Independent Reading List
AP English

1984
By Orwell, George, 1903-1950.
Depicts life in a totalitarian regime of the future.

Absalom, Absalom!
By Faulkner, William, 1897-1962.
A Harvard freshman pieces together the strange story of a southern tragedy involving an
ambitious planter who settled in Mississippi in 1833.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
By Twain, Mark, 1835-1910.
Huck, escaping from his father, who had imprisoned him in a lonely cabin, meets Jim, a
runaway slave, on Jackson's Island on the Mississippi River. Together they float down
the Mississippi.

Agamemnon : Being of the House of Atreus
By Aeschylus.  Dewey: 882
Presents the script of the classic Greek tragedy in which Agamemnon, having returned
victorious from the war with Troy, is murdered by his jealous wife Clytemnestra who
must now face the judgment of the people.

The Age of Innocence
By Wharton, Edith, 1862-1937.
A portrayal of New York society in the 1870s where money counted for less than
manners and morals.

All My Sons
By Miller, Arthur, 1915-  Dewey: 812
Presents the text of the 1947 play about Joe Keller, a manufacturer of aircraft parts during
World War II who allows faulty cylinder heads to be sold to the Army and when caught,
blames his employee and neighbor, destroying many lives in the process.

All Quiet on the Western Front
By Remarque, Erich Maria, 1898-1970.
Depicts the experiences of a group of young German soldiers fighting and suffering
during the last days of World War I.

All the King's Men
By Warren, Robert Penn, 1905-
Willie Stark, a well-intentioned idealistic back-country lawyer is unable to resist greed
for power and lust for politics during his rise and fall as an American demagogue.

All the Pretty Horses
By McCarthy, Cormac, 1933- The story of young John Grady Cole, the last of a long line
of Texas ranchers, who, along with two companions, sets off on an idyllic, sometimes
comic adventure, to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.

The American
By James, Henry, 1843-1916.
Christopher Newman, a wealthy American, goes to Europe to enjoy his wealth and
becomes engaged. Her family is against the engagement and has it annulled. Newman is
confronted with a moral dilemma when the possibility of revenge presents itself.

The American Dream ; and Zoo story : two plays
By Albee, Edward, 1928-  Dewey: 812
Contains two plays, "The American Dream" and "The Zoo Story," written by Pulitzer
Prize-winning author Edward Albee.

An American Tragedy
By Dreiser, Theodore, 1871-1945.
Presents the 1925 novel about Clyde Griffiths, an impoverished young man whose
dreams of self-betterment lead him to commit a horrible murder, and includes a
chronology and notes.

Animal Farm
By Orwell, George, 1903-1950.
A political satire in which the animals take over running the farm but find their utopian
state turning into a dictatorship.

Anna Karenina
By Tolstoy, Leo, graf, 1828-1910.
In nineteenth-century Russia, the wife of an important government official loses her
family and social status when she chooses the love of Count Vronsky over a passionless
marriage.

The Annunciation
By Gilchrist, Ellen, 1935-
Amanda McCamrey, engaged in a competition to translate the work of an obscure
eighteenth-century poetess who committed suicide, develops a grand passion for an
unsophisticated musician in an affair that has striking parallels to the life of the woman
whose poems she is translating.

Another Country
By Baldwin, James, 1924-
Rufus, a gifted African-American musician, Leona, the woman who loves him, his sister
Ida, and her lover Vivaldo, struggle with issues of love, hate, gender, and racism in
Greenwich Village, Harlem, France, and other locales in the early part of the twentieth
century.

Antigone
By Sophocles.  Dewey: 882
King Creon of Thebes refuses to allow the burial of his nephew, whom he has declared a
traitor and whose sister, Antigone, is betrothed to Creon's son.

As You Like It
By Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616.  Dewey: 822.3
Presents the complete text of Shakespeare's comedy of love and redemption in exile, and
includes explanations of difficult words and passages, a plot synopsis, scene summaries,
and character notes, as well as a brief biography of Shakespeare, and photographs from
various performances.

The Assistant
By Malamud, Bernard.
Frank, a troubled, somewhat desperate, Italian American, works long hours in the grocery
store of a struggling Jewish family in a Brooklyn neighborhood where he develops a
secret passion for his employer's attractive daughter.

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
By Johnson, James Weldon, 1871-1938.
A novel narrated by an African-American man whose light skin enables him to pass for
white.

The Awakening
By Chopin, Kate, 1851-1904.  Dewey: 813
Edna Pontellier, a Victorian-era wife and mother, is awakened to the full force on her
desire for love and freedom when she becomes enamored with Robert LeBrun, a young
man she meets while on vacation.

The Barretts of Wimpole Street
By Besier, Rudolf, 1878-1942.  Dewey: 822
A family chronicle based on two romances--that of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert
Browning and that of her sister and a soldier.

Bartleby ; and, Benito Cereno
By Melville, Herman, 1819-1891.  Dewey: 813
Presents the unabridged texts of two short stories by Herman Melville, including
"Bartleby," a moral allegory set in the business world of mid-nineteenth-century New
York; and "Benito Cereno," a parable of man's struggle against the forces of evil.

The Beet Queen
By Erdrich, Louise.
In the early 1930s, Karl and his sister Mary Adare, arrive by boxcar in Argus, a small off-
reservation town in North Dakota. Orphaned, they look to their mother's sister Fritzie and
her husband for refuge.

Beloved
By Morrison, Toni .
Sethe, an escaped slave who now lives in post-Civil War Ohio, has borne the unthinkable
and works hard at "beating back the past." She struggles to keep Beloved, an intruder,
from gaining possession of her present while throwing off the legacy of her past.

A Bend in the River
By Naipaul, V. S. (Vidiadhar Surajprasad),
A young Indian flees his country to escape the war that has claimed his family and settles
in a small town in a newly independent African nation.

Billy Budd, Sailor
By Melville, Herman, 1819-1891.
A legal parable in which a handsome sailor becomes a victim of man's intransigence.

The Birthday Party ; and the Room : two plays
By Pinter, Harold, 1930-  Dewey: 822
Presents two plays by Harold Pinter, including "The Birthday Party," in which a musician
falls victim to the violence of two men from his sinister past; and "The Room," the story
of a blind man who arrives at a derelict boarding house to deliver a mysterious message.

Bleak House
By Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870.
Presents Dickens's 1853 novel which tells the story of several generations of the Jarndyce
family who wait in vain to inherit money that is tied up in a legal dispute in England's
notoriously slow moving Court of Chancery.

Bless me, Ultima
By Anaya, Rudolfo A.
Six-year-old Antonio embarks upon a spiritual journey under the watchful guidance of
Ultima, a healing woman, that leads him to question his faith and beliefs in family,
religion, and other aspects of his Chicano culture.

Blood Knot and other plays
By Fugard, Athol.
Presents three plays by South African playwright Athol Fugard, in which he explores
close family relationships.

The Bluest Eye
By Morrison, Toni.
An eleven-year-old African-American girl in Ohio, in the early 1940s, prays for her eyes
to turn blue so that she will be beautiful.

Brave New World
By Huxley, Aldous, 1894-1963.
A satirical novel about the utopia of the future, a world in which babies are decanted
from bottles and the great Ford is worshipped.

Brothers and Keepers
By Wideman, John Edgar.
The author examines his brother's life in comparison to his own and asks himself why
they are so different, one a college professor, one sentenced to life imprisonment.

Burger's Daughter
By Gordimer, Nadine.
The story of a young woman's evolving identity in the political environment of present-
day South Africa.

