This list of essential books is floating around in the blogosphere, and I thought I would keep it going. I have bolded the books that I have read.

  1. Beowulf
  2. Achebe, Chinua – Things Fall Apart
  3. Agee, James – A Death in the Family
  4. Austen, Jane – Pride and Prejudice
  5. Baldwin, James – Go Tell It on the Mountain
  6. Beckett, Samuel – Waiting for Godot
  7. Bellow, Saul – The Adventures of Augie March
  8. Brontë, Charlotte – Jane Eyre
  9. Brontë, Emily – Wuthering Heights
  10. Camus, Albert – The Stranger
  11. Cather, Willa – Death Comes for the Archbishop
  12. Chaucer, Geoffrey – The Canterbury Tales
  13. Chekhov, Anton – The Cherry Orchard
  14. Chopin, Kate – The Awakening
  15. Conrad, Joseph – Heart of Darkness
  16. Cooper, James Fenimore – The Last of the Mohicans
  17. Crane, Stephen – The Red Badge of Courage
  18. Dante – Inferno
  19. de Cervantes, Miguel – Don Quixote
  20. Defoe, Daniel – Robinson Crusoe
  21. Dickens, Charles – A Tale of Two Cities
  22. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor – Crime and Punishment
  23. Douglass, Frederick – Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
  24. Dreiser, Theodore – An American Tragedy
  25. Dumas, Alexandre – The Three Musketeers
  26. Eliot, George – The Mill on the Floss
  27. Ellison, Ralph – Invisible Man
  28. Emerson, Ralph Waldo – Selected Essays
  29. Faulkner, William – As I Lay Dying
  30. Faulkner, William – The Sound and the Fury
  31. Fielding, Henry – Tom Jones
  32. Fitzgerald, F. Scott – The Great Gatsby
  33. Flaubert, Gustave – Madame Bovary
  34. Ford, Ford Madox – The Good Soldier
  35. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von – Faust
  36. Golding, William – Lord of the Flies
  37. Hardy, Thomas – Tess of the d’Urbervilles
  38. Hawthorne, Nathaniel – The Scarlet Letter
  39. Heller, Joseph – Catch 22
  40. Hemingway, Ernest – A Farewell to Arms
  41. Homer – The Iliad
  42. Homer – The Odyssey
  43. Hugo, Victor – The Hunchback of Notre Dame
  44. Hurston, Zora Neale – Their Eyes Were Watching God
  45. Huxley, Aldous – Brave New World
  46. Ibsen, Henrik – A Doll’s House
  47. James, Henry – The Portrait of a Lady
  48. James, Henry – The Turn of the Screw
  49. Joyce, James – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
  50. Kafka, Franz – The Metamorphosis
  51. Kingston, Maxine Hong – The Woman Warrior
  52. Lee, Harper – To Kill a Mockingbird
  53. Lewis, Sinclair – Babbitt
  54. London, Jack – The Call of the Wild
  55. Mann, Thomas – The Magic Mountain
  56. Marquez, Gabriel García – One Hundred Years of Solitude
  57. Melville, Herman – Bartleby the Scrivener
  58. Melville, Herman – Moby Dick
  59. Miller, Arthur – The Crucible
  60. Morrison, Toni – Beloved
  61. O’Connor, Flannery – A Good Man is Hard to Find
  62. O’Neill, Eugene – Long Day’s Journey into Night
  63. Orwell, George – Animal Farm
  64. Pasternak, Boris – Doctor Zhivago
  65. Plath, Sylvia – The Bell Jar
  66. Poe, Edgar Allan – Selected Tales
  67. Proust, Marcel – Swann’s Way
  68. Pynchon, Thomas – The Crying of Lot 49
  69. Remarque, Erich Maria – All Quiet on the Western Front
  70. Rostand, Edmond – Cyrano de Bergerac
  71. Roth, Henry – Call It Sleep
  72. Salinger, J.D. – The Catcher in the Rye
  73. Shakespeare, William – Hamlet
  74. Shakespeare, William – Macbeth
  75. Shakespeare, William – A Midsummer Night’s Dream
  76. Shakespeare, William – Romeo and Juliet
  77. Shaw, George Bernard – Pygmalion
  78. Shelley, Mary – Frankenstein
  79. Silko, Leslie Marmon – Ceremony
  80. Solzhenitsyn, Alexander – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
  81. Sophocles – Antigone
  82. Sophocles – Oedipus Rex
  83. Steinbeck, John – The Grapes of Wrath
  84. Stevenson, Robert Louis – Treasure Island
  85. Stowe, Harriet Beecher – Uncle Tom’s Cabin
  86. Swift, Jonathan – Gulliver’s Travels
  87. Thackeray, William – Vanity Fair
  88. Thoreau, Henry David – Walden
  89. Tolstoy, Leo – War and Peace
  90. Turgenev, Ivan – Fathers and Sons
  91. Twain, Mark – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
  92. Voltaire – Candide
  93. Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. – Slaughterhouse-Five
  94. Walker, Alice – The Color Purple
  95. Wharton, Edith – The House of Mirth
  96. Welty, Eudora – Collected Stories
  97. Whitman, Walt – Leaves of Grass
  98. Wilde, Oscar – The Picture of Dorian Gray
  99. Williams, Tennessee – The Glass Menagerie
  100. Woolf, Virginia – To the Lighthouse
  101. Wright, Richard – Native Son