Shs english department reading list

The works in this list do not constitute an exhaustive or absolute listing of any kind. The list offers our suggestions for some valuable reading.

Two other points should be made briefly. First, because we do want the list to be a helpful guide, we have made specific recommendations for your reading. For example, George Bernard Shaw is not simply named, but some of Shaw’s plays are specifically suggested. This does not mean that these are the only or all the “good” plays by Shaw, but they are good plays and plays good for providing an introduction to Shaw’s work. Our specific recommendations, then, are not intended to be absolute evaluations but reasonable, helpful suggestions for valuable reading.

Also, we have included writers who have only recently come into prominence. We hope that there will be some reading of contemporary works, but not enough time has elapsed at this point to test how really valuable or significant these words are.

Fiction

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  Adams, Richard - Watership Down
  
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  Agee, James - A Death in the Family
  
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  Alcott, Louisa May - Little Women
  
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  Allende, Isabel - The House of Spirits
  
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  Anderson, Sherwood - Winesburg, Ohio
  
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  Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma
  
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  Baldwin, James - Go Tell it on the Mountain, Nobody Knows my Name
  
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  Bellamy, Edward - Looking Backward
  
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  Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March, Seize the Day
  
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  Bierce, Ambrose – short stories
  
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  Bradbury, Ray - Martian Chronicles, Illustrated Man, Fahrenheit 451
  
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  Bronte, Emily - Wuthering Heights
  
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  Bronte, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
  
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  Buck, Pearl - The Good Earth
  
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  Bunyan, John - Pilgrim's Progress
  
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  Burns, Olive Ann - Cold Sassy Tree
  
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  Butler, Samuel - Erewhon, The Way of Flesh
  
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  Camus, Albert - The Plague, The Stranger
  
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  Capote, Truman - Breakfast at Tiffany's
  
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  Carroll, Lewis - Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass
  
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  Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop, My Antonia, The Professor's House
  
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  Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
  
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  Chaucer, Geoffory - The Canterbury Tales
  
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  Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
  
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  Christie, Agatha - Murder on the Orient Express, And Then There Were None, Curtain
  
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  Cisneros, Sandra - House on Mango Street
  
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  Clarke, Arthur - 2001: A Space Odyssey
  
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  Clark, Walter Van Tilberg - The Ox-Bow Incident
  
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  Clemens, Samuel (Mark Twain) - Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper
  
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  Conrad, Joseph - The Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, The Secret Sharer and Other Stories
  
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  Cooper, James Fenimore - Last of the Mohicans, Leatherstocking Tales
  
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  Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage, Maggie
  
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  Dante, Alighieri - The Divine Comedy
  
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  Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
  
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  Dickens, Charles - David Copperfield, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities
  
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  Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment
  
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  Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan - Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Hound of the Baskervilles
  
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  Draiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
  
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  Dumas, Alexandre - The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers
  
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  DuMaurier, Daphne - Rebecca
  
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  Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Middlemarch
  
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  Ellison, Ralph - The Invisible Man
  
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  Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury, Intruder in the Dust, The Bear
  
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  Ferber, Edna - Showboat, Ice Palace, Giant
  
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  Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
  
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  Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night
  
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  Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
  
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  Forster, E.M. - A Room with a View, Howard's End, A Passage to India
  
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  Fowles, John - The Collector
  
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  Francis, Dick - Danger, Dead Cert, Straight, Bolt, Longshot
  
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  Galsworthy, John - The Forsythe Saga
  
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  Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
  
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  Goldsmith, Oliver - The Vicar of Wakefield
  
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  Greene, Graham - The Heart of the Matter, The Quiet American, The Comedians
  
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  Grisham, John - The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client, The Testament
  
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  Haley, Alex - Roots
  
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  Hardy, Thomas - Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess of the Durbervilles
  
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  Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The House of Seven Gables, The Scarlet Letter
  
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  Heinlein, Robert - Stranger in a Strange Land, Citizen of the Galaxy, I Will Fear No Evil
  
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  Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
  
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  Hemingway, Ernest - For Whom the Bell Tolls, Farewell to Arms, The Old Man and the Sea
  
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  Herbert, Frank - Dune
  
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  Hersey, John - A Bell for Adano, A Single Pebble
  
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  Hesse, Herman - Siddhartha, Steppenwolf
  
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  Hillerman, Tony - The Blessing Way, Listening Woman, The SkinWalkers
  
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  Hilton, James - Good-bye Mr. Chips, Lost Horizon
  
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  Howells, William Dean - The Rise of Silas Lapham
  
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  Hudson, W. H. - Green Mansions
  
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  Hugo, Victor - Les Miserables, The Hunchback of Notre Dame
  
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  Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
  
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  Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
  
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  Irving, Washington - The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The Sketch Book
  
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  Jackson, Shirley - We Have Always Lived in a Castle, The Haunting of Hill House, Lottery
  
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  James, Henry - Daisy Miller, The Turn of the Screw
  
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  Joyce, James - The Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
  
