If your student is planning to head to college after graduation, they will be expected to have read several classic books during their high school career. While there is plenty of choice and variety in the list of books you can choose, your teen will want to be well-rounded and familiar with famous authors that may be encountered in college. If your student reads one book a month for every year of high school, they’ll have read almost fifty books. If your teen isn’t a reader, consider asking them to read some of the books, but allowing them to listen to some of them as audio books as well. Here are some suggestions for you to choose from.
American
Agee, James – A Death in the Family
Alcott, Louisa May – Little Women and Little Men
Baldwin, James – Go Tell It On the Mountain
Bradbury, Ray – Fahrenheit 451
Brown, Dee – Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Buck, Pearl S. – Good Earth
Cather, Willa – My Antonia
Crane, Stephen – The Red Badge of Courage
Fitzgerald, F. Scott – The Great Gatsby
Franklin, Benjamin – The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Gaines, Ernest – The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
Hawthorne, Nathaniel – The Scarlet Letter and House of Seven Gables
Heller, Joseph – Catch-22
Hemingway, Ernest – A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea
Keller, Helen – The Story of My Life
Lee, Harper – To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair – Main Street
London, Jack – Call of the Wild
Melville, Herman – Moby-Dick
Poe, Edgar Allan – Great Tales and Poems
Salinger, J.D. – The Catcher in the Rye
Sinclair, Upton – The Jungle
Steinbeck, John – The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men
Stowe, Harriet Beecher – Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Twain, Mark – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Thoreau, Henry David – Walden
Walker, Alice – The Color Purple
Washington, Booker T. – Up From Slavery
World
Beowulf
Austen, Jane – Pride and Prejudice and Emma
Bronte, Charlotte – Jane Eyre
Bronte, Emily – Wuthering Heights
Bunyan, John – Pilgrim’s Progress
Carroll, Lewis – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Cervantes, Miguel de – Don Quixote
Conrad, Joseph – Heart of Darkness
Defoe, Daniel – Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles – Great Expectations, A Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities, and Oliver Twist
Dostoevski, Feodor – Crime and Punishment
Eliot, George – The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner
Frank, Anne – The Diary of a Young Girl
Golding, William – Lord of the Flies
Herriot, James – All Creatures Great and Small
Homer – The Iliad and The Odyssey
Orwell, George – Animal Farm and 1984
Pasternak, Boris – Doctor Zhivago
Paton, Alan – Cry, the Beloved Country
Plato – The Republic
Remarque, Erich Maria – All Quiet on the Western Front
Scott, Sir Walter – Ivanhoe and Rob Roy
Shelley, Mary W. – Frankenstein
Stevenson, Robert Louis – Treasure Island and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Swift, Jonathan – Gulliver’s Travels
Wells, H.G. – The Time Machine
Wiesel, Elie – Night
Drama
Miller, Arthur – Death of a Salesman and The Crucible
Shakespeare, William – Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Macbeth, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Shaw, George Bernard – Pygmalion, Sophocles, Antigone
Wilde, Oscar – The Importance of Being Earnest
Wilder, Thornton – Our Town
Williams, Tennessee – A Streetcar Named Desire