English Language & Literature

• List of Recommended Works

• Primary Importance:

• British

• Beowulf
• The Battle of Maldon
• "The Wife's Lament"
• "Judith"
• Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Cressida
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
• Wyatt, "Farewell, Love," "They Flee from Me"
• Spenser, The Faerie Queene [Book I]
• Sidney, Astrophel and Stella, Defence of Poesy [also considered secondary]
• Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love"
• Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, The
Tempest, 1 Henry IV, Henry V, Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream
• Ralegh, "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd"
• Jonson, Volpone [also judged secondary]
• Donne, "Go and catch a falling star," "The Flea," "A Valediction: Forbidding
Mourning," Holy Sonnet 14: "Batter my heart," Holy Sonnet 10: "Death, be not
proud"
• Herrick, "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time"
• Herbert, "Easter Wings"
• Milton, Paradise Lost
• Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress"
• Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress
• Defoe, Robinson Crusoe [also judged secondary]
• Swift, "A Modest Proposal," Gulliver's Travels
• Pope, An Essay on Man, An Essay on Criticism [the first two also judged
secondary], The Rape of the Lock
• Fielding, Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews
• Richardson, Clarissa [at least read about], Pamela
• Johnson, "Vanity of Human Wishes," "Preface to Shakespeare" [also judged
secondary]
• Sterne, Tristram Shandy [also judged secondary]
• Goldsmith, "The Deserted Village"
• Sheridan, School for Scandal, The Rivals
• Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"
• Blake, Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell [also judged secondary]
• Austen, Pride and Prejudice
• Wordsworth, "Tintern Abbey," "Michael," "The World Is Too Much With Us,"
Preface to Lyrical Ballads, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," The Prelude [also
judged secondary]
• Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," "Kubla Khan," "Dejection: An
Ode," "Frost at Midnight," "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison"
• Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage [excerpts], Don Juan [Books 1-4], Manfred
• Shelley, "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," "Ozymandias," "Ode to the West Wind,"
"To a Sky-Lark," "Adonais," A Defence of Poetry
• Keats, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," Letters [NAEL], "The Eve of
St. Agnes," "La Belle Dame sans Merci," "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a
Grecian Urn," "To Autumn" [also judged secondary]
• M. Shelley, Frankenstein
• E. B. Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese [also judged secondary]
• Dickens, Great Expectations, Bleak House [also judged secondary], Hard Times
• Tennyson, "The Lady of Shalott," "Ulysses," In Memoriam A.H.H. [excerpts],
"Crossing the Bar," Idylls of the King ["The Passing of Arthur"]
• Thackeray, Vanity Fair [also judged secondary]
• R. Browning, "My Last Duchess," "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came"
[also judged secondary], "Andrea del Sarto," "Caliban upon Setebos," "Soliloquy
in a Spanish Cloister," "Porphyria's Lover," "The Bishop Orders His Tomb" [also
judged secondary]
• E. Bronte, Wuthering Heights
• C. Bronte, Jane Eyre
• G. Eliot, Middlemarch [also judged secondary], Silas Marner [also judged
secondary]
• Mill, On Liberty
• C. Rossetti, Goblin Market
• Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, "Channel Firing," "The Darkling Thrush,"
"Neutral Tones"
• Arnold, "To a Friend," "The Buried Life," "Dover Beach," "The Scholar Gypsy,"
"Thyrsis"
• Carroll, "Jabberwocky"
• Hardy, "Hap," "The Darkling Thrush," "Channel Firing," "The Convergence of
the Twain"
• Hopkins, "God's Grandeur," "The Windhover," "Spring and Fall: to a young
child"
• Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
• Housman, "To an Athlete Dying Young," "Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff"
• Owen, "Dulce et Decorum Est," "Anthem for Doomed Youth"
• Conrad, Heart of Darkness
• Yeats, "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," "Easter 1916," "The Second Coming,"
"Sailing to Byzantium," "Leda and the Swan," "Among School Children," "The
Circus Animals' Desertion"
• Forster, A Passage to India [also judged secondary]
• Joyce, Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses [at least read in
and read about]
• Woolf, A Room of One's Own, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse
• Lawrence, Women in Love, Sons and Lovers [also judged secondary], "The
Rocking Horse Winner," "The Horse-Dealer's Daughter," Tortoise poems, Fruit
poems
• Mansfield, "The Garden Party"
• Beckett, Waiting for Godot
• Auden, "Musee des Beaux Arts," "In Memory of W. B. Yeats"
• Thomas, "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night," "Fern Hill"
• Larkin, "Church Going" [also judged secondary]
• T. Hughes, "Thought-Fox"
• Heaney, "Digging"