Candide
By Voltaire, 1694-1778.  Dewey: 843
The story of a simple, optimistic man whose travels take him from one disaster to
another.

The Castle
By Kafka, Franz, 1883-1924.
Illustrates man's struggle against bureaucracy through the story of K, a land-surveyor
who is obsessed with reaching the castle.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
By Williams, Tennessee, 1911-1983.  Dewey: 812
Presents the script of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a wealthy Southern family
and the secrets that are revealed when they all gather to celebrate Big Daddy's birthday.

Catch-22
By Heller, Joseph.
A bombardier, based in Italy during World War II, repeatedly tries to avoid flying
bombing missions while his colonel tries to get him killed by demanding that he fly more
and more missions.

The Catcher in the Rye
By Salinger, J. D. (Jerome David), 1919-  Dewey: -Fic-
An adolescent boy, knowing he is about to be dropped by his school, spends three days
and nights in New York City.

The Caucasian Chalk Circle
By Brecht, Bertolt, 1898-1956.  Dewey: 832
A retelling of the tale of King Soloman and a child claimed by two mothers that is set in
the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia at the end of World War II.

Ceremony
By Silko, Leslie, 1948-
Follows Tayo, a young Native American, after his release from a veteran's hospital
following World War II as he searches for meaning and sanity in his life.

The Cherry Orchard
By Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 1860-1904.  Dewey: 891.72
An aristocratic Russian family struggles to maintain their status in a changing world as
they are faced with the prospect of selling the family estate to a land developer in order to
pay off their debts.

The Cocktail Party
By Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888-1965.  Dewey: 822
Presents T. S. Eliot's 1950 verse morality play about the consequences of human choices,
revolving around the infidelities of an English married couple.

The Color Purple
By Walker, Alice, 1944-
Tells the story of two African-American sisters: Nettie, a missionary in Africa, and Celie,
a child-wife living in the south, in the medium of their letters to each other and in Celie's
case, the desperate letters she begins, "Dear God."

Coming Through Slaughter
By Ondaatje, Michael, 1943-
A fictionalized story of jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden, a cornet player in turn-of-the-century
New Orleans who cut hair by day, played music by night, and went mad at the age of
thiry-one.

A Confederacy of Dunces
By Toole, John Kennedy, 1937-1969.
Pulitzer Prize winning farce, set in New Orleans, telling about Ignatius J. Reilly and his
various attempts at employment and one-man wars.

The Corn is Green
By Williams, Emlyn.  Dewey: 822
Miss Moffat, a spinster who has started a school for boys in a Welsh mining town,
determines to everything possible for Morgan Evans, a boy she believes shows great
promise, but just when Morgan is on the verge of applying for Oxford, he becomes
distracted by a flashy woman, and Miss Moffat realizes her interest in the young man has
become too absorbing.

The Counterlife
By Roth, Philip.
Stories of people enacting their dreams of renewal and escape, ranging from a quiet
suburban New Jersey dentist to a genteel Englishwoman and an Israeli settlement leader.

The Coup
By Updike, John.
The fictional leader of an imaginary African nation describes the repercussions of violent
events that rock his country.

Crime and Punishment
By Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821-1881.  Dewey: 891.73
Raskolnikov, a former Russian student, murders an old pawnbroker and her sister. The
subsequent guilt with which he struggles results in a tragedy of tension and terror.

Crossing to Safety
By Stegner, Wallace Earle, 1909-
Two American couples, one from the East and one from the West, form a fast and
lifelong friendship during the mid-thirties of the Depression.

The Crucible
By Miller, Arthur, 1915-  Dewey: 812
Presents Arthur Miller's play in which a vengeful teenager in 1692 Salem accuses her
former lover and his wife of witchcraft. Includes an introduction.

Cry, the Beloved Country
By Paton, Alan.
Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo travels to Johannesburg on an errand for a friend and to visit
his son, Absalom, only to learn Absalom has been accused of murdering white city
engineer and social activist Arthur Jarvis and stands very little chance of receiving mercy.

Daisy Miller
By James, Henry, 1843-1916.
Classic novella about a captivating young American, Daisy Miller, whose behavior
causes conflicting feelings in the mind of would-be suitor, Winterbourne.

Dancing at Lughnasa
By Friel, Brian. Presents the script of the play in which Michael, an illegitimate child
raised by his mother and her four unmarried sisters, looks back on a summer in which the
entire family structure was changed due to a series of events, including the women's
acquisition of a radio and the arrival of his father.

Daniel Martin
By Fowles, John, 1926
Hollywood screenwriter Daniel Martin, summoned home to England to visit a sick friend,
is forced to confront his buried past, and begins a journey of self-discovery that leads him
to a more satisfying existence.

David Copperfield
By Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870.
A young boy in nineteenth-century London runs away from an unhappy home, finds
employment in a wine factory, and becomes acquainted with a wide variety of characters
in the city streets.

The Day of Creation
By Ballard, J. G., 1930-  Dewey: 823
Dr. Mallory believes that he has found a third Nile that will transform the desolate Sahara
region and sets out to find its source after he notices a trickle of water coming from a
local airstrip.

The Dead :
By Joyce, James, 1882-1941
A New Year's Eve gathering in Dublin is the setting of this masterpiece.  The protagonist
offers a perspective on the lives, dreams, and feelings of the party's guests.

Death of a Salesman
By Miller, Arthur, 1915-
Presents the script of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play in which Willy Loman, a sixty-
three-year-old traveling salesman, is forced to face the reality he has avoided all his life.

The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories
By Tolstoy, Leo, graf, 1828-1910.
Contains the title story in which the life of a peaceful public official is permanently
changed by a mysterious illness, and includes "Family Happiness," "The Kreutzer
Sonata," and "Master and Man," also by the ninteenth-century Russian author.

Delta Wedding
By Welty, Eudora, 1909-
A portrait of a large Southern family living on their plantation in the Mississippi delta
land in 1923.

Dessa Rose
By Williams, Sherley Anne, 1944- Based on the life events of two historical characters in
the nineteenth century, two women, one black and one white confront their time.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
By Tyler, Anne.
Pearl Tull's children return to their home to watch their mother die, and while they are
there, they are forced to deal with the issues they have with their mother before it is too
late.

The Diviners
By Laurence, Margaret.
Morag Gunn spends her entire life trying to escape her roots and adoptive parents in the
small Canadian town of Manawaka, becoming trapped in a demeaning marriage, and then
unwed parenthood, only to find herself back where she started, and dealing with a
daughter who is, in turn, rejecting her.

A Doll's House
By Ibsen, Henrik, 1828-1906. Presents the script of the late nineteenth-century play about
Nora, a woman whose husband expects her to be his petted little songbird, but who is in
truth hiding a deceptive secret.

Don Quixote de la Mancha
By Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 1547-1616.
The epic tale of an eccentric country gentleman and his companion who set out as a
knight and squire of old to right wrongs and punish evil in sixteenth-century Spain.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
By Stevenson, Robert Louis, 1850-1894.
A respected London doctor invents a formula which turns him into an evil and ugly
person who stalks the streets at night killing people, and by the time his friends discover
his secret, it is too late.

Edward Albee's the Zoo story and the Sandbox.
By Albee, Edward, 1928-
Contains the scripts for two plays by Edward Albee, including "The Zoo Story," about a
young vagrant who is starved for company; and "The Sandbox," in which a group of
seemingly unrelated people reveal their connections.

