (20th cent.) – “To An Athlete Dying Young”, “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now”
Howe, Julia Ward – “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”
Hubbard, L. Ron – Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (provides basic tenets of Scientology)
Hughes, Langston – “The Weary Blues”
Hugo, Victor – The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Les Misérables
Hurston, Zora Neale – Dust Tracks on a Road, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous – Brave New World (title comes from The Tempest)
Ibsen, Henrik (Norwegian) – A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler, Peer Gynt
Irving, Washington – The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle
Jackson, Charles – The Lost Weekend
Jackson, Shirley – Hangsaman, The Lottery
James, Henry – Daisy Miller, The Portrait of a Lady, The Turn of the Screw
Johnson, Samuel – A Dictionary of the English Language (1st English dictionary)
Jonson, Ben (17th cent.) – The Alchemist, Volpone
Joyce, James –Dubliners, Finnegans Wake, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses
Kafka, Franz (Czech) – Amerika (unfinished), The Castle, The Metamorphosis, The Trial
Kant, Immanuel (German) – Critique of Practical Reason, Critique of Pure Reason (“categorical
imperative”)
Keats, John (Romantic) – “Bright Star”, “The Eve of St. Agnes”, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “Ode to a Nightingale”, “ On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”, “To Autumn”, “When I have Fears that I may Cease to Be”
Kennedy, John F. – Profiles in Courage
Kerouac, Jack – On the Road (Beat poet)
Kesey, Ken – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Keyes, Daniel – Flowers for Algernon
Khayyám, Omar – “The Rubaiyat”
Kierkegaard, Soren (Danish) – Either/Or
Kilmer, Joyce – “Trees”
King, Stephen – Carrie, The Green Mile, It, Misery, Pet Sematary, The Shining, The Stand
Kingsolver, Barbara – The Poisonwood Bible
Kipling, Rudyard – Captains Courageous, “If—”, The Jungle Book, Just So Stories, Kim, “The White Man’s Burden”
Knowles, John- A Separate Peace
Koran (Quran) – holy book of Islam
L’Amour, Louis – The Lonely Men, Ride the River (westerns)
L’Engle, Madeline – A Wrinkle in Time
La Fontaine Jean de– The Grasshopper and the Ant, The Hen with the Golden Eggs
Lao Tzu – Tao Te Ching (teachings of Taoism)
Lawrence, D.H. – Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Sons and Lovers, Women in Love
Lazarus, Emma – “The New Colossus” – inscribed on Statue of Liberty
Lear, Edward – A Book of Nonsense, The Owl and the Pussycat (credited with creating the limerick)
Lee, Harper – To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, C.S. – The Chronicles of Narnia (includes The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe)
Lewis, Sinclair – Arrowsmith, Babbitt, Elmer Gantry, Main Street
Lindgren, Astrid – Pippi Longstocking (series)
London, Jack – The Call of the Wild, The Sea-Wolf, White Fang
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth – “The Courtship of Miles Standish”, “Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie”, “Paul Revere’s Ride”, “The Song of Hiawatha”, “The Village Blacksmith”
Lovelace, Richard (17th cent. Cavalier poet) – “To Althea from Prison” (“Stones walls do not a prison
make, / nor iron bars a cage”), “To Lucasta, Going to the Wars”
Lowell, James Russell – “The Biglow Papers”, “A Fable for Critics”
Lowell, Robert – “For the Union Dead”, “Lord Weary’s Castle”
Luce, Henry – co-founder (with Briton Hadden) of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines
Machiavelli, Niccolo – The Prince
MacLeish, Archibald – “Conquistador”; Collected Poems, 1917-1952; J.B.