• American

• E. Taylor, "Huswifery"
• Edward, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" [also judged secondary]
• Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer
• Cooper, Last of the Mohicans [also judged secondary], The Deerslayer [also
judged secondary]
• Emerson, "The American Scholar," "The Over-Soul," "Nature," "Divinity School
Address"
• Thoreau, Walden, "Civil Disobedience"
• Poe, "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Raven"
• Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, "Young Goodman Brown," "Rappaccini's
Daughter" [both stories also judged secondary], Preface to House of the Seven
Gables
• Melville, Moby Dick, Billy Budd, "Bartleby the Scrivener," "Benito Cereno"
• Whitman, Leaves of Grass [1888 ed.]
• Dickinson, "There's a certain Slant of light," "Because I could not stop for Death"
• Twain, Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
• S. Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, "The Open
Boat"
• James, Daisy Miller [also judged secondary], The American, The Portrait of a
Lady
• Norris, McTeague [also judged secondary]
• Chopin, The Awakening [also judged secondary]
• Wharton, "Roman Fever"
• Cather, O Pioneers, My Antonia
• Frost, "Mending Wall," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "The Gift
Outright," "Home Burial,"
• Sandburg, "Chicago"
• Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
• Dreiser, Sister Carrie
• London, The Call of the Wild
• T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," The Wasteland, Four
Quartets
• O'Neill, The Emperor Jones
• W. Williams, "The Red Wheelbarrow," "To Elsie," "Spring and All," "The Young
Housewife," "Danse Russe," Imaginations, Spring and All
• Pound, "In a Station in the Metro," Cantos I and XLV [The Cantos as a whole
also judged secondary], "The Garden," "The River Merchant to His Wife," "A
Pact"
• Stevens, Harmonium, "Sunday Morning," "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a
Blackbird," "The Emperor of Ice Cream"
• H. Crane, The Bridge
• Cummings, Collected Poems, "Buffalo Bill's," "I sing of Olaf," "Cambridge
Ladies"
• F. S. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, "Winter Dreams" [also judged secondary],
"Babylon Revisited"
• Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! [also judged secondary], The Sound and the Fury,
Go Down, Moses, Light in August
• Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms [also judged secondary], The Sun Also Rises
[also judged secondary], "Soldier's Home," "Big Two-Hearted River" [Parts I and
II), "Hills Like White Elephants"
• L. Hughes, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "Harlem" ["A Dream Deferred"],
"Theme for English B," "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," The Weary
Blues
• Olson, "Projective Verse"
• Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
• Wright, Native Son
• Lewis, Main Street
• Lowell, Life Studies, "For the Union Dead," "Skunk Hour," "The Drinker,"
"Waking in the Blue," "After Surprising Conversions"
• Roethke, The Far Field, "The Far Field," "Elegy for Jane," "Root Cellar," "My
Papa's Waltz"
• T. Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie
• Ellison, Invisible Man
• Baldwin, "Sonny's Blues"
• Ginsberg, Howl, "America," "A Supermarket in California"
• Kerouac, On the Road
• Snyder, Turtle Island
• Miller, Death of a Salesman
• Bellow, Herzog [also judged secondary]
• O'Connor, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," "Good Country People," "Everything
That Rises Must Converge," Wise Blood
• Heller, Catch-22
• Bishop, "Questions of Travel," "In The Waiting Room," "The Fish"
• Lowell, "For the Union Dead"
• Salinger, Catcher in the Rye
• Mailer, Armies of the Night
• Percy, The Movie-Goer
• Rich, "Diving into the Wreck"
• Plath, "Daddy"
• Momaday, House Made of Dawn
• Silko, Ceremony
• Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
• Morrison, Beloved, Song of Solomon
• Oates, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"
• Walker, The Color Purple, "Everyday Use"

• World

• Bible: Genesis, Job, one of the Gospels

• Homer, The Odyssey
• Plato, The Republic
• Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, Agamemnon
• Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, Antigone
• Euripides, Medea
• Aristophanes, Lysistrata
• Virgil, Aeneid
• Ovid, Metamorphoses
• Dante, Inferno
• Moliere, The Misanthrope, Tartuffe
• Cervantes, Don Quixote
• Voltaire, Candide
• Goethe, Faust
• Flaubert, Madame Bovary
• Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov
• Ibsen, A Doll's House
• Strindberg, Miss Julie
• Tolstoy, "The Death of Ivan Ilyitch"
• Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard
• Kafka, "Metamorphosis"
• Camus, The Plague, The Stranger
• Sartre, No Exit
• Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country
• Achebe, Things Fall Apart
• Walcott, "A Far Cry from Africa"