Electra
By Sophocles
Translates Sophocles' tragedy in which Electra, daughter of Greek warrior Agamemnon
and his murderous wife Clytemnestra, yearns for her brother Orestes to avenge their
father's death by killing their mother.

Emma
By Austen, Jane, 1775-1817.
A novel of Regency England that centers upon a self-assured young lady who is
determined to arrange her life and the lives of those around her into a pattern dictated by
her romantic fancy.

The Emperor Jones,"Anna Christie," The Hairy Ape
By O'Neill, Eugene, 1888-1953.  Dewey: 812
Contains three plays about ordinary people-- an outcast prostitute in "Anna Christie," a
Pullman porter in "The Emperor Jones," and a coal stoker in "The Hairy Ape."

Endgame : a play in one act
By Beckett, Samuel, 1906-  Dewey: 842
Contains the text to two of Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett's greatest works,
a single-act play and a single-person mime sketch.

An Enemy of the People ; The Wild Duck ; Rosmersholm
By Ibsen, Henrik, 1828-1906.  Dewey: 839.8
Contains translations of three plays by nineteenth-century Norwegian playwright Henrik
Ibsen, each of which is concerned with the problem of telling the truth.

Equus
By Shaffer, Peter, 1926-  Dewey: 822
A psychiatrist's probings into the mind of a young man who has blinded six horses with a
spike, leaves him questioning his own purpose and the work he is doing.

Ethan Frome
By Wharton, Edith, 1862-1937.
A grim tale of retribution involving a discouraged New England farmer, his
hypochondriac wife, and a girl who still finds some joy in living.

Eugenie Grandet
By Balzac, Honore de, 1799-1850. In a French provincial town in the early nineteenth
century, a miser obsessed with building a fortune for his daughter's future ruins her
chances at love and joy in her youth.

The Eumenides, or, The Reconciliation
By Aeschylus.  Dewey: 882
In the third work in Aeschylus' "Oresteia" trilogy, Apollo decrees that Orestes shall stand
trial before Athena.

Excellent Women
By Pym, Barbara.
A comic novel about Mildred Lathbury, a clergyman's spinster daughter in 1950s
England who has a tendency to get involved in other people's lives.

Falconer
By Cheever, John
In the prison Falconer, a convict named Farragut struggles to maintain his identity and a
grasp of reality in a surreal world.

Falling in Place
By Beattie, Ann
An unsettling novel that traces the members of one family from a hidden love triangle to
the ten-year-old son whose problem may pull everyone down.

A Farewell to Arms
By Hemingway, Ernest, 1899-1961. An American ambulance officer serving on the
Austro-Italian front deserts to join an English nurse after the retreat of Caporetto.

The Father : a Tragedy in Three Acts ; and, A Dream Play
By Strindberg, August, 1849-1912.  Dewey: 839.72
Presents the texts of two plays by nineteenth-century Swedish playwright August
Strindberg, including "The Father," and "A Dream Play."

Father Melancholy's Daughter
By Godwin, Gail.
Abandoned by her mother at six, a young girl becomes used to putting her needs after her
clergyman father.

Fathers and Sons
By Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich, 1818-1883.
In three parts, first, the text of the novel which portrays a new type of hero, a "nihilist,"
who would represent the values of the younger generation, revealing the full breadth of
19th century Russia, second, a selection of Turgenev's letters, and third, sixteen critical
essays on the novel.

Faust --  Part one and part two
By Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749-1832.  Dewey: 832
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's eighteenth-century epic play about the struggles of a man
who strives to take advantage of everything life offers.

Fences
By Wilson, August.  Dewey: 812
Troy Maxson, a strong, hard man who has learned how to be Black and proud in the
1950s, finds the changing spirit of the 1960s hard to deal with.

A Few Green Leaves
By Pym, Barbara
A compelling portrait of a town that seems to be forgotten by time, but which is
unmistakably affected by it. Romance shares the pages with death in this engaging novel
that is the culmination of Barbara Pym's acclaimed writing career.

Fifth Business
By Davies, Robertson, 1913- The first novel of the Deptford Trilogy which centers
around the mystery of who killed Boy Staunton.

The Forsyte Saga
By Galsworthy, John, 1867-1933.
Chronicles the struggles and relationships of the wealthy Forsyte family in nineteenth-
and twentieth-century England.

Four Plays by Aristophanes : The Clouds ; The Birds ; Lysistrata ; The Frogs
By Aristophanes.  Dewey: 882.01

Frankenstein
By Shelley, Mary
A timeless, terrifying tale of one man's obsession to create life -- and the monster that
became his legacy.

The French Lieutenant's Woman
By Fowles, John, 1926-
A love story set at Lyme Regis, England in the 19th century. Charles Smithson, a young
gentleman of traditional values, is engaged to a wealthy girl. His destiny is haunted by
the independent and poor Sarah Woodruff.

Frogs
By Aristophanes.  Dewey: 882
Ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes' work in which Dionysus travels to Hades in an
effort to bring Euripdes, his favorite poet, back to life--but finds him in competition with
Aeschylus to be the cleverest poet in hell.

A Gathering of Old Men
By Gaines, Ernest J., 1933-
When Beau Boutan, a Cajun farmer, is found shot on a Louisiana plantation, the
claimants to the killing form a wall of protection around the real murderer.

Ghosts : a Family Drama in Three Acts
By Ibsen, Henrik, 1828-1906.  Dewey: 839.82
Contains two plays: "Ghosts" by Henrik Ibsen and "Miss Julia" by August Strindberg.

The Glass Menagerie
By Williams, Tennessee, 1911-1983.  Dewey: 812
Amanda, a faded southern belle, abandoned wife, and dominating mother, hopes to match
her daughter Laura with an eligible "gentleman caller" while her son Tom supports the
family. Laura, lame and painfully shy, evades her mother's schemes and reality by
retreating to the make-believe world of her glass animal collection. Tom eventually
leaves home to become a writer but is forever haunted by the memory of Laura.

Go Tell it on the Mountain
By Baldwin, James.
Describes a day in the life of several members of a Harlem fundamentalist church. The
saga of three generations of people is related through flashbacks.

Going After Cacciato
By O'Brien, Tim, 1946-
An American soldier in Vietnam decides to leave the war and simply walks out of the
jungle, with the intent of going to Paris.

The Good Soldier : a Tale of Passion
By Ford, Ford Madox, 1873-1939
American John Dowell tries to understand the complex intrigues and passions behind the
orderly Edwardian facade of the relationship he and his wife nurtured with English
couple, Captain and Leonora Ashburnham.

The Good Woman of Setzuan
By Brecht, Bertolt, 1898-1956.  Dewey: 832
Presents an English translation of German playwright Bertolt Brecht's "The Good
Woman of Setzuan" a drama about a young woman in pre-Communist China who is torn
between her own wants and needs, and obligation and practicality.

The Grapes of Wrath
By Steinbeck, John, 1902-1968.
John Steinbeck's classic novel about an Oklahoma farm family driven from their home
and forced to travel to California during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Great Expectations
By Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870.
Contains the complete text of the 1860 novel about Pip, an orphan in Victorian England
who is plucked from a life of poverty and informed he is to be educated and reared as a
gentleman; and includes a critical introduction and a chronology.

The Great Gatsby
By Fitzgerald, F. Scott (Francis Scott), 1896-1940.  Dewey: 813
The tragic story of the wealthy Jay Gatsby and his attempt to win back the love of Daisy
Buchanan.

The Green Pastures
By Connelly, Marc, 1890
A fantasy of biblical history presented in terms of the religious life of Southern blacks; it
was based on Roark Bradford's book Ol' Man Adam an' His Chillun.

