The 100 Most Recommended Classics

A friend of mine posted this list of top recommended books in classical literature. Enjoy.

Titles colored in blue are ones I've read.
Titles colored in red are ones I've read excerpts from.
Titles colored in green are ones which I suspect were made up, because I've never heard of them.
Titles colored in purple are Walden, which is not very good.

Novels and Short Stories

Jane Austen
•Pride and Prejudice
•British, 1813

James Baldwin
•Go Tell It on the Mountain
•American, 1953

Saul Bellow
•Seize the Day
•American, 1956

Charlotte Brontë
•Jane Eyre
•British 1847

Emily Brontë
•Wuthering Heights
•British, 1847

Albert Camus
•The Stranger
•French, 1942

Lewis Carroll
•Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
•British, 1865

Willa Cather
•My Antonia
•American, 1918

Miguel de Cervantes
•Don Quixote
•Spanish, 1605, 1617

Kate Chopin
•The Awakening
•American, 1899


Joseph Conrad
•Heart of Darkness
•British, 1902


Stephen Crane
•The Red Badge of Courage
•American, 1895

Daniel Defoe
•Robinson Crusoe
•British, 1719

Charles Dickens
•Great Expectations
•British, 1860-61

Feodor Dostoevski
•Crime and Punishment
•Russian, 1866

George Eliot
•The Mill on the Floss
•British, 1860

Ralph Ellison
•Invisible Man
•American, 1947

William Faulkner
•The Sound and the Fury
•American, 1929

Henry Fielding
•Tom Jones
•British, 1749

F. Scott Fitzgerald
•The Great Gatsby
•American, 1925

Gustave Flaubert
•Madame Bovary
•French, 1857

E.M. Forster
•A Passage to India
•British, 1924


Gabriel García Márquez
•One Hundred Years of Solitude
•Columbian, 1967

William Golding
•Lord of the Flies
•British, 1954

Thomas Hardy
•Tess of the D'Urbervilles
•British, 1891


Nathaniel Hawthorne
•The Scarlet Letter
•American, 1850

Ernest Hemingway
•A Farewell to Arms
•American, 1929

Zora Neale Hurston
•Their Eyes Were Watching God
•American, 1937

Aldous Huxley
•Brave New World
•British, 1932

Henry James
•The Turn of the Screw
•American, 1898

James Joyce
•A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
•Irish, 1916

Franz Kafka
•The Trial
•Czechoslovakian, 1925

D.H. Lawrence
•Sons and Lovers
•British, 1913

Sinclair Lewis
•Babbitt
•American, 1922

Bernard Malamud
•The Assistant
•American, 1957


Thomas Mann
•Death in Venice
•German, 1912

Herman Melville
•Moby-Dick
•American, 1851

Toni Morrison
•Sula
•American, 1973

Flannery O'Connor
•A Good Man Is Hard to Find
•American, 1955

Tillie Olsen
•Tell Me a Riddle
•American, 1956-60

George Orwell
•Animal Farm
•British, 1945


Alan Paton
•Cry, the Beloved Country
•South African, 1948

Edgar Allan Poe
•Great Tales and Poems
•American, 1839-45

J.D. Salinger
•The Catcher in the Rye
•American, 1951

Sir Walter Scott
•Ivanhoe
•British, 1820


Mary Shelley
•Frankenstein
•British, 1818

John Steinbeck
•The Grapes of Wrath
•American, 1939

Jonathan Swift
•Gulliver's Travels
•British, 1726

William Makepeace Thackeray
•Vanity Fair
•British, 1847-48

Leo Tolstoy
•War and Peace
•Russian, 1865-69

Ivan Turgenev
•Fathers and Sons
•Russian, 1862

Mark Twain
•The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
•American, 1886

John Updike
•Rabbit, Run
•American, 1961

Voltaire
•Candide
•French, 1759

Kurt Vonnegut
•Slaughterhouse Five
•American, 1969

Alice Walker
•The Color Purple
•American, 1982

Eudora Welty
•Thirteen Stories
•American, 1965

Edith Wharton
•The Age of Innocence
•American, 1920

Virginia Woolf
•To the Lighthouse
•British, 1927

Richard Wright
•Native Son
•American, 1940

Drama

Aeschylus
•Oresteia
•Greek, 458 BCE

Aristophanes
•Lysistrata
•Greek, 411, BCE

Samuel Beckett
•Waiting for Godot
•Irish, 1952

Bertolt Brecht
•Mother Courage and Her Children
•German, 1941

Anton Chekov
•The Cherry Orchard
•Russian, 1904

Euripides
•Medea
•Greek, 431 BCE

Johann von Goethe
•Faust, Part I
•German, 1808

Henrik Ibsen
•A Doll's House
•Norwegian, 1879

Christopher Marlowe
•Doctor Faustus
•British, 1604

Arthur Miller
•Death of a Salesman
•American, 1949

Molière
•The Misanthrope
•French, 1666

Eugene O'Neill
•Desire Under the Elms
•American, 1924

William Shakespeare
•Hamlet
•British, 1600


George Bernard Shaw
•Pygmalion
•British, 1913

Sophocles
•Oedipus Rex
•Greek, 430 BCE

Oscar Wilde
•The Importance of Being Earnest
•British, 1895


Thornton Wilder
•Our Town
•American, 1938


Tennessee Williams
•The Glass Menagerie
•American, 1945

Poetry*

Allison, Alexander, Editor
•Norton Anthology of Poetry (Shorter Edition)
•British & American

Anonymous
•Beowulf
•British, c. 700

Anonymous
•Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
•British, c. 1350-1400


Geoffrey Chaucer
•Canterbury Tales
•British, 1387-1400

Dante
•Inferno
•Italian, c. 1320

Homer
•The Odyssey
•Greek, c. 9th C. BCE

John Milton
•Paradise Lost
•British, 1667

Vergil
•The Aeneid
•Italian, c. 18 BCE

Walt Whitman
•Leaves of Grass
•American, 1855

Miscellaneous

Aristotle
•Poetics
•Greek, 4th C. BCE

Saint Augustine
•Confessions
•Italian, 397-401

The Holy Bible (esp. King James Version)

Charles Darwin
•Origin of the Species
•British, 1859

Ralph Waldo Emerson
•"The American Scholar"
•American, 1837

Benjamin Franklin
•Autobiography
•American, 1771

Sigmund Freud
•Civilization and Its Discontents
•German, 1930

Edith Hamilton
•Mythology
•American, 1940

Niccolò Machiavelli
•The Prince
•Italian, 1532

Karl Marx
•Communist Manifesto
•German, 1848

Michel de Montaigne
•Selected Essays
•French, 1580

Plato
•Republic
•Greek, c. 370 BCE

Henry David Thoreau
•Walden
•American, 1854

*Apparently, there hasn't been any poet worth reading in the last 150 years.