| The 100 Most-Often-Recommended Works for College Freshman | ||
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
British American World