Gulliver's Travels
By Swift, Jonathan, 1667-1745.  Dewey: -Fic-
An Englishman's voyages carry him to Lilliput, a land of people six inches high, and to
Brobdingnag, a land of giants.

Hamlet
By Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616.  Dewey: 822.3
This is "The Tragical History of Hamlet Prince of Denmark" and his family and friends.

The Handmaid's Tale
By Atwood, Margaret Eleanor, 1939-  Dewey: 813
Set in the near future, America has become a puritanical theocracy and Offred tells her
story as a Handmaid under the new social order.

Happy All the Time
By Colwin, Laurie.
Cousins and best friends Guido and Vincent meet the women of their dreams, Holly and
Misty, and the two couples embark on a search for lifelong love and friendship.

Hard Times
By Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870.
Contains the complete text of the nineteenth-century tale of redemption in a northern
English town beset by industrialism, and includes a critical introduction and chronology.

Heart of Darkness
By Conrad, Joseph, 1857-1924.
Marlow comes face to face with the corruption and despair that lies at the heart of human
existence when he undertakes a journey on behalf of a Belgian trading company up the
Congo River in search of the tormented white ivory trader, Kurtz.

The Heart of the Matter
By Greene, Graham, 1904-
Scobie, an assistant police commissioner in World War II West Africa, known for his
high principles and devotion to family and duty, experiences a crisis of character and
faith when he falls in love with a nineteen-year-old widow.

Hedda Gabler
By Ibsen, Henrik, 1828-1906.  Dewey: 839.82
Hedda Gabler, a woman who has married beneath herself, becomes trapped in a prison of
her own making when she tries to advance her husband's career by driving his competitor
to suicide.

Henry V
By Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616.  Dewey: 822.3
The newly crowned King Henry, fully reformed from his days as wild Prince Hal, faces
the challenge of war against the French, and includes explanations of difficult words and
passages, a plot synopsis, scene summaries, character notes, and study questions and
activities.

The Homecoming
By Pinter, Harold, 1930-  Dewey: 822
A family of men live together in a seedy house in North London. Into this slightly sinister
atmosphere the eldest son brings his wife Ruth for a visit.

The Hound of the Baskervilles
By Doyle, Arthur Conan, Sir, 1859-1930.  Dewey: -Fic-
Presents the classic mystery novel in which legendary detective Sherlock Holmes and his
assistant Dr. Watson are called to investigate the case of a family in Devonshire living
under the curse of a spectral hound.

House Made of Dawn
By Momaday, N. Scott, 1934-
Abel, a young American Indian home from a foreign war, finds himself torn between his
father's world on the reservation and the lure of industrial America.

The House of Bernarda Alba
By Garcia Lorca, Federico, 1898-1936.  Dewey: 862
Tyrannical matriarch Bernarda Alba, having just buried her second husband, declares an
eight-year period of mourning, not knowing that each of her five daughters harbors a
secret passion for Pepe el Romano, the handsomest man in the village, who is engaged to
Bernarda's oldest daughter, and having an affair with her youngest.

The House of the Seven Gables
By Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864.
Follows the Pyncheon family who lived for generations under a dead man's curse until his
death restored their house.

The House of the Spirits
By Allende, Isabel.
Presents a novel set in an unnamed Latin American country and describes the struggles,
passions, and secrets of the Trueba family that spans three generations.

The Iliad ; The Odyssey
By Homer.  Dewey: 883
Presents modern-verse translations of Homer's classic epic of the Trojan War and his
adventure story chronicling Odysseus's journey home.

The Importance of Being Earnest
By Wilde, Oscar, 1854-1900.  Dewey: 822
Jack Worthing creates a fictitious brother Earnest who lives in London to escape his dull
country routine, but finds the lie backfiring when he falls in love.

In the Lake of the Woods
By O'Brien, Tim
A politician's career is ruined overnight by revelations of his wartime participation in a
village massacre in Vietnam while his personal life is undone by the sudden
dissappearance of his wife.

Inherit the Wind
By Lawrence, Jerome, 1915-  Dewey: 812
Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee's 1951 play based on the Scopes Trial in Dayton,
Tennessee, July 1925, which opened the debate over the teaching of creationism and
evolution.
Invisible Man
By Ellison, Ralph.
In the course of his wanderings from a Southern college to New York's Harlem, an
African-American man becomes involved in a series of adventures.

 Jane Eyre
By Bronte, Charlotte, 1816-1855. When a penniless governess falls in love with the
brooding master of Thornfield, she is unaware of the tragic events that will follow.

Jasmine
By Mukherjee, Bharati.
At seventeen, Jasmine is a widow in a small village in India where she was born. Just a
few years later, she is Jane Ripplemeyer, happily pregnant by a middle-aged Iowa banker
and adoptive mother of a Vietnamese refugee.

Joe Turner's Come and Gone
By Wilson, August.  Dewey: 812
When Herald Loomis arrives at an African-American Pittsburgh boardinghouse, after
seven years' impressed labor on Joe Turner's chain gang, he is a free man--in body.

The Joy Luck Club
By Tan, Amy
In 1949 four Chinese women began meeting in San Francisco to play mah jong. They
called their gathering the Joy Luck Club. Forty years later they look back and remember.

Jude the Obscure
By Hardy, Thomas, 1840-1928.
Jude Fawley, an impoverished stonemason, aspires to the ministry and fails to fulfill the
opposite expectations of the two women he loves in Victorian society.

Julius Caesar
By Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616.  Dewey: 822.3
Shakespeare’s magnificent play about political intrigue and the meaning of leadership.

King Lear
By Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616.  Dewey: 822.3
The compelling story of a king and his three daughters, two who are evil and one who is
good.

The Kitchen God's Wife
By Tan, Amy.
Winnie and Helen have kept each other's worst secrets for more than fifty years, but now
that she believes she is dying, Helen wants to expose everything.

Lady Oracle
By Atwood, Margaret Eleanor, 1939-
When all the secrets of her life are about to be exposed, a young woman plans her own
"accidental death."

Lake Wobegon Days
By Keillor, Garrison.
Recalls the early history of Lake Wobegon and many of its memorable characters and
places first met on "A Prairie Home Companion" radio program.

A Late Divorce
By Yehoshua, Abraham B.
A family faces the divorce of its no longer-young parents. Each family member narrates
part of the story.

A Lesson Before Dying
By Gaines, Ernest J., 1933
Tells the story of a young African-American man sentenced to death for a murder he did
not commit, and a teacher who tries to impart to him his learning and pride before the
execution.

Light in August
By Faulkner, William, 1897-1962.
Joe Christmas, who appears to be white but is part African-American, kills Joanna
Burden, a spinster with whom he has had an affair. He is captured, castrated, and killed
by outraged townspeople.

The Little Foxes
By Hellman, Lillian, 1906-  Dewey: 812
Brothers Oscar and Ben Hubbard steal money from their ailing brother-in-law in order to
fund a cotton mill, only to be caught by their sister Regina who demands they give her a
seventy-five percent share of the business in exchange for keeping them out of prison.

Long Day's Journey into Night
By O'Neill, Eugene, 1888-1953.  Dewey: 812
Depicts the struggles of the Tyrone family as they face drug addiction, alcohol abuse,
tuberculosis, and lost dreams in this semi-autobiographical play.

Look Back in Anger
By Osborne, John, 1929-  Dewey: 822
An English play about Jimmy Porter, a man sadly out of synch with his times, and the
women who love him.