• Secondary Importance:

• British

• Malory, Le Morte d'Arthur

• Spenser, The Faerie Queene [all but Book I], Amoretti
• Sidney, Defence of Poesy [also judged primary]
• Marlowe, The Jew of Malta
• Shakespeare, As You Like It, Antony and Cleopatra, Richard II, 2 Henry IV,
Richard III, Twelfth Night
• Jonson, Volpone [also judged primary]
• Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
• Lovelace, "To Lucasta, Going to the Wars"
• Waller, "Song" ["Go, lovely rose!"]
• Milton, "L'Allegro," "Il Penseroso," "Lycidas," "When I Consider How My Light
Is Spent"
• Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, "To the Memory of Mr. Oldham,"
[Shakespeare and Ben Jonson Compared], [In Praise of Chaucer]
• Behn, Oroonoko
• Pepys, Diary
• Defoe, Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe [also judged primary], Journal of the
Plague Year
• Swift, "Tale of a Tub"
• Pope, The Dunciad
• Addison and Steele (NAEL)
• Fielding, Shamela
• Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson
• Johnson, Rasselas, Dictionary, Preface to Shakespeare [also judged primary],
Lives of the Poets
• Thomson, The Seasons
• Sterne, Tristram Shandy [also judged primary]
• Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer
• Godwin, Caleb WIlliams
• Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman [NAEL]
• Collins, Jubilate Agno
• Cowper, The Task, "The Castaway"
• Austen, Emma, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion
• Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell [also judged primary], The Four Zoas
• Burns, "To a Mouse," "Tam O'Shanter," "Afton Water," "A Red, Red Rose,"
"Auld Lang Syne"
• Clare, "I Am"
• Wordsworth, "The Tables Turned," "Resolution and Independence," "I Wandered
Lonely. . . ," "My Heart Leaps Up," "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge," "It Is
a Beauteous Evening," "London," "The World Is Too Much with Us," "Surprised
by Joy"
• Coleridge, Christabel, Biographia Literaria [NAEL]
• Byron, "Written After Swimming. . . ," "She walks in beauty"
• Shelley, "Mont Blanc," Prometheus Unbound [know about]
• Keats, Endymion [Book I], "Ode to Psyche," "Lamia," "Ode on Melancholy," "To
Autumn" [also judged primary]
• Tennyson, "Mariana," "The Lotus-Eaters," "Break, Break, Break," "The Eagle: A
Fragment," "Sweet and Low," "The Splendor Falls," "Tears, Idel Tears," "The
Charge of the Light Brigade"
• Morris, "The Defense of Guenevere," "The Haystack in the Floods"
• Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
• Thackeray, Vanity Fair [also judged primary]
• E. B. Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese [#22, 43], Aurora Leigh [NAEL]
• R. Browning, "Porphyria's Lover" [also judged primary], "Home-Thoughts, from
Abroad," "The Bishop Orders His Tomb" [also judged primary], "Rabbi Ben
Ezra," "Pippa Passes," "Fra Lippo Lippi," "An Epistle . . . Karshish, the Arab
Physician," The Ring and the Book [Books 1, 7, 10-12], "Childe Roland to the
Dark Tower Came" [also judged primary]
• Dickens, David Copperfield, Hard Times [also judged primary], Bleak House
[also judged primary], Oliver Twist
• Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch [also judged primary], Adam Bede
• D. G. Rossetti, "The Blessed Damozel," The House of Life ["The Sonnet"]
• Rossetti, "Song" ["When I am dead, my dearest"], "A Birthday"
• Carlyle, Sartor Resartus [NAEL]
• Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua [NAEL], The Idea of a University
• Huxley, Agnosticism and Christianity [NAEL]
• Ruskin, Modern Painters, The Stones of Venice [NAEL]
• Arnold, The Function of Criticism [NAEL], "Literature and Science," "Stanzas
from the Grande Chartreuse," "Thyrsis"
• Lear, "How Pleasant to Know . . . ," "The J. . . ," "The Owl and the Pussy Cat,"
Limericks
• Carroll, "The Walrus and the Carpenter"
• Henley, "Invictus"
• Thompson, "The Hound of Heaven"
• Dowson, "Cynara"
• Hopkins, "Spring and Fall," "Pied Beauty"
• Hardy, "Drummer Hodge," "The Ruined Maid," "A Trampwoman's Tragedy,"
"Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?," Jude the Obscure, The Mayer of
Casterbridge, Far from the Madding Crowd
• Shaw, Pygmalion
• Conrad, Nostromo, Lord Jim
• Synge, Playboy of the Western World
• Forster, Howard's End, A Passage to India [also judged primary]
• O'Casey, Juno and the Paycock
• Brooke, "The Soldier"
• Thomas, "As the Team's Head Brass"
• Sassoon, "Base Details"
• Sassoon, "They"
• Owen, "Strange Meeting"
• Yeats, "Who Goes with Fergus," "Adam's Curse," "No Second Troy," "September
1913," "The Wild Swans at Coole," "Under Ben Bulben"
• Lawrence, Sons and Lovers [also judged primary], The Rainbow, "Piano,"
"Bavarian Gentians"
• Ford, The Good Soldier
• Huxley, Brave New World
• Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1984
• Beckett, Krapp's Last Tape, Endgame
• Auden, "Spain, 1937," "Sept. 1, 1939"
• Thomas, "The Force That Through the Green Fuse. . ."
• Hughes, "Pike"
• Heaney, "The Skunk," "Station Island"
• Larkin, "Church Going" [also judged primary]

