Fiction Writers
- Abbott, Flatland
- Achebe, Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God
- Agee, A Death in the Family
- Akutagawa, “In a Grave”
- Alcott, Little Women, Little Men
- Amis, Lucky Jim
- Anaya
- Anderson, S. Winesburg, Ohio, “The Egg”
- Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, “You Begin,” Wilderness Tips, Surfacing
- Austen, Pride & Prejudice, Sense & Sensibility, Emma
- Baldwin, Another Country, “Sonny’s Blues,” Go Tell It On the Mountain
- Balzac, Pere Goriot
- Barth, “Life Story,” Sot-weed Factor
- Barthelme
- Bellow, Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, Seize the Day
- Bierce, Devil’s Dictionary
- Boccacio, Decameron
- Bolt, A Man for All Seasons
- Borges
- Bradbury, Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, “August 2002”
- Bronte, A. Tenant of Wildfell Hall
- Bronte, C. Jane Eyre, Villette
- Bronte, E. Wuthering Heights
- Buck, Good Earth
- Butler, The Way of All Flesh
- Camus, The Stranger, The Plague
- Capote, In Cold Blood, Other Voices, Other Rooms
- Carver
- Cather, My Antonia, Death Comes for the Archbishop
- Cervantes, Don Quixote
- Chaucer, Canterbury Tales
- Cheever
- Chopin, Awakening, “Story of an Hour”
- Cisneros, House on Mango Street
- Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey, “The Star,” “Nine Billion Names of God”
- Colette, Gigi, Sido
- Collins, Moonstone
- Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, Lord Jim, Nigger of the Narcissus, Secret Sharer, Victory
- Crane, “Experiment in Misery,” “Open Boat,” “Blue Hotel” Red Badge of Courage
- Danticot, Krick? Krak!
- Davies, Fifth Business
- Dazai, No Longer Human
- Defoe, Moll Flanders
- Desai, In Custody
- Dickens, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Tale of Two Cities, Bleak House, Hard Times, Oliver Twist
- Dinesen, Out of Africa
- Doctorow, Ragtime, City of God
- Dostoevski, Crime and Punishment, The Possessed, Notes from the Underground, Brothers Karamazov, “Grand Inquisitor”
- Doyle
- Dreiser, American Tragedy
- Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (essay), Murder in the Cathedral
- Eliot, George, Adam Bede, Middlemarch, Mill on the Floss, Silas Mariner
- Ellison, H. “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” “’Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman”
- Ellison, R. Invisible Man, Juneteenth, Shadow and Act
- Erdrich, Love Medicine, Tracks, Beet Queen
- Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, Intruder in the Dust, Sound and the Fury, A Light in August, “Barn Burning,” “The Bear,” “Rose for Emily,” Absalom, Absalom
- Fielding, Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews
- Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night
- Flaubert, Madame Bovary
- Ford, F.M., Good Soldier
- Forster, Passage to India, Room With a View
- Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Magus
- Fuentes, Death of Artemio Cruz, Change of Skin, “Aura”
- Galsworthy, Forsyte Saga
- Gardner, Grendel
- Golding, The Spire, Lord of the Flies
- Gogol, “The Overcoat,” Diary of a Madman
- Greene, Power and the Glory, Heart of the Matter
- Hardy, Madding Crowd, Return of the Native, Jude the Obscure, Tess of the D’Uberbervilles, Mayor of Casterbridge
- Hawthorne, Scarlet Letter, “Young Goodman Brown,” House of Seven Gables
- Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
- Heller, Catch-22, Something Happened
- Hemingway, Sun Also Rises, Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Old Man and the Sea
- Henry, O.
- Hersey, A Single Pebble
- Hesse, Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, Demian
- Hugo, Les Miserables
- Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
- Huxley, Brave New World
- Irving, Legends of the Alhambra, Ciderhouse Rules
- Ishiguro, Remains of the Day
- Jackson, S.
