The 100 Most-Often-Recommended Works for College Freshman-- Novels and Short Stories

Author  Title  Available at Media
Center
Jane Austen  Pride and Prejudice Yes
James Baldwin  Go Tell It on the Mountain  Yes 
Saul Bellow  Seize the Day No 
Charlotte Brontë  Jane Eyre Yes
Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights Yes
Albert Camus The Stranger Yes
Lewis Carroll Alice's Adventures in Wonderland  Yes 
Willa Cather My Antonia  Yes
Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote  Yes 
Kate Chopin  The Awakening  Yes
Joseph Conrad  Heart of Darkness Yes
Stephen Crane  The Red Badge of Courage  Yes
Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe Yes
Charles Dickens  Great Expectations  Yes
Feodor Dostoevski  Crime and Punishment Yes 
George Eliot  The Mill on the Floss  Yes 
Ralph Ellison  Invisible Man  Yes
William Faulkner  The Sound and the Fury Yes
Henry Fielding  Tom Jones  No 
F. Scott Fitzgerald  The Great Gatsby  Yes
Gustave Flaubert  Madame Bovary  Yes
E.M. Forster  A Passage to India  Yes
Gabriel García Márquez  One Hundred Years of Solitude  Yes 
William Golding  Lord of the Flies Yes
Thomas Hardy  Tess of the D'Urbervilles Yes
Nathaniel Hawthorne  The Scarlet Letter  Yes
Ernest Hemingway  A Farewell to Arms  Yes
Zora Neale Hurston  Their Eyes Were Watching God Yes
Aldous Huxley  Brave New World  Yes
Henry James  The Turn of the Screw  Yes
James Joyce  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man  Yes
Franz Kafka  The Trial  Yes 
D.H. Lawrence  Sons and Lovers  Yes
Sinclair Lewis Babbitt Yes
Bernard Malamud  The Assistant  Yes 
Thomas Mann  Death in Venice  Yes 
Herman Melville  Moby-Dick  Yes
Toni Morrison  Sula  Yes 
Flannery O'Connor A Good Man Is Hard to Find  Yes  
Tillie Olsen  Tell Me a Riddle  Yes 
George Orwell  Animal Farm Yes
Alan Paton Cry, the Beloved Country  Yes
Edgar Allan Poe  Great Tales and Poems  Yes 
J.D. Salinger  The Catcher in the Rye  Yes
Sir Walter Scott  Ivanhoe  Yes
Mary Shelley  Frankenstein Yes
 John Steinbeck  The Grapes of Wrath  Yes
Jonathan Swift  Gulliver's Travels  Yes
William Makepeace Thackeray  Vanity Fair  Yes
Leo Tolstoy  War and Peace  Yes
Ivan Turgenev  Fathers and Sons  Yes
Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  Yes
John Updike  Rabbit, Run Yes 
Voltaire  Candide  Yes
Kurt Vonnegut  Slaughterhouse Five  Yes 
Alice Walker  The Color Purple  Yes
Eudora Welty  Thirteen Stories  No
Edith Wharton  The Age of Innocence  Yes
Virginia Woolf  To the Lighthouse  Yes
Richard Wright  Native Son  Yes


Drama 

Aeschylus  Oresteia  No 
Aristophanes  Lysistrata  Yes 
Samuel Beckett  Waiting for Godot  Yes 
Bertolt Brecht  Mother Courage and Her Children  No 
Anton Chekov  The Cherry Orchard  Yes 
Euripides  Medea  Yes
Johann von Goethe  Faust, Part I  No 
Henrik Ibsen  A Doll's House  Yes
Christopher Marlowe  Doctor Faustus  Yes
Arthur Miller  Death of a Salesman  Yes 
Molière  The Misanthrope  No
Eugene O'Neill  Desire Under the Elms No
William Shakespeare Hamlet  Yes
George Bernard Shaw Pygmalion  Yes 
Sophocles  Oedipus Rex  Yes
Oscar Wilde  The Importance of Being Earnest  Yes 
Thornton Wilder  Our Town  Yes 
Tennessee Williams  The Glass Menagerie  Yes 

Poetry 

Allison, Alexander, Editor  Norton Anthology of Poetry (Shorter Edition)  Yes 
Anonymous  Beowulf  Yes 
Anonymous  Sir Gawain and the Green Knight  Yes 
Geoffrey Chaucer  Canterbury Tales  Yes 
Dante  Inferno  Yes 
Homer  The Odyssey Yes 
John Milton  Paradise Lost  Yes 
Vergil  The Aeneid  Yes
Walt Whitman  Leaves of Grass  Yes 

Miscellaneous 

Aristotle  Poetics  Yes 
Saint Augustine  Confessions  Yes 
Bible (esp. King James Version)    Yes 
Charles Darwin  Origin of the Species Yes 
Ralph Waldo Emerson  "The American Scholar"  No 
Benjamin Franklin  Autobiography  Yes 
Sigmund Freud  Civilization and Its Discontents  Yes 
Edith Hamilton  Mythology  Yes 
Niccolò Machiavelli  The Prince Yes
Karl Marx  Communist Manifesto  Yes
Michel de Montaigne  Selected Essays  Yes 
Plato  Republic  Yes
Henry David Thoreau Walden  Yes

 
Updated 10 March 2009
Mr. Jones