College Board's 101 Greatest Works of Literature

[pegkerr]

From magentamn

Bold those you have read, underline those you want to read. Asterisk if you've not read this particular work, but have read others by the same author

Beowulf (nope, although I've read John Gardner's Grendal)

Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart

Agee, James - A Death in the Family

Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice (And all her other work)

Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain

Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot

Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March (*Henderson the Rain King)

Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre

Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights

Camus, Albert - The Stranger

Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop (*A Lost Lady)

Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales

Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard

Chopin, Kate - The Awakening

Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness

Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans

Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage

Dante - Inferno

de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote

Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe

Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities (and lots of his other work)

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment

Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy

Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers

Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss (*Middlemarch)

Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying (*Light in August)

Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury

Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby

Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary

Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust

Golding, William - Lord of the Flies

Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter

Heller, Joseph - Catch-22

Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms (*The Sun Also Rises)

Homer - The Iliad (in translation)

Homer - The Odyssey (in translation)

Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God

Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World

Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House

James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady (*The American)

James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw

Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis

Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior

Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird

Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt

London, Jack - The Call of the Wild

Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain

Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude

Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener

Melville, Herman - Moby Dick (*Typee)

Miller, Arthur - The Crucible

Morrison, Toni - Beloved

O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find

O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night

Orwell, George - Animal Farm

Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago

Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar

Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales

Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way

Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49

Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front

Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac

Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep

Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye

Shakespeare, William - Hamlet

Shakespeare, William - Macbeth

Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream

Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet

Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion

Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein

Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Sophocles - Antigone (And the Jean Anouilh version, too)

Sophocles - Oedipus Rex

Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath

Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island (I think I did. I definitely read Kidnapped)

Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin

Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels (tried it; couldn't get through it)

Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair

Thoreau, Henry David - Walden

Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace

Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Voltaire - Candide

Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - George Bergeron

Walker, Alice - The Color Purple

Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth

Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories

Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass

Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray

Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie

Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse

Wright, Richard - Native Son (*Black Boy)

>>>

What!!?? No Tolkien on the list?

Comments

[baldanders.livejournal.com]

May I put in a few plugs? Things Fall Apart and Their Eyes Were Watching God are great books with powerful narrative steam engines; I think you'd know pretty early in each of them whether you wanted to keep reading. And Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty have a couple of the liveliest voices in English literature.

I wonder what "George Bergeron" is supposed to be. "Harrison Beregron," maybe, but that's a short story, unless it's also the title of a collection (British?) that I don't know about.

[alisgray.livejournal.com]

it *is Harrison, not George, even though the main character's name is George. I'm pretty sure that that's what is intended, and yeah, it's a short story, but several of the others are short plays, so I don't consider that disqualifying. odd, but not disqualifying.

[alisgray.livejournal.com]

Funny, I get the same number that I finished... the list is not all that similar, though.

Which ones were your favorites?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I keep reading these lists and finding myself curious about which of the books the person has read that they didn't want to.

[amethistdolphin.livejournal.com]

Beowulf (some of it but not whole)

Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart

Agee, James - A Death in the Family

Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice (And other work)

Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain

Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot

Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March

Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre

Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights

Camus, Albert - The Stranger

Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop

Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales

Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard

Chopin, Kate - The Awakening

Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness

Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans

Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage

Dante - Inferno

de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote

Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe

Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities (and lots of his other work)

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment

Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy

Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers

Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss

Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying

Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury

Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby

Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary

Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust

Golding, William - Lord of the Flies

Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter

Heller, Joseph - Catch-22

Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms

Homer - The Iliad (in translation)

Homer - The Odyssey (in translation)

Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame *

Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God

Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World

Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House

James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady

James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw

Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis *and others

Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior

Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird

Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt

London, Jack - The Call of the Wild

Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain

Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude

Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener

Melville, Herman - Moby Dick

Miller, Arthur - The Crucible

Morrison, Toni - Beloved

O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find

O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night

Orwell, George - Animal Farm

Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago

Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar

Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales *

Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way

Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49

Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front

Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac

Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep

Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye

Shakespeare, William - Hamlet

Shakespeare, William - Macbeth

Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream

Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet

Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion

Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein

Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Sophocles - Antigone (And the Jean Anouilh version, too)

Sophocles - Oedipus Rex

Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath

Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island

Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin

Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels

Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair

Thoreau, Henry David - Walden

Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace

Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Voltaire - Candide

Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - George Bergeron

Walker, Alice - The Color Purple

Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth

Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories

Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass

Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray

Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie

Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse

Wright, Richard - Native Son

[butterfly.livejournal.com]

I'm vaguely annoyed at the inclusion of Robinson Crusoe. Most boring book that I have ever read in my life. And that's including textbooks.

And yes, Tolkien should definitely be on there.

[alisgray.livejournal.com]

you haven't tried Madame Bovary then, I believe...

[butterfly.livejournal.com]

God, there's something worse out there? My brain shudders.

[peppersghost.livejournal.com]

Ugh. That's the first book I can remember reading where I absolutely HATED the title character. It was a revelation of sorts, actually, because I enjoyed the writing and the story even though I thought the plot and the main character were repugnant. I think I was in high school, and it had never occurred to me that I could hate a character like that, or that perhaps the author *wanted* me to hate her.

I was glad to see "The House of Mirth" on that list. For some reason, that book went straight to my heart.

[metmamandy.livejournal.com]

As I Lay Dying was absolutely fantastic. Terrifically dark humor. It's much more approachable than The Sound and the Fury, but that is definitely worth a read as well.

Their Eyes Were Watching God is another terrific book. Much better than 100 Years of Solitude. Read that instead. ^_^

[lissannej.livejournal.com]

Totally unrelated to your post but I wanted to come over and wish you a very happy birthday, Peg. Hope you had a wonderful day!

Cheers
Liss

[haniaw.livejournal.com]

Happy birthday and thanks for the fun meme. Here's my list.

In agreement with others, I think Madame Bovary is the most boring book in history of the world.

...Hania

[werecat.livejournal.com]

Happy (belated) Birthday Peg! Hope you have a good one :)