Checklist of 100 Books Students Should Read Before Going to College
1984 by George Orwell
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich-Maria Remarque
And Then There were None by Agatha Christie
Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir by Frank McCourt
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
Anthem by Ayn Rand
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley with Malcolm X
The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation by Seamus Heaney
Black Boy by Richard Wright
Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo A. Anaya
Bodega Dreams by Ernesto Quinonez
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
The Chosen by Chaim Potok
The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother by James
McBride
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
The Crucible by Arthur Miller
Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton
Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas
Esperanza Rising by Pam Munoz Ryan
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne and James Houston
Fences by August Wilson
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Grendel by John Gardner
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Hatchet by Gary Paulsen
Having Our Say by Sarah Delany
Hiroshima by John Hersey
The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee
The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
Krik? Krak! By Edwidge Danticat
A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines
Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Maus I: My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman
The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
The Miracle Worker by William Gibson
Montana 1948 by Larry Watson
Mythology by Edith Hamilton
The Natural by Bernard Malamud
Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya
Night by Elie Wiesel
The Odyessy by Homer
Oedipus the King by Sophocles
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
Othello by William Shakespeare
Our Town by Thornton Wilder
The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton
The Pearl by John Steinbeck
The Piano Lesson by August Wilson
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
A Separate Peace by John Knowles
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
The Stranger by Albert Camus
A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Twelve Angry Men: A Play in Three Acts by Reginald Rose
*Books chosen by a sampling of college professors.
****Native Son by Richard Wright