- James, Turn of the Screw, Daisy Miller, Portrait of a Lady, “Birthplace,” “Beast in the Jungle,” The American
- Jewett, Country of the Painted Firs
- Joyce, Dubliners, “Araby,” “The Dead,” Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- Kafka, “Hunger Artist,” Metamorphosis, The Trial, Amerika, Castle
- Kawabata, Master of Go, etc.
- Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
- Kingsolver, Poisonwood Bible
- Kingston, M.H., Woman Warrior, “No Name Woman”
- Kipling, Gunga Din, Kim, “They,” “Man Who Would Be King”
- Koestler, Darkness at Noon
- Kogawa
- Lawrence, D.H., Sons and Lovers, “Rocking Horse Winner”
- LeGuin, Dispossessed, Left Hand of Darkness
- Lessing, Martha Quest
- Lewis, Babbitt, Main Street, Arrowsmith
- Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley
- London, Call of the Wild
- Mailer, Naked and the Dead
- Malamud, The Natural, The Fixer, The Pawnbroker
- Mann, Doktor Faustus, Magic Mountain, “Death in Venice,” Buddenbrooks
- Mansfield, “Garden Party”
- Marlowe, Dr. Faustus
- Marquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Love in the Time of Cholera
- Mason, Four Feathers
- Matheisson, The Snow Leopard
- Maugham, Of Human Bondage
- Maupassant
- McCullers, Heart is a Lonely Hunter
- Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Moby Dick, Billy Budd, Typee
- Michener, The Source
- Miller, H. Tropic of Cancer
- Momaday
- Monsarrat, Cruel Sea
- Morrison, Beloved, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Sula, Bluest Eye, Jazz, Paradise
- Mukherjee
- Murakami, Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, Hard-Boiled Wonderland, Norwegian Wood
- Nabokov, “Signs and Symbols,” Pale Fire
- O’Brien, T. Things They Carried
- O’Connor, Frank, “Guests of the Nation”
- Olson, Yonnondio
- Ondaatge, In the Skin of a Lion
- Orwell, 1984, Animal Farm
- Ozida, Cannibal Galaxy
- Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, “Conversation With My Father”
- Parker, D.
- Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
- Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country
- Piercey, Woman on the Edge of Time
- Porter, K.A., Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Ship of Fools
- Potok, Chosen, My Name is Asher Lev
- Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel
- Rand, Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, Anthem
- Reed, Mumbo Jumbo
- Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
- Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, Wild Sargasso Sea
- Robbe-Grillet
- Rolvaag, Giants in the Earth
- Rushdie, Shame, Midnight’s Children
- Salinger, Franny and Zooey, Catcher in the Rye, Nine Stories
- Saroyan, Human Comedy, Time of Your Life
- Sayers, Nine Tailors
- Shelley, Frankenstein
- Sheridan, School for Scandal
- Shute, On the Beach
- Silko, Ceremony
- Sinclair, Jungle
- Singer, “Gimpel the Fool”
- Smiley, All-Time True Adventures of Lidie Newton, A Thousand Acres
- Stafford, J.
- Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, Tortilla Flat, Pearl
- Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
- Styron, Sophie’s Choice
- Swift, Guliver’s Travels, “A Modest Proposal” (essay)
- Thackeray, Vanity Fair
- Thomas, D.
- Thurber
- Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Death of Ivan Ilych
- Trollope, Barchester Towers
- Turgenev, Fathers and Sons
- Twain, Huck Finn, Pudd’nhead Wilson
- Tyler, A. Accident Tourist, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
- Unamuno, Mist, “St. Emmanuel, Martyr”
- Updike, Rabbit, Run, “A&P”
- Uris, Trinity, Exodus
- Valenzuela
- Voltaire, Candide
- Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse Five, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
- Walker, Color Purple
- Warren, All the King’s Men
- Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, Handful of Dust
- Welty, Thirteen Stories, Optimist’s Daughter
- Wharton, Ethan Frome, Age of Innocence
- White, E.B.
