Most Frequently Cited 1970-2023

Most Frequently Cited 1970-2023

32  Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

27  Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

25  Great Expectations by Charles Dickens; Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

23 King Lear by William Shakespeare

19  Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad; King Lear by William Shakespeare; Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zorah Neale Hurston

18  Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

17  Moby Dick by Herman Melville

16  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain; The Awakening by Kate Chopin; Catch-22 by Joseph Heller; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce; The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne;

15  Beloved by Toni Morrison; Native Son by Richard Wright;

14  The Color Purple by Alice Walker; A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry

13  Antigone by Sophocles; Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko; Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller;

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald; Light in August by William Faulkner; Othello by William Shakespeare;

12  Billy Budd by Herman Melville; The Color Purple by Alice Walker; The Crucible by Arthur Miller;

Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

11  As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner; Candide by Voltaire; The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams;

A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

10  A Passage to India by E. M. Forster; Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen; Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison; Sula by Toni Morrison; The Tempest by William Shakespeare

9  Frankenstein by Mary Shelley; Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy; Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert;

Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy;; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard;

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

8  All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy; Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy; Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya; Brave New World by Aldous Huxley; The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck; The Jungle by Upton Sinclair; Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe; Oedipus Rex by Sophocles; The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner;

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway; Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy; Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee; The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor

7  All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren; Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton; A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen; Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton; Fences by August Wilson; Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift; Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad; Medea by Euripides; The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare; Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf; The Piano Lesson by August Wilson

6  The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison; Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes; An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen; Equus by Peter Shaffer; Hamlet by William Shakespeare; Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen; The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton; The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini; Macbeth by William Shakespeare; Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw; Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot; Obasan by Joy Kogawa; The Odyssey by Homer; The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver; Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser; To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee; Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare; The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

5  Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton; Atonement by Ian McEwan; Bleak House by Charles Dickens;

The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger; The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov; Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe; Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin; The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood; Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee;The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan; Middlemarch by George Eliot; The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot; Mrs. Warren’s Profession by George Bernard Shaw; My Ántonia by Willa Cather; 1984 by George Orwell; Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro; One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey; Tom Jones by Henry Fielding; To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf; Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys; Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor

These contemporary novels have been cited more recently on the AP exam:

A Gesture Life by Chang-rae Lee (2000)

A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende (2019)

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving (1989)

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (1996)

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (2014)

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones (2018)

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki by Ishiguro Marukami (2013)

Corelli's Mandolin by Louis De Berniere (1994)

Dominicana by Angie Cruz (2020)

George Washington Gomez by Americo Paredes(1994) 

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2007)

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (2017)

Indian Horse by Rochard Wagamese (2012)

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu (2020)

Kindred by Octavia Butler (2003)

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (2009)

Lila by Marilyn Robinson (2015)

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng (2019)

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2009)

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (2019)

On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee (2014)

Passing by Nella Larson (2021)

Pipeline by Dominque Morriseau (2017)

Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (2005)

Purple Hibscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2003)

Sing, Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward (2017)

Southernmost by Silas House (2019)

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (2014)

The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho (1993)

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (2008)

The Goldfinch by Donna Tart (2016)

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985)

The Hummingbird's Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea (2006)

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai (2006)

The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez by John Rechy (2001)

The Night Watchman by Louise Erdich (2020)

The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler (1993)

The Power of One by Bryce Courtney (1996)

There There by Tommy Orange (2018)

Washington Black by Esi Edugan (2018)

When the Emperor was Divine by Julie Otsuka (2002)

Where the Crawdad's Sing by Delia Owens (2018)

White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (2008)