Lord Jim
By Conrad, Joseph, 1857-1924
A man who has been branded a coward earns the respect of the Malay people.

Lord of the Flies
By Golding, William, 1911-
After a plane crash strands them on a tropical island while the rest of the world is ravaged
by war, a group of British schoolboys attempts to form a civilized society but descends
into brutal anarchy.

Love Letters, and two Other Plays, The Golden Age and What I Did Last Summer
By Gurney, A. R. (Albert Ramsdell), 1930-
A two-person play by A.R. Gurney about two people who grow up in tune with each
other's written words.

Love Medicine
By Erdrich, Louise.
Presents the story of the Kashpaws and the Lamartines, two extended families who live
on and around a Chippewa reservation in North Dakota and of Lipsha Morrissey, a young
man who attempts to bring his wandering grandfather back to his long-suffering
grandmother with a love medicine made from goosehearts.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Poems
By Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888-1965.  Dewey: 821
A collection of poems composed by Nobel Prize-winning writer T.S. Eliot between 1909
and 1935.

The Loved One
By Waugh, Evelyn, 1903-1966.
Mr. Joyboy, an embalmer, and Aimee Thanatogenos, crematorium cosmetician, find their
romance complicated by the appearance of a young English poet.

Lysistrata
By Aristophanes.  Dewey: 882
Classic comedy (5th century BC) concerns the vow of Greek women to withhold sex
from their husbands until the men agree to end the disastrous wars between Athens and
Sparta. Exuberant battle of the sexes with underlying anti-war theme.

M. Butterfly
By Hwang, David Henry, 1957-  Dewey: 812
Presents the text of the 1988 Tony Award-winning play in which diplomat Rene
Gallimard, a captive of the French government, relives his twenty-year affair with a
beautiful, elusive Chinese actress who turned out to be not only a spy, but a man in
disguise, and includes comments by the author.

Macbeth
By Shakespeare  Dewey: 822
Classic tale of ambition, murder and retribution.

Madame Bovary
By Flaubert, Gustave, 1821-1880.
Emma Bovary, the wife of a provincial doctor, seeks to escape her boredom by indulging
in romantic fantasies and adulterous affairs.

Main Street
By Lewis, Sinclair, 1885-1951.
A young woman has difficulty adjusting to life in a small town in Minnesota.

Major Barbara
By Shaw, Bernard, 1856-1950.  Dewey: 822
A play with the theme of societal salvation and salvation of the human soul brought out
in characters representing the rich versus the poor.

A Man for All Seasons
By Bolt, Robert.  Dewey: 822
A play based on the historical relationship between Henry VIII and Thomas More whom
he appointed Bishop of Canterbury.

Man's Fate
By Malraux, Andre, 1901-1976
English translation of a 1933 French novel telling of a crucial episode in the opening days
of the Chinese Revolution.

The Master Builder
By Ibsen, Henrik, 1828-1906.  Dewey: 839.8
Presents the script of Henrik Ibsen's "The Master Builder," a play about the anguish of
architect Halvard Solness.

The Mayor of Casterbridge
Michael Henchard, an unemployed farmhand, gets drunk and sells his wife and baby
daughter, and nineteen years later, when he is the Mayor of Casterbridge, his past is
brought back to haunt him, when they return, and his success is undone.

Medea
By Euripides.  Dewey: 882
Medea, betrayed by her husband and banished from her home, plots insane and violent
revenge.

The Member of the Wedding
By McCullers, Carson, 1917-1967.
A story of black and white in the American South with Berenice Sadie Brown, a black
cook who mothers the motherless Frankie Addams, a lonely over-imaginative Georgia
girl.

The Merchant of Venice
By Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616.  Dewey: 822.3
Presents Shakespeare's comedy about a creditor demanding a pound of flesh in payment
for a defaulted debt and a lover who must choose among three caskets in a riddle game to
win the hand of a wealthy lady. Includes an introduction, notes, critical commentaries, a
performance history of the play, and other reference materials.

The Metamorphosis By Kafka, Franz, 1883-1924.
A young man wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a giant beetle-like
insect. He becomes an object of disgrace to his family and an alienated man.

Middlemarch
By Eliot, George, 1819-1880.  Dewey: 823.8
The lives of three people in a nineteenth-century provincial community become entwined
as crusader Dorothea Brooke is prevented from being with the man she loves, the
idealistic Dr. Lydgate succumbs to materialism, and religious hypocrite Bulstrode tries to
hide his past crimes.

A Midsummer Night's Dream
By Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616.  Dewey: 822.3
Midsummer Night's Dream is the bards most fantasical play in the true sense of the word.
The language is absolutely beautiful and the plot is so creative and wonderful. This is a
play that can be enjoyed over and over again for a lifetime. In some respects this is the
perfect play to introduce young people to Shakespeare and hopefully inspire a lifelong
love of his work.

The Mill on the Floss
By Eliot, George, 1819-1880.
Young Maggie Tulliver's loyalty to her beloved older brother, Tom, and to the rest of her
family, is tragically tested when she falls in love with the son of her father's bitterest
enemy.

The Misanthrope
By Moliere, 1622-1673.
Alceste is against duplicity and false flattery, but the woman he loves, Celimene, is the
embodiment of all that he abhors which makes this a comedy of manners.

Miss Julie
By Strindberg, August, 1849-1912.  Dewey: 839.72
A 1994 translation of the 1888 drama by Swedish author August Strindberg, about the
sad affair of young countess Julie and her servant, Jean.

Moby-Dick
By Melville, Herman, 1819-1891.
Captain Ahab's determination to find and kill the great white whale becomes an obsession
driving him to disaster.

Moll Flanders
By Defoe, Daniel, 1661?-1731.
Follows the heroine's adventures from seventeenth-century England to the American
colonies.

Monkey Bridge
By Cao, Lan.
Mai Nguyen, a young Vietnamese girl, immigrates to America after the end of the
Vietnam War and moves into a Vietnamese community in Virginia where she is reunited
with her mother and learns about her family's dark past.

Moon Palace
By Auster, Paul, 1947-
In August 1969, Marco Fogg, a young New Yorker, finds himself homeless and then
embarks on a journey of self-discovery when he becomes a live-in aide for an elderly
invalid and begins writing the man's life story.

More Die of Heartbreak
By Bellow, Saul.
Kenneth leaves his native Paris and moves to the Midwest to be near his beloved uncle,
Ben Crader, a world-class botanist, and together they toil through the morass of life and
relationships.

Mother Courage and Her Children
By Brecht, Bertolt, 1898-1956.
Chronicles Mother Courage as she trails the armies back and forth across Europe selling
provisions and liquor from her canteen wagon during the thirty years war.

Mrs. Dalloway
By Woolf, Virginia, 1882-1941. Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway, occupied with the last-minute
details of party preparation, finds her thoughts on a very different route through the past.

Mrs. Warren's Profession
By Shaw, Bernard, 1856-1950.  Dewey: 822
George Bernard Shaw's classic play about an unapologetic prostitute's reaction to her
daughter finding out about her questionable lifestyle. Includes Shaw's 1902 apology.

Murder in the Cathedral
By Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888-1965.  Dewey: 812
A drama of the conflict between church and state in 12th century England culminates in
the murder of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral.

Native Son
By Wright, Richard, 1908-1960.
Trapped in the poverty-stricken ghetto of Chicago's South Side, a young African-
American man finds release only in acts of violence.

Native Speaker
By Lee, Chang-rae.
Henry Park is a Korean American private investigator who, in the course of spying on a
New York City politician, comes to terms with his own sense of identity, family, and
culture.