- White, T.H. Once and Future King, Sword in the Stone
- Wideman
- Wilde, Importance of Being Earnest, Picture of Dorian Gray
- Wilkie, W. Woman in White
- Wilson, A. Jitney
- Wolfe, Look Homeward Angel
- Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, Mrs. Dalloway, “Shakespeare’s Sister,” To the Lighthouse
- Wouk, The Caine Mutiny
- Wright, Native Son, Black Boy
Essayists and Philosophers
- Addison
- Anzaldoc
- Aristotle
- Arnold, M.
- Augustine
- Bacon
- Baldwin
- Beerbohm
- Benedict, Patterns of Culture
- Boswell
- Camus
- Carlysle
- Cather
- Churchill
- Colin
- Darwin
- Descartes
- Dewey
- Dillard
- Douglass, F.
- Eliot
- Emerson
- Freud
- Hazlitt
- Hegel
- Heidegger
- Hobbes
- Hume
- James, W.
- Johnson
- Kant
- Kierkegaard
- King, Jr. M.L.
- Lamb
- Locke
- Mailer
- Marx
- McCarthy, M.
- Mencken
- Mill
- Montaigne
- Nietzsche
- Orwell
- Plato
- Rousseau
- Russell
- Santayana
- Sartre
- Schopenhauer
- Skinner
- Spinoza
- Steele
- Thomas, D.
- Thoreau
- Walker, A.
- Whitehead
- Wittgenstein
- Wollstonecraft
- Woolf
Dramatists
- Aeschylus, Agamemnon, Prometheus Bound
- Albee, The Zoo, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Tiny Alive
- Anouilh, Antigone, The Lark
- Baraka, Dutchman, “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note” (poem)
- Beckett, Waiting for Godot, Endgame
- Checkhov, Uncle Vanya, Cherry Orchard, Three Sisters, “Medved”
- Congreve, Way of the World
- Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral
- Euripides, Medea
- Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer
- Hansberry, Raisin in the Sun
- Hellman, The Little Foxes
- Huang, Madame Butterfly
- Ibsen, Peer Gynt, Enemy of the People, Doll’s House, Ghosts, Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler, Master Builder
- Ionesco, The Rhinoceros
- Jonson, Every Man in His Humour, “To Celia” (poem)
- Miller, Death of a Salesman, Crucible
- Moliere, Les Precieuses Ridicules, The Misanthrope, Le Tartuffe
- O’Casey, June and the Paycock
- O’Neill, Hairy Ape, Desire Under the Elms, Strange Interlude, Mourning Becomes Electra, Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey Into Night
- Pinter, Dumb Waiter, Birthday Party
- Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author
- Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac
- Sartre, No Exit
- Schiller, Mary Stuart
- Shakespeare, Hamlet, Othello, Tempest, King Lear, Henry IV, Julius Caesar, MacBeth, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard II, Richard III, “Rape of Lucrece”
- Shaw, Major Barbara, Arms and the Man, Man and Superman, Pygmalion, St. Joan
- Shepard, Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child
- Sheridan, School for Scandal
- Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, Antigone, Electra
- Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are Dead, Real Thing
- Valdez
- Wilde, Importance of Being Earnest, Picture of Dorian Gray (novel)
- Williams, T. Glass Menagerie, Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
- Wilson, Hot l Baltimore, Talley’s Folly
Poets
- Ai
- Auden
- Baraka
- Bible (Old and New Testaments)
- Bishop
- Blake
- Bradstreet
- Brathwaite
- Brooks
- Browning
- Byron
- Cervantes
- Chaucer
- Coleridge
- Collins
- Dante
- Dickinson
- Donne
- Eliot
- Frost
- Ginsberg
- H.D.
- Hanjo
- Heaney
- Herbert
- Homer
- Hongo
- Hopkins
- Hughes
- Jonson
- Keats
- Kerouac
- Koznesensky
- Larkin
- Lowell
- Marvell
- Milton
- Moore
- Nemerov
- Petrarch
- Plath
- Poe
- Pope
- Reed
- Rich
- Shakespeare
- Shelley
- Silko
- Spenser
- Stevens
- Sung
- Tennyson
- Walcott
- Whitman
- Wilbur
- Williams, W.C.
- Wordsworth
- Yeats