In 1989 the Center for the Learning and Teaching of Literature (SUNY Albany; Arthur Applebee, director) produced a report on what books were taught in various kinds of high school literature courses. This is an unannotated and uncriticized list of the books they mention. (Please do not add books except with respect to the note below.)

I have annotated in my votes which books that are required in more than 30% of public, Catholic and independent schools — click here , or next to "Richard" on the list of People Who Voted On This List. All other titles I have added are required in at least 5% of one or more of those kind of schools. Just to confuse things further, the "schools" are grades 7-12 for public schools, but 9-12 for Catholic and independent.

Note: A single user can only add 100 titles, so I was unable to add the following. I hope a volunteer does so...
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Kesey)
Ordinary People (Guest)
Othello (Shakespeare)
The Ox-Bow Incident (Clark)
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce)
The Prince and the Pauper (Twain)
Pygmalion (Shaw)
Raisin in the Sun (Hansberry)
Return of the Native (Hardy)
Roll of Thunder, Hear Me Cry (Taylor)
Rumble Fish (Hinton)
Shane (Schaefer)
Short Stories of Edgar Allan Poe (Poe)
Short Stories of Hawthorne (Hawthorne)
Silas Marner (Eliot)
Sounder (Armstrong)
The Stranger (Camus)
The Streetcar Named Desire (Williams)
The Summer of My German Soldier (Greene)
The Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Hardy)
That was Then, This is Now (Hinton)
The Time Machine (Wells)
Treasure Island (Stevenson)
Twelve Angry Men (Rose)
Waiting for Godot (Beckett)
Watership Down (Adams)
West Side Story (Bernstein)
When the Legends Die (Borland)
Where the Lilies Bloom (Cleaver)
Where the Red Fern Grows (Rawls)
White Fang (London)
Witch of Blackbird Pond (Speare)
Yearling (Rawlings)
All My Sons (Miller)
All Quiet on the Western Front (Remarque)
All the King's Men (Warren)
Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
Anthem (Rand)
Bell Jar (Plath)
Candide (Voltaire)
Catch-22 (Heller)
Chosen (Potok)
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (Twain)
Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas)
Crystal Cave (Stewart)
David Copperfield (Dickens)
Demian (Hesse)
Doctor Faustus (Marlowe)
Dubliners (Joyce)
Enemy of the People (Ibsen)
Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
Frankstein (Shelley)
Hard Times (Dickens)
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (McCullers)
Hedda Gabler (Ibsen)
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Angelou)
I Never Sang for My Father (Anderson)
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Lewis)
Lord Jim (Conrad)
Madame Bovary (Flaubert)
Man for All Seasons (Bolt)
The Mayor of Casterbridge (Hardy)
Member of the Wedding (McCullers)
Metamorphosis (Kafka)
Les Miserables (Hugo)
Oliver Twist (Dickens)
On the Beach (Shute)
Once and Future King (White)
The Plague (Camus)
The Power and the Glory (Greene)
Rebecca (Du Maurier)
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (Stoppard)
Siddhartha (Hesse)
Sons and Lovers (Lawrence)
The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway)
The Tempest (Shakespeare)
Ten Little Indians (Christie)
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Smith)
Turn of the Screw (James)
Walden (Thoreau)
Alice in Wonderland (Carroll)
Grendel (Gardner)
Henry IV, Part I (Shakespeare)
Out of the Silent Planet (Lewis)
Perelandra (Lewis)
The Republic (Plato)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Unknown)
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25

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3.61 avg rating — 462,080 ratings
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26

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3.71 avg rating — 218,617 ratings
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27

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4.35 avg rating — 9,825,535 ratings
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28

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3.60 avg rating — 231,747 ratings
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29

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3.50 avg rating — 344,954 ratings
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30

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4.32 avg rating — 1,016,958 ratings
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31

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3.43 avg rating — 556,204 ratings
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32

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4.03 avg rating — 989,574 ratings
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33

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4.21 avg rating — 840,696 ratings
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34

