Suggested Readings
This list emphasizes authors from the United States of America. Please use this list as a guide to select readings for Book Club and Independent Reading. If you would like to choose something not on this list, please make sure your teacher approves your book. If you choose something written by an author on the list, you do not need approval, but please let me know so I can add your selection to the list!
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn and/or Tom Sawyer, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Harriett Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
Nathanial Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Henry David Thoreau, Walden and On Civil Disobedience
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay, The Federalist Papers
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems
Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Edgar Allen Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Raven
James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea
James L. Swanson, Manhunt
Stephan Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Robert Edwin Lee and Jerome Lawrence, The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail
John Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks
Jack London, The Call of the Wild
H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and The War of the Worlds
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun
Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome, The Age of Innocence, and The House of Mirth
Willa Cather, My Antonia
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five, Player Piano, Cat's Cradle
Tom Wolf, The Right Stuff
James Bradley, Flyboys
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
John Steinbeck, Cannery Row, Of Mice and Men, East of Eden, The Pearl, and The Grapes of Wrath
Olive Ann Burns, Cold Sassy Tree
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Sandra Cisneros, House on Mango Street
Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell the Arms, and The Old Man and the Sea
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman and The Crucible
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Richard Wright, Native Son, Black Boy
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn
Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air and Into the Wild
Toni Morrison, Beloved
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury
Joseph Heller, Catch 22
Jack Kerouac, On The Road
Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran
Martin Luther King, Jr., Collected Speeches
Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roofs, A Streetcar Named Desire
Lorraine Hansbury, A Raisin in the Sun
Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic, Blue Latitudes, and A Voyage Long and Strange
Isaac Asimov, Nightfall
Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye
Doris Atkinson Paul, Navajo Code Talkers
Malcom X, Autobiography of Malcom X
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Marc Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime
Candice Millard, River of Doubt
John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me
Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man
Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy
Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings