Updated 06/22/96

The Must Read Literature List

Ancient Writers

Aeschylus - Agamemnon
Aesop - Fables
Aristophanes - Lysistrata
Aristotle - Poetics
Confucius - The Analects
Euripides - Hippolytus
Homer - The Iliad, The Odyssey
Lao-Tzu -The Way and Its Power
Lucretius - On the Nature of Things
Plato - The Republic, Phaedo (The Death of Socrates)
Sophocles - Oedipus Tyrannus, Antigone
Saint Augustine - Confessions
Thucydides - The Peloponnesian War
Vergil - The Aeneid

Middle Ages

The Arabian Nights
Dante Alighieri - The Divine Comedy
Giovanni Boccaccio - Decameron
Geoffrey Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales

Renaissance

Miguel De Cervantes - Don Quixote
Niccolo Machiavelli - The Prince
Christopher Marlowe - The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus
John Milton - Paradise Lost
Francois Rabelais - Gargantua and Patagruel
Shakespeare - All major works

Neoclassicism and Romanticism

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Moliere - Tartuffe
William Blake - Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience
Robert Browning - The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed's Church
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe - Faust
George Gordon, Lord Byron - Don Juan Canto II
Herman Melville - Moby Dick
Jean Racine - Phaedra
Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels
Francois-Marie Arouet De Voltaire - Candide
Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass

Realism, Naturalism (18th Century and Beyond)

Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice
Darwin - The Origin of Species
Defoe - Robinson Crusoe
Charles Dickens - David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities
Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed
Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary
Gibbon - Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Hamilton - Federalist Papers
Hardy - Tess of the D'Ubervilles
Nathanial Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter
Victor Hugo - Les Miserables
Franz Kafka - The Metamorphosis
D. H. Lawrence - Odour of Chrysanthemums
Thomas Paine - The Rights of Man
Edgar Allen Poe - The Raven
William Thackery - Vanity Fair
Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace, Anna Karenina
Mark Twain - Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi, Tom Sawyer,

20th Century

Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange
Albert Camus - The Stranger
Truman Capote - In Cold Blood
Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness
Einstein - The Meaning of Relativity
Ellison - The Invisible Man
William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, Sanctuary
Mark Helprin - A Soldier of the Great War, Winter's Tale
Ernest Hemingway - For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea
Abraham Lincoln - A House Divided, Dedication at Gettysburg
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera
Erich Marla Remarque - All Quiet on the Western Front
Cormac McCarthy - Suttree, All the Pretty Horses, Blood Meridian
J. D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye
Jean-Paul Sartre - The Wall
John Steinbeck - Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, Of Mice and Men, My Travels with Charlie
John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces
Kurt Vonnegut - Panio Player, Slaughterhouse Five, Cat's Cradle



On The Hot Seat

Mark Helprin - Memoir From Antproof Case

For additions, comments & concerns E-Mail to jhaynes@eden.com



Thanks to everyone who has written! Your comments are a great help. Please keep them coming.


In the interest of expanding literacy in any form please feel free to print and distribuite this list.

Compiled by J. Haynes @ Haynes & Associates in scenic Austin Texas
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