101 Great Books Recommended for College-Bound Readers
List from College Board.
I’ve read the books in bold, and I’ve noted when I first read it. I’ve tried to note when I’ve read a book on Rebecca Reads.
- A Death in the Family by James Agee
- A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen (high school)
- A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
- A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor (college) reread/reviewed here
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (high school)
- All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
- An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
- Animal Farm by George Orwell (high school) reread/reviewed here
- Antigone by Sophocles (high school)
- As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (college)
- Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
- Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville (high school)
- Beloved by Toni Morrison (high school) reread/reviewed here
- Beowulf
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (abandoned as adult; thoughts here)
- Call it Sleep by Henry Roth
- Candide by Voltaire (college)
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
- Collected Stories by Eudora Welty
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (high school)
- Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand
- Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather (adult) reviewed here
- Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
- Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
- Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev (college)
- Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
- Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (adult) reviewed here
- Hamlet by William Shakespeare (college)
- Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (high school)
- Inferno by Dante
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (middle school) reread/reviewed here
- Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
- Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill (high school)
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding (adult) reviewed here
- Macbeth by William Shakespeare (adult) reviewed here
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (adult) reviewed here
- Moby Dick by Herman Melville (college)
- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass (adult) reviewed here
- Native Son by Richard Wright
- Oedipus Rex by Sophocles (high school)
- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (adult)
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (high school) reread/reviewed here
- Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
- Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (adult) reviewed here
- Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare (high school)
- Selected Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Selected Tales by Edgar Allen Poe (high school) reread/reviewed here
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
- Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
- Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
- The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (high school)
- The Awakening by Kate Chopin
- The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
- The Call of the Wild by Jack London
- The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (high school)
- The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov
- The Color Purple by Alice Walker
- The Crucible by Arthur Miller (high school)
- The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
- The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams (high school)
- The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (high school)
- The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (adult) reviewed here
- The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
- The Iliad by Homer (adult) reviewed here
- The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
- The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
- The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
- The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
- The Odyssey by Homer (high school) reread/reviewed here
- The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (adult)
- The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
- The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (high school)
- The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (high school)
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
- The Stranger by Albert Camus (adult) reviewed here
- The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
- The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (college)
- The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
- Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (adult)
- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (high school)
- To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee (high school) reread/reviewed here
- To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (high school)
- Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
- Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (adult)
- Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
- Vanity Fair by William Thackeray
- Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
- Walden by Henry David Thoreau (high school)
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (high school)
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Luv your list! I have a similar one on my blog.
Vasilly, I’d love to take the credit, but really it was The College Board that created this particular list. I still can’t believe finishing all these books by the time I entered college!
My English teacher gave us this list freshman year, and thought by now I would have read more of these books, but apparently not.
Christina, I think it’s a great list, but I think expecting high school students to read them all before graduation is a bit much. I mean Proust?! I’m afraid of him still!
I added your link to my College Board post. Let me know if you update your progress.
I just finished Crime and Punishment, so I can cross it off of this list and the Easton Press list.
Rose City Reader, I’d love to hear your thoughts on Crime and Punishment. It was one of my favorites (although I haven’t read it for at least 8 years…)