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3.92 avg rating — 1,013,910 ratings
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3.83 avg rating — 661,653 ratings
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36

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3.91 avg rating — 470,255 ratings
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37

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3.77 avg rating — 202,166 ratings
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3.85 avg rating — 110,065 ratings
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3.81 avg rating — 1,302,777 ratings
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46

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3.85 avg rating — 538,202 ratings
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47

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4.30 avg rating — 4,431,071 ratings
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48

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3.53 avg rating — 237,322 ratings
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49

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3.30 avg rating — 109,848 ratings
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50

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4.38 avg rating — 1,356,109 ratings
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51

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4.11 avg rating — 517,450 ratings
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52

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3.56 avg rating — 269,734 ratings
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53

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4.17 avg rating — 404,251 ratings
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54

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4.03 avg rating — 206,403 ratings
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55

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4.41 avg rating — 3,127,773 ratings
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56

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3.90 avg rating — 1,865,376 ratings
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57

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3.98 avg rating — 333,615 ratings
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58

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4.13 avg rating — 439,140 ratings
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59

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3.74 avg rating — 142,881 ratings
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60

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4.09 avg rating — 927,838 ratings
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61

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4.19 avg rating — 617,661 ratings
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4.40 avg rating — 295,149 ratings
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63

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4.24 avg rating — 788,358 ratings
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64

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3.73 avg rating — 236,474 ratings
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4.01 avg rating — 260,159 ratings
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4.20 avg rating — 777,725 ratings
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3.88 avg rating — 426,212 ratings
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3.93 avg rating — 506,847 ratings
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4.03 avg rating — 1,383,328 ratings
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3.74 avg rating — 58,948 ratings
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3.77 avg rating — 163,243 ratings
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3.91 avg rating — 236,658 ratings
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82

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3.84 avg rating — 301,775 ratings
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3.76 avg rating — 300,215 ratings
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4.08 avg rating — 871,153 ratings
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3.92 avg rating — 3,537,314 ratings
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3.87 avg rating — 125,203 ratings
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3.69 avg rating — 93,362 ratings
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3.70 avg rating — 51,142 ratings
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3.69 avg rating — 226,541 ratings
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3.71 avg rating — 372,916 ratings
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3.79 avg rating — 491,760 ratings
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92

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3.82 avg rating — 352,054 ratings
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93

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3.89 avg rating — 109,512 ratings
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3.88 avg rating — 349,086 ratings
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95

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3.46 avg rating — 137,331 ratings
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3.84 avg rating — 147,128 ratings
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3.61 avg rating — 166,530 ratings
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4.13 avg rating — 385,991 ratings
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4.23 avg rating — 323,650 ratings
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245 books · 152 voters · list created April 8th, 2013 by Richard (votes) .
109 likes · 
Lists are re-scored approximately every 5 minutes.


Richard 2647 books
309 friends
Lori S. 3167 books
94 friends
Clara 945 books
61 friends
Susanna - Censored by GoodReads 3386 books
851 friends
Themis-Athena (Lioness at Large) 546 books
365 friends
Frank 75 books
2 friends
Sarah 13852 books
227 friends
Sami 2698 books
6 friends

More voters…


Comments Showing 1-5 of 5 (5 new)

dateUp arrow    newest »

Susanna - Censored by GoodReads Your annotations will be visible if you click "X people voted" on the books you annotated, Richard.


message 2: by Richard (new)

Richard Thank you. I thought so, but I (mistakenly) thought what others would see would be different than my own view whilst I was logged in.


Susanna - Censored by GoodReads You can see anyone's comments there. (For some lists it's very useful.)


message 4: by Maureen (new)

Maureen Is there somewhere I can get this in list form?


message 5: by Richard (new)

Richard Google might be able to help you, but I'm pretty sure I couldn't find an explicit source back when I first started this, since then I'd have done a lot more cutting and pasting instead of typing. I do suspect there might be variations on this, though. But U.S. educational culture was different back in the late '80s, so lists from different times would have variant contents.


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