Mailer, Norman – The Executioner’s Song, The Naked and the Dead
Malamud, Bernard – The Magic Barrel
Malory, Thomas (medieval) – Le Morte d’Arthur
Malthus, Thomas – An Essay on the Principle of Population
Mann, Thomas (German) – Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain
Marlowe, Christopher (16th cent.) – “Hero and Leander”, The Jew of Malta, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”, Tamburlaine the Great, The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus
Márquez, Gabriel García (Colombian) – One Hundred Years of Solitude
Marvell, Andrew (17th cent.) – “The Garden”, “To His Coy Mistress”
Marx, Karl – The Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital (co-written with Friedrich Engels)
Masters, Edgar Lee – Spoon River Anthology (of poems)
Mather, Cotton – The Christian Philosopher, Wonders of the Invisible World
Maugham, Somerset – The Moon and Sixpence (about Paul Gauguin), Of Human Bondage
Maupassant, Guy de (French) – The Necklace, The Umbrella
Maurier, Daphne du – Rebecca
McCourt, Frank – Angela’s Ashes
McCullers, Carson – The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding
Mead, Margaret – Coming of Age in Samoa (antropology)
Melville, Herman – Moby-Dick, Omoo, Typee
Michener, James – Alaska, Centennial, Hawaii, Mexico, Poland, Space, Tales of the South Pacific, Texas
Mill, John Stuart – On Liberty, Utilitarianism
Millay, Edna St. Vincent – “A Few Figs From Thistles”, “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver”
Miller, Arthur – The Crucible, Death of a Salesman (title character - Willy Loman)
Miller, Henry – Tropic of Cancer
Millett, Kate – Sexual Politics
Milne, A.A. – Winnie-the-Pooh (series)
Milton, John – “On His Blindness”, “Paradise Lost”, “Paradise Regained”
Mitchell, Margaret – Gone with the Wind
Molière –The Misanthrope, The School for Wives, Tartuffe
Montaigne, Michel de – Essays
Moore, Clement Clark – “A Visit from St. Nicolas” (Twas the night before Christmas…)
More, Sir Thomas (16th cent.) – Utopia
Morrison, Toni – Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Paradise
Nabokov, Vladimir (Soviet) – Lolita
Nash, Ogden – “The Duck”, “Everyone But Thee and Me”, “I’m a Stranger Here Myself”
Newton, Sit Isaac – Principia Mathematica
Nietzsche, Friedrich (German) – Beyond Good and Evil, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Nordhoff, Charles and Hall, James Norman – Mutiny on the Bounty
Norton, Mary – The Borrowers
Nostradamus – Centuries (collection of poetic prophecies)
O’Brien, Robert C. – Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
O’Connor, Flannery – Everything That Rises Must Converge, A Good Man Is Hard To Find
O’Dell, Scott – Island of the Blue Dolphins
O’Neill, Eugene – Desire Under the Elms, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into Night, Mourning
Becomes Electra
Orczy, Emma (Hungarian born)– The Scarlet Pimpernel
Orwell, George (Eric Blair) – Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm
Ovid – “Art of Love”, “Metamorphoses”
Paine, Thomas – The Age of Reason, Common Sense
Parker, Dorothy – “Death and Taxes” (known for witty sayings: “Men seldom make passes/ At girls who wear glasses.”)
Pasternak, Boris (Soviet) – Doctor Zhivago
Paterson, Katherine – Bridge to Terabithia, The Great Gilly Hopkins, Jacob Have I Loved
Paton, Alan – Cry, The Beloved Country
Pavlov, Ivan – Conditioned Reflexes
Peale, Norman Vincent – The Power of Positive Thinking
Pepys, Samuel – The Diary of Samuel Pepys
Petrarch – 14th century Italian poet; his lady-love (“paramour”) was Laura; Italian sonnet form is named
for him
Pinter, Harold (British) – The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Homecoming
Plath, Sylvia – The Bell Jar, The Colossus (poetry collection); second wife of poet laureate Ted Hughes to
commit suicide in a gas oven
Plato – Apology, Dialogues, Euthyphro, Phaedo, The Republic
Plutarch – Parallel Lives
Poe, Edgar Allan – “Annabel Lee”, The Cask of Amontillado, The Fall of the House of Usher, The