'Night, Mother
By Norman, Marsha.  Dewey: 812
Provides the text of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about Jessie Cates, a divorced
woman whose life is stale and unprofitable, and the helpless desperation experienced by
her mother when Jessie calmly announces her intention to commit suicide.

No Exit
By Sartre, Jean Paul, 1905-  Dewey: 842
Four plays written by the French existentialist philosopher and writer addressing such
topics as hell, racism, and conduct of life.

No-no Boy
By Okada, John.
After World War II Ichiro returns home to Seattle after four years--two spent in a
Japanese internment camp, and two in prison for refusing to fight in the U.S. Army, and
finds himself rejected by still-frightened whites, as well as his own people.

Notes from Underground
By Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821-1881.
The passionate confessions of a suffering man who identifies himself as sick and spiteful.

Obasan
By Kogawa, Joy.
Naomi Nakane, a child of Japanese immigrant parents, is interned by the Canadians at the
beginning of World War II when she is five years old.

Oedipus the King
By Sophocles.  Dewey: 882
Presents the text of the play by Sophocles in which a king prophesied to kill his father
and marry his mother, and includes background information, time line of events,
explanatory notes, and a list of recommended related books.

Of Mice and Men
By Steinbeck, John, 1902-1968
Sustained by the hope of someday owning a farm of their own, two migrant laborers
arrive to work on a ranch in central California.

Oliver Twist
By Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
In nineteenth-century England, a young orphan boy lives in the squalid surroundings of a
workhouse until he becomes involved with a gang of thieves.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
By Kesey, Ken.
A rebel named Randle Patrick McMurphy is committed to a mental ward and challenges
the authority of its dictatorial head nurse. Includes line drawings by the author.

One Hundred Years of Solitude
By Garcia Marquez, Gabriel, 1928
The rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of
the Buendia family.

Oresteia
By Aeschylus.  Dewey: 883
Traces the chain of murder and revenge within the royal house of Artreus, and includes
an introduction and notes.

Othello
By Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616.  Dewey: 822.3
Iago, jealous that he has been passed over for a promotion, plots revenge against Othello,
a general in service of Venice, with tragic results.

Our Mutual Friend
By Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870.
Presents Charles Dickens's novel in which young John Harmon, supposedly murdered on
his way to London to claim his inheritance, takes a job under an assumed name and spies
on the people who are trying to secure his late father's fortune; and includes an
introduction and explanatory notes.

Our Town
By Wilder, Thornton, 1897-1975.  Dewey: 812
Portrays life in Grover's Corner, New Hampshire, in the early 1900's through the routine
daily events and the major moments in the lives of George Gibbs, Emily Webb, and their
families; and how their lives, although mundane, are touched by the universal forces of
love, despair, apathy, nature, and death.

Pale Fire
By Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899-1977.
Charles Kinbote tells the story of his life while analyzing a poem by his deceased friend,
John Shade.

Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded
By Richardson, Samuel, 1689-1761.
An novel about a teenage servant in eighteenth-century England who tries desperately to
keep her virtue as her master tirelessly attempts to despoil her.

Paradise Lost
By Milton, John, 1608-1674.  Dewey: 821
Contains the text of John Milton's epic poem "Paradise Lost" which deals with the
original sin of Adam and Eve and their temptation by the devil.

A Passage to India
By Forster, E. M. (Edward Morgan), 1879-1970.
The story about the clash between Eastern and Western cultures during British rule in
India.

Pere Goriot
By Balzac, Honore de, 1799-1850
Presents an English translation of a French novel by early nineteenth-century author
Honore Balzac in which Pere Goirot, a man who has risen from laborer to prosperous
merchant, is rejected by his daughters and his community when his fortune wanes.

Persuasion
By Austen, Jane, 1775-1817.
Anne Elliot, persuaded by family and friends that the charming and handsome Frederick
Wentworth is not worthy of her regard, questions her decision to send him away until he
returns seven years later, his circumstances much improved.

Amadeus
By Shaffer, Peter, 1926-  Dewey: 822
Presents the text of the play "Amadeus," based upon the life of eighteenth-century
composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Phedre
By Racine, Jean, 1639-1699.  Dewey: 842
An English verse translation of the myth of Phedre, the story of the dying queen's
obsessive love for her stepson, Hippolytus.

The Piano Lesson
By Wilson, August.  Dewey: 812
Dramatizes the struggles of an African-American family as they consider selling a prized
possession, an ornate upright piano, in order to buy the tract of land upon which they
were once enslaved.

The Picture of Dorian Gray
By Wilde, Oscar
Story about a youth of exceptional beauty who gets his wish to remain untouched by the
passage of time when it is arranged that his portrait will age in his place.

The Plague
By Camus, Albert, 1913-1960.
A coastal city in Algeria is struck by bubonic plague and is shut off from the world for
months.

Pocho
By Villarreal, Jose Antonio. During the Depression-era in California, Richard, a young
Mexican American, experiences a conflict between loyalty to the traditions of his family's
past and attraction to new ideas.

The Portrait of a Lady
By James, Henry, 1843-1916.
Henry James's 1881 novel, which follows young American Isabel Archer from innocence
to unhappy marriage.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
By Joyce, James, 1882-1941
An autobiographical novel depicting the childhood, adolescence, and early manhood of
Stephen Dedalus.

Praisesong for the Widow
By Marshall, Paule, 1929-
Avey Johnson, a black, middle-class widow, experiences some almost supernatural
incidents while on a cruise and is driven to a rediscovery and reassessment of her origins.

Pride and Prejudice
By Austen, Jane, 1775-1817.
Presents Jane Austen's 1813 novel about the fervent attempts of a gentlewoman to find
husbands for her five daughters, which lead to the questionable pairing of the prejudiced
Elizabeth with the proud Mr. Darcy.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
By Spark, Muriel.  Dewey:
A teacher at a girls' school in Edinburgh, Scotland, Miss Jean Brodie was a woman of
ideas, wit, and charm who had a lover. The students she chose as her special friends were
called the "Brodie set." One of them would betray her.

Pygmalion
By Shaw, Bernard, 1856-1950.  Dewey: 822
Presents the text to George Bernard Shaw's classic play "Pygmalion" about a professor of
languages who sets out to transform a Cockney girl into a sophisticated lady, and
contains explanatory and textual notes, chronology and background information on the
author, and a critical analysis of Shaw's work.

Rabbit is Rich
By Updike, John
Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom's comfortable new prosperity is threatened by the return of his
son, and reminders of a former romance.

Ragtime

By Doctorow, E. L., 1931- The lives of three remarkable families become entwined with Henry Ford, Harry
Houdini, J.P. Morgan, Theodore Dreiser, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata at the turn
of the century.

The Rainbow
By Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert), 1885-1930
The story of three generations of a Nottingham family whose love affairs move backward
and forward across the years.

A Raisin in the Sun
By Hansberry, Lorraine, 1930-1965.  Dewey: 812
A three-act play concerned with the tensions in a middle- class African American family
living on Chicago's Southside in the 1950s.

The Real Thing
By Stoppard, Tom.  Dewey: 822
Life imitates art when Charlotte, an actress appearing in a play about a faltering marriage
written by her husband Henry, learns that Henry is having an affair with the wife of her
co-star, Max.

Red and Black
By Stendhal, 1783-1842.  Dewey: 843
Presents a contemporary colloquial English translation of the nineteenth-century novel
based on the 1827 trial of Antoine Berthet, a young man whose dismay over being denied
entry into the seminary led him to murder; and includes background and sources, and a
sampling of critical commentaries.

