College Bound Reading List
Instead of flipping on the TV or putting on those headphones, how about picking up a book instead? Reading not only will take you to wonderful, unexplored worlds in your imagination, but there are practical reasons as well. Reading gives you a more well-rounded background. College admissions and future employers pick up on that. And you’ll be able to answer the questions, "Did you read that book? What did you think of it?" How many of the books on this list have you read?
| Adams, Richard | Watership Down |
| Aesop | Fables |
| Agee, James | A Death in the Family |
| Anderson, Sherwood | Winesburg, Ohio |
| Anonymous | Go Ask Alice |
| Asimov, Isaac | Short Stories |
| Austen, Jane | Emma, Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility |
| Baldwin, James | Go Tell It on the Mountain |
| Balzac, Honore de | Pere Goriot |
| Beckett, Samuel | Waiting for Godot |
| Bolt, Robert | A Man for All Seasons |
| Brontë, Charlotte | Jane Eyre |
| Brontë, Emily | Wuthering Heights |
| Brooks, Gwendolyn | In the Mecca Riot |
| Browning, Robert | Poems |
| Buck, Pearl | The Good Earth |
| Butler, Samuel | The Way of All Flesh |
| Camus, Albert | The Plague, The Stranger |
| Cather, Willa | Death Comes for the Archbishop, My Antonia |
| Cervantes, Miguel | Don Quixote |
| Chaucer, Geoffrey | The Canterbury Tales |
| Chekhov, Anton | The Cherry Orchard |
| Chopin, Kate | The Awakening |
| Collins, Wilkie | The Moonstone |
| Conrad, Joseph | Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, The Secret Shaver, Victory |
| Crane, Stephen | The Red Badge of Courage |
| Dante | The Divine Comedy |
| Defoe, Daniel | Moll Flanders |
| Dickens, Charles | Bleak House, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Hard Times, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities |
| Dickinson, Emily | Poems |
| Dinesen, Isak | Out of Africa |
| Dostoevski, Fyodor | The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment |
| Douglas, Frederick | The Life of Frederick Douglas |
| Dreiser, Theodore | An American Tragedy, Sister Carrie |
| Early, Gerald | Tuxedo Junction |
| Eliot, George | Adam Bede, Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner |
| Eliot, T. S. | Murder in the Cathedral |
| Ellison, Ralph | Invisible Man |
| Emerson, Ralph Waldo | Essays |
| Faulkner, William | Absalom, Absalom!, As I Lay Dying, Intruder in the Dust, Light in August, The Sound and the Fury |
| Fielding, Henry | Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones |
| Fitzgerald, F. Scott | The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night |
| Flaubert, Gustave | Madame Bovary |
| Forster, E. M. | A Passage to India, A Room with a View |
| Franklin, Benjamin | The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin |
| Galsworthy, John | The Forsyte Saga |
| Golding, William | Lord of the Flies |
| Goldsmith, Oliver | She Stoops to Conquer |
| Graves, Robert | I, Claudius |
| Greene, Graham | The Heart of the Matter, The Power and the Glory |
| Hamilton, Edith | Mythology |
| Hardy, Thomas | Far from the Madding Crowd, Jude the Obscure, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Return of the Native, Tess of the D’Urbervilles |
| Hawthorne, Nathaniel | The House of the Seven Gables, The Scarlet Letter |
| Hemingway, Ernest | A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises |
| Henry, O. | Stories |
| Hersey, John | A Single Pebble |
| Hesse, Hermann | Demian, Siddhartha, Steppenwolf |
| Homer | The Iliad, The Odyssey |
| Hughes, Langston | Poems, The Big Sea |
| Hugo, Victor | Les Misérables |
| Huxley, Aldous | Brave New World |
| Ibsen, Henrik | A Doll House, An Enemy of the People, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, The Wild Duck |
| James, Henry | The American, Daisy Miller, Portrait of a Lady, The Turn of the Screw |
| Joyce, James | Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man |
| Kafka, Franz | The Castle, The Metamorphosis, The Trial |
| Keats, John | Poems |
| Kerouac, Jack | On the Road |
| Koestler, Arthur | Darkness at Noon |
| Lawrence, Jerome, and Robert E. Lee | Inherit the Wind |
| Lewis, Sinclair | Arrowsmith, Babbitt, Main Street
| | Llewellyn, Richard | How Green Was My Valley |
| Machiavelli, Niccolo | The Prince |
| MacLeish, Archibald | J.B. |
| Mann, Thomas | Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain |
| Marlowe, Christopher | Dr. Faustus |
| Maugham, Somerset | Of Human Bondage |
| McCullers, Carson | The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter |
| Melville, Herman | Billy Budd, Moby-Dick, Typee |
| Miller, Arthur | The Crucible, Death of a Salesman |
| Monsarrat, Nicholas | The Cruel Sea |
| Naylor, Gloria | Bailey’s Cafe, The Women of Brewster Place |
| O’Neill, Eugene | The Emperor Jones, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Mourning Becomes Electra |
| Orwell, George | Animal Farm, 1984 |
| Pasternak, Boris | Doctor Zhivago |
| Poe, Edgar Allan | Short Stories |
| Remarque, Erich | All Quiet on the Western Front |
| Rolvaag, O. E. | Giants in the Earth |
| Rostand, Edmond | Cyrano de Bergerac |
| Salinger, J. D. | The Catcher in the Rye |
| Sandburg, Carl | Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years |
| Saroyan, William | The Human Comedy |
| Sayers, Dorothy | The Nine Tailors |
| Shakespeare, William | Plays and Sonnets |
| Shaw, George Bernard | Arms and the Man, Major Barbara, Pygmalion, Saint Joan |
| Sheridan, Richard B. | The School for Scandal |
| Shute, Nevil | On the Beach |
| Sinclair, Upton | The Jungle |
| Sophocles | Antigone, Oedipus Rex |
| Steinbeck, John | East of Eden, The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men |
| Stowe, Harriet Beecher | Uncle Tom’s Cabin |
| Swift, Jonathan | Gulliver’s Travels |
| Thackeray, William M. | Vanity Fair |
| Thoreau, Henry David | Walden |
| Tolstoy, Leo | Anna Karenina, War and Peace |
| Trollope, Anthony | Barchester Towers |
| Turgenev, Ivan | Fathers and Sons |
| Twain, Mark | Pudd’nhead Wilson |
| Updike, John | Rabbit, Run |
| Vergil | The Aeneid |
| Voltaire | Candide |
| Walker, Alice | The Color Purple, Meridian |
| Warren, Robert Penn | All the King’s Men |
| Waugh, Evelyn | Brideshead Revisited, A Handful of Dust |
| Wharton, Edith | The Age of Innocence |
| White, T. H. | The Once and Future King, The Sword in the Stone |
| Wilde, Oscar | The Importance of Being Earnest, The Picture of Dorian Gray |
| Wilder, Thornton | Our Town |
| Williams, Tennessee | The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire |
| Wolfe, Thomas | Look Homeward, Angel |
| Woolf, Virginia | Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse |
| Wouk, Herman | The Caine Mutiny |
| Wright, Richard | Black Boy, Native Sun |
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