Gold-Bug, The Masque of the Red Death, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Purloined Letter, “The Raven”, The Tell-Tale Heart
Pope, Alexander (18th cent.) – “An Essay on Man” (“A little learning is a dangerous thing.”), Moral Essays,
“The Rape of the Lock”
Porter, Katherine Ann – Ship of Fools
Potter, Beatrix – The Tale of Peter Rabbit
Pound, Ezra – “The Cantos”
Prejean, Sister Helen – Dead Man Walking
Preston, Richard – The Hot Zone
Proust, Marcel - Remembrance of Things Past
Pushkin, Alexander (Russian) – Boris Godunov
Puzo, Mario – The Godfather, The Last Don
Rabelais, Francois – Gargantua and Pantagruel
Raleigh, Sir Walter – The History of the World
Rand, Ayn – Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead (founder of Objectivism)
Rawlings, Marjorie Kinnan – The Yearling
Rawls, Wilson – Where the Red Fern Grows
Remarque, Erich Maria (German) – All Quiet on the Western Front
Riis, Jacob – How the Other Half Lives (wretched living conditions of low class immigrants in early 20th)
Riley, James Whitcomb – “Little Orphant Annie”, “When the Frost is on the Punkin”
Robinson, Edwin Arlington – “The Man Who Died Twice”, “Miniver Cheevy”, “Richard Cory”
Rosseau, Jean-Jacques – The Social Contract
Rossetti, Christina (Victorian) – Goblin Market and Other Poems; sister of Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Rostand, Edmond – Cyrano de Bergerac
Rowling, J.K. – Harry Potter series: The Sorcerer’s Stone, The Chamber of Secrets, The Prisoner of
Azkaban, The Goblet of Fire, The Order of the Phoenix, The Half-Blood Prince, The Deathly Hallows
Rushdie, Salman – The Satanic Verses, Midnight’s Children (under a fatwā, or death sentence, b/c of TSV)
Sachar, Louis – Holes
Sagan, Carl – Contact, Cosmos
Saki (H.H. Munro) – Not So Stories, “The Interlopers”, “The Open Window”
Salinger, J.D. – The Catcher in the Rye
Sand, George (a woman) – Elle et Lui, La Mare au Diable (had romance with Chopin)
Sandburg, Carl – “Chicago”, Complete Poems, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years
Santayana, George (Spanish) – The Life of Reason (“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”)
Saroyan, William – The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, The Time of Your Life
Sartre, Jean-Paul – The Age of Reason, Being and Nothing, Existentialism, No Exit
Scott, Sir Walter – Ivanhoe
Seeger, Alan – “Rendezvous” (killed in action during WWI)
Sewell, Anna – Black Beauty
Shaffer, Anthony – Sleuth
Shaffer, Peter – Amadeus, Equus
Shakespeare, William – First Folio (1st collection of his works, contained 36 plays, omitting Pericles)
Shaw, George Bernard – Arms and the Man, Major Barbara, Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary – Frankenstein (or, The Modern Prometheus)
Shelley, Percy Bysshe (Romantic) – “Adonaïs”, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”, “Ode to the West Wind”, “Ozymandias”, “Prometheus Unbound”, “To a Skylark”, “To Wordsworth”
Sheridan, Richard – The Rivals (contains Mrs. Malaprop – source of malapropism), The School for Scandal
Sidney, Sir Philip – “Arcadia”
Silverstein, Shel – The Giving Tree, A Light in the Attic, Where the Sidewalk Ends
Simon, Neil – Biloxi Blues, The Goodbye Girl, The Odd Couple, Barefoot in the Park, Brighton Beach Memoirs
Sinclair, Upton – The Jungle (about meat-packing industry)
Smith, Adam – The Wealth of Nations
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr (Soviet) – The Gulag Archipelago, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles – Antigone, Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus Rex
Spenser, Edmund (16th cent.)– “The Faerie Queene”
Spillane, Mickey – I, the Jury (Mike Hammer mysteries)
Spock, Dr. Benjamin – The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care
Spyri, Johanna – Heidi
Stein, Gertrude – The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Steinbeck, John – Cannery Row, East of Eden, The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, The Pearl, The
Red Pony
Stevenson, Robert Louis – Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped, Treasure Island
Stockton, Frank R. – The Lady or the Tiger?