Redburn
By Melville, Herman, 1819-1891.
Young Wellingborough Redburn's pastoral innocence is vanquished forever after he
experiences the bullying and brutality of life aboard a packet ship, and is introduced to
the squalor of nineteenth-century London and Liverpool.

The Remains of the Day
By Ishiguro, Kazuo, 1954-
The life of Stevens, an aging English butler, changes after three decades of service to the
same man.

The Return of the Native
By Hardy, Thomas, 1840-1928.
Clym Yeobright, tired of Paris city life, returns to Egdon Heath to open a school. There
he marries a pleasure-loving girl and tragedy follows.

Rhinoceros
By Ionesco, Eugene.  Dewey: 842
A collection of three modern plays by the master of the absurd and member of the French
Academy.

Riddley Walker
By Hoban, Russell.
Follows the adventures of Riddley Walker, a rebel, artist, and agent of change in post
nuclear-holocaust England.

Romeo and Juliet
By Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616.  Dewey: 822.3
Presents Shakespeare's play of tragic love between Romeo and Juliet, adapted to make
the themes, plot, and characters more understandable; and includes scene summaries, as
well as background to the story and the times in which it was written.

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead
By Stoppard, Tom.  Dewey: 822
Presents the play of Hamlet as seen through the eyes of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Sabbatical : a Romance
By Barth, John, 1930-
Teacher Susan and her ex-CIA operative-turned-expose-writer husband Fenwick Turner,
who try to make life decisions while on a sabbatical voyage on the Chesapeake Bay

The Scarlet Letter
By Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864.
In seventeenth century New England, Hester Prynne is condemned by Puritan law to
wear a scarlet "A" as a symbol of the sin she has committed.

The School for Scandal
By Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 1751-1816.  Dewey: 822
Presents eighteenth-century playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan's comedy in which a
rich man attempts to determine the true natures of his two nephews--one of whom is
noted for his decency, the other for his vices--in order to choose a deserving, charitable
heir.

The Sea-gull
By Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 1860-1904.  Dewey: 891.72
A translation of Anton Chekhov's 1913 play which revolves around the question of the
nature of art and love, reflecting the debate in Chekhov's day about art and the role of the
artist in society. Includes the short, humorous piece, "The Tragedian in Spite of Himself."

Separate Tables
By Rattigan, Terence.  Dewey: 822
Presents two linked one-act plays set in a shabby residential hotel, the first about a lonely
divorcee who looks up her ex-husband, and the second about a repressed young spinster
who offers moral support to a man accused of improper sexual behavior.

Shakespeare's Henry IV. Parts one and two
Political intrigue in England.

The Shipping News
By Proulx, Annie.
Quoyle and his two emotionally disturbed daughters return to the family ancestral home
in Newfoundland to start new lives.

Silas Marner
By Eliot, George, 1819-1880.
Embittered by a false accusation and disappointed in friendship and love, the weaver
Silas Marner retreats into a life alone with his loom and his gold. Fate steals his gold and
replaces it with a golden-haired foundling child.

Sister Carrie
By Dreiser, Theodore, 1871-1945.
The story of a young woman from Wisconsin who goes to Chicago, becomes an actress,
marries and goes to New York, and when her husband loses his job, goes onstage again.

Six Characters in Search of an Author
By Pirandello, Luigi, 1867-1936.  Dewey: 852
Presents the text of the early twentieth-century play in which six characters, family
members caught up in their own human drama, come to a theater and demand that the
manager and his actors perform their life story.

Six Degrees of Separation : a play
By Guare, John.  Dewey: 812
A tragicomedy of race, class, and manners, about the Kittredges, a wealthy New York
couple who are taken in by a hustler who claims to be the son of actor Sidney Poitier.

Snow Falling on Cedars
By Guterson, David.
When a newspaper journalist covers the trial of a Japanese American accused of murder,
he must come to terms with his own past.

Song of Solomon
By Morrison, Toni
Follows the life of Macon Dead, Jr., the son of the richest black family in a midwestern
town, as he leaves home on a quest for personal freedom.

Sons and Lovers
By Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert), 1885-1930.  Dewey: 823
Paul Morel, a painter from a British working-class family, is unable to choose between
his possessive mother and two young beautiful women.

The Sound and the Fury
By William Faulkner :
Faulkner's fourth novel (1929), is his first true masterpiece. Depicting the decline of the
once aristocratic Compson family, the novel is composed of four stream-of-
consciousness narratives, each told by a different character with his or her own way of
relating events.

Stone Angel
By O'Connell, Carol, 1947-
New York police sergeant Kathleen Mallory sets off a chain reaction of violence when
she returns to her small hometown in Louisiana in an attempt to solve the mystery of her
mother's murder years earlier.

The Stranger
By Camus, Albert, 1913-1960.
Caught in the grip of forces he does not understand, a quiet, ordinary clerk in Algiers
commits a murder.

The Street of Crocodiles
By Schulz, Bruno, 1892-1942.
An autobiographical novel written in the first person recalling certain events and
experiences of Polish author Bruno Schulz's own childhood in Drogobych, Poland before
the Nazi occupation of World War Two.

A Streetcar Named Desire
By Williams, Tennessee, 1911-1983.  Dewey: 812
Presents in three acts the famous play by Tennessee Williams about Blanche DuBois, a
woman whose romantic illusions cause her to lose touch with reality.

Sula
By Morrison, Toni.
Traces the lives of two African-American heroines from their growing up together in a
small Ohio town, to their sharply divergent paths of womanhood, to their ultimate
confrontation and reconciliation.

The Sun Also Rises
By Hemingway, Ernest, 1899-1961.
A group of American and British expatriates living in Paris go on an excursion to
Pamplona, Spain.

A Tale of Two Cities
By Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870.
Charles Dickens' 1859 historical novel set in Paris and London during the French
Revolution, in which a French nobleman, Charles Darnay, renounces his position and
leaves his country, then returns during the Terror to save the life of a servant, putting
himself in grave danger.

The Taming of the Shrew
By Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616.  Dewey: 822.3
Presents the text of the play about a man who sets out to tame his shrewish wife, and
includes an essay on the play in performance, annotated bibliographies, and other
reference information.

Tartuffe : comedy in five acts, 1669
By Moliere, 1622-1673.  Dewey: 842
Presents a comedy in five acts about religious hypocrisy among seventeenth-century
French society.

The Tempest
By Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616.  Dewey: 822.3
The bard’s final play, containing his mature reflections on life, concerns Prospero, a
philosophical old magician, and Miranda, his lovely daughter, who dwell in peaceful
isolation on an enchanted island. When a shipwreck brings old enemies to shore, the
stage is set for a masterly drama of comedy, romance, and reconciliation.

Their Eyes Were Watching God
By Hurston, Zora Neale.
An African-American woman searches for a fulfilling relationship through two loveless
marriages and finally finds it in the person of Tea Cake, an itinerant laborer and gambler.

Things Fall Apart
By Achebe, Chinua.
Set in an Ibo village in Nigeria, the novel recreates pre-Christian tribal life and shows
how the coming the white man led to the breaking up of the old ways.

Three Plays : Desire Under the Elms ; Strange Interlude ; Mourning Becomes
Electra
By O'Neill, Eugene, 1888-1953.  Dewey: 812
A collection of three plays by Eugene O'Neill.

To Kill a Mockingbird
By Lee, Harper.
Presents a fortieth anniversary edition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel in which Scout
Finch, the young daughter of a local attorney in the Deep South during the 1930s, tells of
her father's defense of an African-American man charged with the rape of a white girl.

