LITERATURE LIST



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

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