Stoker, Bram - Dracula
Stowe, Harriet Beecher – Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Stratemeyer, Edward – “The Hardy Boys” and “Nancy Drew” series (written under different pen names)
Strindberg, August (Swedish) – The Dance of Death, Miss Julie
Stuart, Jesse (Kentuckian) – “The Land Beyond the River”, The Thread That Runs So True
Suckling, Sir John (17th cent. Cavalier poet) – “Why So Pale and Wan, Fond Lover”
Susann, Jacqueline – Valley of the Dolls
Swift, Jonathan (17th cent.) – Gulliver’s Travels, A Modest Proposal
Tan, Amy – The Joy Luck Club
Tarkington, Booth – Alice Adams, The Magnificent Ambersons
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord (Victorian) – “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (about Battle of Balaclava in
Crimean War), “The Lady of Shalott”, “The Lotos-Eaters”, “Ulysses”
Thackeray, William Makepeace – Vanity Fair
Thomas, Augustus – The Witching Hour
Thomas, Dylan (Welsh – 20th cent.) – “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night” (villanelle form)
Thompson, Hunter S. (Louisvillian) – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (“gonzo journalism”)
Thoreau, Henry David – Civil Disobedience, Walden
Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War
Thurber, James – The Catbird Seat, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Tolkien, J.R.R. – The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings trilogy (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two
Towers, The Return of the King)
Tolstoy, Leo (Russian) – Anna Karenina, War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan (Russian) – Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) – The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi, The Prince and the Pauper, The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson
Updike, John – Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit is Rich; Rabbit at Rest
Uris, Leon – Battle Cry, Exodus, Gunfight at the OK Corral
Verne, Jules – Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in Eighty Days, A Journey to the Center of the Earth
Virgil – “Aeneid”
Voltaire – Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt – Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice – The Color Purple
Wallace, Lew (a Civil War general from Indiana) – Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
Warren, Robert Penn (Kentuckian) – All the King’s Men (1st poet laureate of U.S.)
Washington, Booker T. – Up From Slavery
Waugh, Evelyn – Brideshead Revisted
Webber, Andrew Lloyd – Cats, Jesus Christ Superstar, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,
The Phantom of the Opera
Webster, Noah – A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1st American dictionary)
Wells, H.G. – The Invisible Man, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds
Wharton, Edith – The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome, The House of Mirth
Wheatley, Phyllis – Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (African-born slave brought to
Americas)
White, E.B. – Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, The Trumpet of the Swan
White, T.H. – The Once and Future King
Whitman, Walt – Leaves of Grass, “O Captain! My Captain!”, “Song of Myself”
Whittier, John Greenleaf – “Barbara Frietchie”, “Snow-Bound”
Wilde, Oscar – The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Windermere’s Fan, The Picture of Dorian Gray,
“The Ballad of Reading Gaol”
Wilder, Laura Ingalls – Little House on the Prairie
Wilder, Thornton – The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth
Williams, Tennessee – Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Glass Menagerie, The Night of the Iguana, A Streetcar
Named Desire
Williams, William Carlos – “Journey to Love”, “Sour Grapes”
Wilson, August – Fences, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Wolfe, Thomas – Look Homeward, Angel
Wolfe, Tom – The Bonfire of the Vanities, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff
Woolf, Virgina – A Room of One’s Own, To the Lighthouse, Mrs Dalloway (Bloomsbury Group member)
Wordsworth, William – “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802”, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, “London, 1802”, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”, “The Prelude”, “The Solitary
Reaper”, “Tintern Abbey”, “Upon Westminster Bridge”, “The world is too much with us”
Wouk, Herman – The Caine Mutiny, War and Remembrance, The Winds of War
Wright, Richard – Black Boy, Native Son
Wyss, Johann – The Swiss Family Robinson
Yeats, William Butler (Irish – 20th cent.) – “Lake Isle of Innisfree”, “Lapis Lazuli”, “Leda and the
Swan”, “Sailing to Byzantium”, “The Wild Swans at Coole”
Zola, Émile – The Dram Shop, Nana
................
................
In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.
To fulfill the demand for quickly locating and searching documents.
It is intelligent file search solution for home and business.