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  Kafka, Franz - The Trial, The Castle, Metamorphosis
  
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  Kesey, Ken - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
  
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  Keyes, Daniel - Flowers for Algernon
  
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  Kipling, Rudyard - The Jungle Book, That Light that Failed, Kim
  
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  Knowles, John - A Separate Peace
  
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  Koestler, Arthur - Darkness at Noon
  
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  L'Amour, Louis - The Sacketts, Last of the Breed, War Party
  
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  LaFarge, Oliver - Laughing Boy
  
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  Lawrence, D. H. - Sons and Lovers
  
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  LeCarre, John - The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
  
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  Lederer, W.J. and Eugene Burick - The Ugly American
  
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  Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
  
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  Lewis, C.S. - Out of the Silent Planet, Mere Christianity, Screwtape Letters
  
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  Lewis, Sinclair - Arrowsmith, Babbit, Elmer Gantry
  
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  Llewellyn, Richard - How Green Was My Valley
  
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  London, Jack - The Call of the Wild, White Fang, Sea Wolf
  
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  Lovecraft, H. P. - At the Mountains of Madness, The Horror in the Museum
  
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  Malamud, Bernard - The Natural, The Assistant, The Fixer
  
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  Malory, Sir Thomas - Le Morte D'Arthur
  
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  Mann, Thomas - Buddenbrooks, Doctor Faustus
  
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  Marquand, John P. - The Late George Apley, Point of No Return
  
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  Marquez, Gabriel Garcia - One Hundred Years of Solitude
  
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  Maugham, Somerset - Of Human Bondage
  
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  Maupassant, Guy – short stories
  
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  McCullers, Carson - The Heart is Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding
  
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  McMurtry, Larry - Lonesome Dove
  
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  McPherson, William.- Testing the Current, Sargasso Sea
  
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  Melville, Herman - Moby Dick, Billy Budd
  
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  Mitchell, Margaret - Gone With the Wind
  
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  Momaday, N. Scott - House Made of Dawn, The Way to Rainy Mountain
  
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  Morrison, Toni - Sula, Beloved
  
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  Nathan, Robert - Portrait of Jennie
  
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  Nichols, John - The Milagro Beanfield War
  
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  Nordhoff, Charles and James Hall - Muntiny on the Bounty
  
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  O'Brien, Darby - Silver Spooners
  
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  O'Brien, Tim - Going after Cacciato
  
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  O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find, Everything that Rises Must Converge
  
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  O'Henry, (Porter, William) - short stories
  
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  Orwell, George - Animal Farm, 1984
  
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  Pasternak, Boris - Dr. Zhivago
  
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  Paton, Alan - Cry, the Beloved Country
  
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  Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
  
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  Poe, Edgar Allan – short stories
  
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  Porter, Katherine Ann - Ship of Fools
  
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  Potok, Chaim - My Name is Asher Lev, The Chosen
  
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  Rand, Ayn - Atlas Shrugged, Fountainhead, Anthem
  
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  Rawlings, Marjorie - The Yearling
  
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  Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
  
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  Renault, Mary - The King Must Die, The Bull From the Sea
  
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  Richter, Conrad - Sea of Grass
  
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  Roberts, Kenneth - Northwest Passage
  
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  Rolvaag, O.E. - Giants in the Earth
  
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  Roth, Philip - Goodbye Columbus
  
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  Saint-Exupery, Antoine – Wind, Sand, and Stars; The Little Prince
  
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  Salinger, J.D. - Catcher in the Rye
  
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  Saroyan, William - The Human Comedy
  
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  Sarte, Jean-Paul - The Flies
  
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  Schaefer, Jack - Shane
  
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  Scott, Sir Walter - Ivanhoe
  
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  Shaara, Michael - Killer Angels
  
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  Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
  
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  Shute, Nevil - On the Beach
  
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  Singer, Isaac Bashevis - The Slave, The Family Mostat
  
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  Smith, Betty - A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
  
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  Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
  
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  Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, The Red Pony
  
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  Stevenson, Robert Louis - Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped, Treasure Island
  
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  Stone, Irving - Love is Eternal, Lust for Life, Agony and Ecstasy
  
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  Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
  
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  Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
  
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  Tarkington, Booth - Seventeen, Alice Adams
  
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  Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
  
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  Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
  
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  Thurber, James – short stories
  
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  Tolkien, J.R.R. - The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings (3 vols.)
  