• American

• Edwards, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" [also judged primary]

• Knight, The Journal of Madam Knight
• Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
• Irving, The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon
• Brown, Wieland, Edgar Huntley
• Cooper, The Pioneers
• Hawthorne, "Young Goodman Brown," "Rappacini's Daughter" [both stories also
judged primary]
• Poe, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Purloined Letter," "The Cask of
Amontillado," "Anabel Lee," "The Philosophy of Composition"
• Dana, Two Years Before the Mast
• Melville, The Confidence Man
• Emerson, Selected Essays
• Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
• Twain, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," The Prince and the Pauper,
Roughing It, Innocents Abroad, The Tragedy of Puddin Head Wilson
• James, Daisy Miller [also judged primary]
• Howells, A Modern Instance
• Norris, McTeague [also judged primary]
• Frederic, The Damnation of Theron Ware
• Eliot, "Ash Wednesday," Murder in the Cathedral
• W. C. Williams, Paterson
• Stevens, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction
• F. S. Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night, "The Ice Palace"
• Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! [also judged primary]
• Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises [also judged primary], "Cat in the Rain"
• Stein, Three Lives
• L. Hughes, Montage of a Dream Deferred
• Olson, Selected Writings
• Lewis, Babbit
• Lowell, Lord Weary's Castle
• H. Miller, Tropic of Cancer
• Sinclair, The Jungle
• Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans
• Ferlinghetti, Starting From San Francisco, "Constantly Risking Absurdity," "Big
Fat Hairy Vision of Evil"
• Snyder, Earth House Hold
• Nabokov, Lolita
• Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
• Kosinski, The Painted Bird
• Plath, The Bell Jar
• Snodgrass, Heart's Needle
• Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49
• Barth, The Floating Opera
• Rothenberg, Poland 1931
• Levertov, The Jacob's Ladder
• Creeley, The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley
• Merwin, Green With Beasts
• Updike, Rabbit, Run
• Bellow, Seize the Day, Herzog [also judged primary]
• Percy, The Second Coming
• Doctorow, Ragtime, The Book of Daniel
• Atwood, The Robber Bride
• Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
• Cisneros, The House on Mango Street
• Tan, The Joy Luck Club
• Kingston, The Woman Warrior
• Dove, The Yellow House on the Corner
• Harjo, She Had Some Horses

• World

• Bible: Exodus, I Samuel [the story of Saul and David]

• Homer, The Iliad
• Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides
• Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus
• Aristophanes, The Frogs
• Dante, Purgatory, Paradise
• Some knowledge of (know their names and major works) Chretien de Troyes,
Guillaume de Machaut, Marie de France, Christine de Pisan, Petrarch, Walther
von der Vogelweide, Gottfried von Strassburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach,
Castiglione, Villon
• Boccaccio, Decameron
• Some knowledge of Ariosto, Calderon, Camoens, Corneille, John of the Cross,
Mme. De LaFayette, Lafontaine, "Lazarillo de Tormes," Lope de Vega, Luis de
Leon, Machiavelli, Marguerite de Navarre, Montaigne, More, Pascal, Rabelais,
Racine, Ronsard, Hans Sachs, Mme. De Sevigne, Tasso, Teresa of Avila (Teresa
of Jesus), Van den Vondel
• Some knowledge of Boileau, Diderot, Goldoni, LaBruyere, LaFontaine,
LaRochefoucald, Rousseau, Scott
• Ibsen, Hedda Gabler, An Enemy of the People
• Koestler, Darkness at Noon