To the Lighthouse
By Woolf, Virginia.
Describes a party gathered at a house on the Scottish coast, in later years only caretakers
have the house, and in the last part of the story the house is again filled with surviving
family members.

Tom Jones
By Henry Fielding
Nearly two and a half centuries after its publication, the adventures of the rambunctious
and randy Tom Jones still makes for great reading

The Tortilla Curtain
By Boyle, T. Coraghessan.
Tells the explosive story of yuppies, Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher, a stay-at-home dad
and his real-estate whiz wife, and their clash with Candido and America Rincon, illegal
aliens who have crossed into California from Mexico and are living in a camp awaiting
the birth of their baby.

The Tragedy of Dr. Faustus
By Marlowe, Christopher, 1564-1593.  Dewey: 822
Presents the text of sixteenth-century dramatist Christopher Marlowe's story of ambitious
scholar Dr. Faustus and his bargain with the devil.

The Trial
By Kafka, Franz, 1883-1924.  Dewey: 833
Joseph K. is suddenly arrested and must spend the rest of his life fighting a charge against
him about which he can get no information.

Trifles
By Glaspell, Susan, 1882-1948.  Dewey: 812

Tristram Shandy
By Sterne, Laurence, 1713-1768.  Dewey: 823
Presents the eighteenth-century comic novel in which Tristram Shandy, the narrator,
attempts to tell the story of his life but becomes totally bogged down in tales of his
eccentric family.

The Turn of the Screw
By James, Henry, 1843-1916.
Presents the nineteenth-century short story in which a governess believes her two
charges, ten-year-old Miles and eight-year-old Flora, are being haunted by the ghosts of
former servants.

Twelfth Night
By Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616.  Dewey: 822.3
Presents the text of "Twelfth Night," in which Viola, disguised as a man, falls in love
with Duke Orsino; while Olivia, the object of Orsino's attentions, is attracted to Viola,
believing her to be male.

Typical American
By Jen, Gish.
Chronicles the rise and sway of fortune in the life of a Chinese immigrant family.

Uncle Tom's Cabin
By Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 1811-1896.
Presents Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel about an elderly slave who maintains his
human dignity in the face of cruelty, suffering, and death; and includes a Stowe time line,
a historical time line, critical excerpts, discussion questions, and other study tools.

Vanity Fair
By Thackeray, William Makepeace, 1811-1863.
A satirical look at Victorian manners recounting the experiences of two finishing school
graduates, Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley.

Victory : an Island Tale
By Conrad, Joseph, 1857-1924
A mysterious drifter named Axel Heyst rescues a "bad girl" from a seedy tropical hotel
and takes her home to Samburan, his own island in the East Indies. Three intruders
follow them and bring horror, death, and a strange, haunting victory.

Volpone
By Jonson, Ben, 1573?-1637.  Dewey: 822
Presents Ben Jonson's play "Volpone," in which a wealthy old man claims to be dying in
order to solicit bribes from greedy acquaintances who hope to inherit his fortune; and
includes explanatory and contextual notes, an introduction on the author, the play, and its
stage history, and Jonson's 1607 defense of literature.

Waiting
By Jin, Ha, 1956
Lin Kong struggles to balance his life between the two women he loves and the country
that is trying to rule his life.

Waiting for Godot
By Beckett, Samuel, 1906-  Dewey: 842
Theatrically entertaining "Waiting for Godot" features two readers who know how to
parry and spare their lines for best effect.

The Warden
By Trollope, Anthony, 1815-1882.  Dewey: 823
Mr. Harding, a clergyman of great personal integrity, becomes the target of young
zealous reformer,John Bold, who accuses Harding of misusing church funds.

Washington Square
By James, Henry, 1843-1916.
Catherine Sloper, an heiress favored by neither beauty nor brilliance, finds herself torn
between an attractive suitor and her adored father who believes the young man to be a
fortune hunter.

Watch on the Rhine
By Hellman, Lillian, 1906-  Dewey: 812
A three-act play in which a German man flees Hitler's Germany to find peace and
freedom in the United States with his wife's family.

Watch That Ends the Night
By MacLennan, Hugh.
George and Catherine Stewart share the worry of Catherine's illness, which could cause
her death at any time, and the memory of Jerome Martell, Catherine's first husband and
George's closest friend. Martel, a brilliant doctor passionately concerned with social
justice, is presumed to have died in a Nazi prison camp.

Watership Down
By Adams, Richard, 1920-
A group of hardy Berkshire rabbits share many adventures together as they search for a
safe place to establish a new warren after the destruction of their community.

The Way of the World and Other Plays
By Congreve, William  Dewey: 822
A comic play written by William Congreve in 1700. Mirabell, the hero, contrives to
marry his true love Millamant despite the opposition of Lady Wishford, Millimant's aunt.
In order to gain access to Millimant, Mirabell pretends to be in love with Lady Wishford,
and he succeeds by this ruse in winning her niece's hand.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
By Albee, Edward, 1928-  Dewey: 812
Dramatizes a night of warfare between a professor and his wife, the daughter of the
college president, as witnessed by a young couple newly arrived on campus.

Wide Sargasso Sea
By Rhys, Jean.
Story of a young woman in the Caribbean whose family's past will be used against her by
her cold-hearted and prideful husband, Rochester.

The Wild Duck
By Ibsen, Henrik, 1828-1906.  Dewey: 839.8
An adaptation of ninteenth-century Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen's play that
illustrates the destructive impact on an average family of a neurotic fanatic who fails to
understand the consequences of his behavior.

The Wings of the Dove
By James, Henry, 1843-1916.
Milly Theale travels to London in an attempt to forget about her deadly illness, but she
soon realizes that no matter what happens, she cannot escape the circumstances fate has
thrown at her.

Winter in the Blood
By Welch, James, 1940-
A tale narrated by a sensitive young man living on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana
and his haunting memories of his once proud heritage.

The Winter's Tale
By Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616.  Dewey: 822.3
King Leontes of Bohemia suspects his wife, Hermione, and his friend, Polixenes, of
betraying him. When he forces Polixenes to flee for his life, Leontes sets in motion a
chain of events that lead to death, a ferocious bear, an infant left in the snow, young love,
and a statue coming to life.

Winterset : play in three acts
By Anderson, Maxwell, 1888-1959.  Dewey: 812
Mio, searching for proof that his father was innocent of the crime for which he was
executed, meets and falls in love with Miriam, a strange girl whose brother Garth might
have saved Mio's father but was afraid to testify on the condemned man's behalf.

Wise Blood
By O'Connor, Flannery.
After his release from the army at age twenty-two, Hazel Motes of Eastrod, Tennessee
comes to a Southern city where he falls under the spell of Asa Hawks, a blind street
preacher who is led around by his daughter, Sabbath Lily.

Wuthering Heights
By Bronte, Emily, 1818-1848.
Forced by a storm to spend the night at the home of the somber Heathcliff, Mr.
Lockwood uncovers a tale of terror and hatred on the Yorkshire moors.

Zoot Suit and Other Plays
By Valdez, Luis.  Dewey: 812
Based on the actual Sleepy Lagoon murder case and the zoot suit riots of 1940s Los
Angeles. Henry Reyna is the leader of a group of Mexican-Americans being sent to San
Quentin without substantial evidence for the death of a man at Sleepy Lagoon. As part of
the defense committee, Alice Bloomfield and George Shearer  fight the blatant
miscarriage of justice for the freedom of Henry and his friends.