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  Tolstoy, Leo - Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Death of Ivan Ilych
  
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  Traven, B. - The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
  
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  Trollope, Anthony - Barchester Towers
  
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  Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
  
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  Twain, Mark --- See Samuel Clemens
  
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  Tyler, Anne - The Accidental Tourist, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
  
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  Undset, Sigrid - Kristin Lavransdatter
  
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  Uris, Leon - Exodus
  
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  Verne, Jules - Journey to the Center of the Earth, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
  
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  Vidal, Gore - Burr, 1876
  
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  Voltaire - Candide
  
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  Vonnegut, Kurt - Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse Five, The Sirens of Titan
  
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  Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
  
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  Wallace, Lew - Ben Hur
  
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  Warren, Robert Penn - All the King's Men
  
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  Waugh, Evelyn - Bridehead Revisted, The Love One, Scoop
  
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  Wells, H.G. - The Invisible Man, The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds
  
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  Welty, Eudora - Delta Wedding, The Ponder Heart, The Optimists Daughter
  
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  West, Jessamyn - Cress Delahanty
  
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  West, Nathaniel - Miss Lonelyhearts, The Day of the Locusts
  
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  Wharton, Edity - The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome
  
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  White, Theodore - The Once and Future King
  
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  Wiesel, Elie - Dawn, The Fifth Son
  
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  Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Grey
  
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  Wilder, Thorton - The Bridge of San Luis Rey
  
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  Wister, Owen - The Virginian
  
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  Wolfe, Thomas - Look Homeward, Angel; You Can't Go Home Again
  
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  Woolf, Virginia - Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse
  
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  Wouk, Herman - The Caine Mutiny, Majorie Morningstar, War and Rememberance
  
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  Wright, Richard - Native Son
  
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  Zola, Emile - Germinal
  

Non-Fiction

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  Albom, Mitch – Tuesdays with Morrie
  
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  Angelou, Maya – I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Gather Together in My Name
  
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  Bernstein, Carl and Bob Woodward - All the President's Men
  
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  Boswell, James - The Life of Samuel Johnson
  
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  Brown, Dee - Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
  
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  Bulfinch, Thomas - The Age of Fable, The Age of Chivalry
  
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  Capote, Truman - In Cold Blood
  
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  Carson, Rachael - The Sea Around Us
  
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  Castenda, Carlos - Journey to Ixtlan
  
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  Catton, Bruce - A Stillness at Appomattox
  
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  Cousteau, Jacques - The Silent World
  
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  Curie, Eve - Madame Curie
  
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  Darwin, Charles - Origin of the Species, The Voyage of the Beagle
  
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  De Tocqueville, Alexis - Democracy in America
  
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  Deloria, Vine, Jr. - Custer Died for Your Sins
  
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  Douglass, Frederick – The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
  
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  Frank, Anne - The Diary of a Young Girl
  
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  Franklin, Benjamin - Autobiography
  
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  Frazier, James George - The Golden Bough
  
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  Graham, Robin Lee - Dove
  
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  Gunther, John - Death Be Not Proud
  
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  Hamilton, Edith - The Greek Way, Mythology
  
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  Herriott, James - All Creatures Great and Small
  
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  Hersey, John - Hiroshima
  
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  Keller, Helen - The Story of My Life
  
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  Kennedy, John F. - Profiles in Courage
  
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  Lord, Walter - A Night to Remember
  
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  Machiavelli, Niccolo - The Prince
  
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  Massie, Robert - Nicholas and Alexandra
  
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  Pepys, Samuel - Diary
  
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  Pirsig, Robert - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
  
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  Sagan, Carl - Cosmos
  
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  Sandburg, Car. - Abraham Lincoln: the Prairie Years, The War Years
  
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  Shirer, William - The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
  
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  Toth, Susan - Blooming Ivy Days
  
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  Tuchman, Barbara - The Guns of August
  
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  Wiesel, Elie – Night
  
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  Wolfe, Tom –The Right Stuff, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
  
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  Woodward, C. Vann - The Strange Case of Jim Crow
  

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  Bertold, Brecht - Mother Courage and Her Children
  
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  Bolt, Robert -A Man for all Seasons
  
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  Checkov, Anton -The Cherry Orchard, Three Sisters
  
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  Eliot, T.S. -The Cocktail Party
  
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  Euripedes -Medea
  
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  Goethe, Johann- Faust
  
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  Hansberry, Lorraine- A Raisin in the Sun
  
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  Hellman, Lillian- The Children's Hour, Days to Come
  
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  Ibsen, Henrik - The Doll's House, Hedda Gabler
  
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  Landon, Margaret - Anna and the King of Siam
  
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  Marlowe, Christopher - Doctor Faustus
  
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  Miller, Arthur- All My Sons, Death of a Salesman
  
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  O'Neill, Eugene- Long Day's Journey into Night, Ah Wilderness, The Iceman Cometh
  
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  Rostand, Edmond- Cyrano de Bergerac
  
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  Shakespeare, William - Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, Hamlet, Julius Ceasar, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet
  
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  Shaw, George Bernard- Arms and the Man, Ceasar and Cleopatra, Androcles and the Lion
  
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  Simon, Neil – Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple
  
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  Sophocles- Oedipus Rex, Antigone
  
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  Stendhal- The Red and the Black, The Charterhouse of Parma
  
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  Synge, J.M. - The Playboy of the Western World
  
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  Wilde, Oscar - The Importance of Being Ernest
  
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  Wilder, Thorton - Our Town
  
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  Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire