| c 8-1100 | Beowulf | |
| c 13– | Sir Gawain and the Green Knight | |
| 1485 | Morte D’Arthur | Sir Thomas Mallory |
| 1588 | Tamburlaine | Christopher Marlowe |
| 1590 | The Faerie Queen | Edmund Spenser |
| 1599 | Much Ado About Nothing | William Shakespeare |
| 1606 | Volpone | Ben Johnson |
| 1606 | King Lear | William Shakespeare |
| 1607 | Macbeth | William Shakespeare |
| 1611 | The Tempest | William Shakespeare |
| 1623 | As You Like It | William Shakespeare |
| 1637 | New English Canaan | Thomas Morton |
| 1647 | Of Plymouth Plantation | William Bradford |
| 1662 | The Day of Doom | Michael Wigglesworth |
| 1667 | Pardise Lost | John Milton |
| 1679 | Pilgrim’s Progress | John Bunyan |
| 1682 | Narrative of Captivity | Mary Rolandson |
| 1693 | The Old Bachelor | William Congreve |
| 1694 | The Double Dealer | William Congreve |
| 1695 | Love For Love | William Congreve |
| 1700 | The Way of the World | William Congreve |
| 1719 | Robinson Crusoe | Daniel Defoe |
| 1722 | A Journal of the Plague Year | Daniel Defoe |
| 1729 | A Modest Proposal | Jonathon Swift |
| 1748 | Clarissa | Samuel Richardson |
| 1749 | Tom Jones | Henry Fielding |
| 1764 | The Castle of Otranto | Horace Walpole |
| 1766 | The Vicar of Wakefield | Oliver Goldsmith |
| 1770 | Tristram Shandy | Laurence Sterne |
| 1773 | She Stoops to Conquer | Oliver Goldsmith |
| 1778 | Eveline | Fanny Burney |
| 1784 | Elegiac Sonnets | Charlotte Turner |
| 1786 | Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect | Robert Burns |
| 1786 | Poems | William Freneau |
| 1788 | Emmeline | Charlotte Turner |
| 1790 | Poems | Sarah Wentworth Morton |
| 1791 | Charlotte Temple | Susanna Rowlandson |
| 1794 | Book of Urizen | William Blake |
| 1798 | Lyrical Ballads | Wordsworth and Coleridge |
| 1813 | Poems | William Cullen Bryant |
| 1818 | The Heart of Midlothian | Sir Walter Scott |
| 1818 | Childe Harolde | Lord Byron |
| 1818 | The Fall of Hyperion | John Keats |
| 1819 | Rip Van Winkle | Washington Irving |
| 1819 | The Legend of Sleepy Hollow | Washington Irving |
| 1820 | Prometheus Unbound | Percy Bysse Shelley |
| 1824 | Don Juan | Lord Byron |
| 1826 | Last of the Mohicans | James Fenimoore Cooper |
| 1827 | Hope Leslie | Catharine Maria Sedgwick |
| 1830 | Poems | John Greenleaf Whittier |
| 1836 | Nature | Ralph Waldo Emerson |
| 1841 | The Big Bear of Arkansas | TB Thorpe |
| 1847 | Wuthering Heights | Emily Bronte |
| 1847 | Evangeline | Henry Wadsworth Longfellow |
| 1849 | Stories | Edgar Allan Poe |
| 1850 | David Copperfield | Charles Dickens |
| 1851 | House of Seven Gables | Nathaniel Hawthorne |
| 1851 | Moby Dick | Herman Melville |
| 1852 | Uncle Tom’s Cabin | Harriet Beecher Stowe |
| 1854 | Ruth Hall | Fanny Fern |
| 1855 | Fra Lippo Lippi | Robert Browning |
| 1855 | A Gramarian’s Funeral | Robert Browning |
| 1855 | Leaves of Grass | Walt Whitman |
| 1859 | A Tale of Two Cities | Charles Dickens |
| 1860 | Poems | Emily Dickenson |
| 1860 | Circumstance | Harriet Prescott Spofford |
| 1861 | Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl | Harriet Anne Jacobs |
| 1865 | Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland | Lewis Carroll |
| 1866 | Wives and Daughters | Elizabeth Gaskell |
| 1866 | A Long Fatal Love Chase | Louisa May Alcott |
| 1870 | Daniel Deronda | George Eliot |
| 1871 | Through the Looking Glass | Lewis Carroll |
| 1871 | Desperate Remedies | Thomas Hardy |
| 1872 | Under the Greenwood Tree | Thomas Hardy |
| 1876 | The Adventures of Tom Sawyer | Mark Twain |
| 1878 | The Return of the Native | Thomas Hardy |
| 1883 | For the Major | Constance Fennimore Cooper |
| 1883 | Life Among the Paiutes | Sarah Winnemucca |
| 1884 | A Country Doctor | Sarah Orne Jewett |
| 1885 | The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | Mark Twain |
| 1885 | The Squater and the Don | Maria Ruiz de Burton |
| 1855 | Song of Hiawatha | Henry Wadsworth Longfellow |
| 1885 | The Rise of Silas Lapham | William Dean Howells |
| 1886 | The Mayor of Casterbridge | Thomas Hardy |
| 1887 | The Woodlanders | Thomas Hardy |
| 1889 | The Awakening | Kate Chopin |
| 1889 | The Conjure Woman | Charles W. Chesnutt |
| 1889 | The Marrow of Tradition | Charles W. Chesnutt |
| 1890 | Stories | Charlotte Perkins Gilman |
| 1891 | Stories | Ambrose Pierce |
| 1893 | Maggie: A Girl of the Streets | Stephen Crane |
| 1896 | George’s Mother | Stephen Crane |
| 1896 | Ode to Ethiopia | Paul Laurence Dunbar |
| 1896 | Jude the Obscure | Thomas Hardy |
| 1897 | Poems | Edwin Arlington Robinson |
| 1900 | Sister Carrie | Theodore Dreiser |
| 1901 | Lord Jim | Joseph Conrad |
| 1901 | Kim | Rudyard Kipling |
| 1903 | The Land of the Little Rain | Mary Austin |
| 1903 | The Souls of Black Folk | W.E.B. DuBois |
| 1906 | The Jungle | Upton Sinclair |
| 1906 | Peter Pan | J. M. Barrie |
| 1910 | Howards End | E.M. Forster |
| 1910 | The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock | T.S. Eliot |
| 1912 | The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man | James Weldon Johnson |
| 1913 | Sons and Lovers | D.H. Lawrence |
| 1913 | O’Pioneers | Willa Cather |
| 1914 | Dubliners | James Joyce |
| 1916 | Poems | Amy Lowell |
| 1916 | A Jury of Her Peers | Susan Glaspell |
| 1916 | A Trifle | Susan Glaspell |
| 1920 | A Few Figs From Thistles | Edna St. Vincent Millay |
| 1920 | Kora in Hell | William Carlos Williams |
| 1920 | Beyond the Horizon | Eugene O’Neil |
| 1920 | This Side of Paradise | F. Scott Fitzgerald |
| 1922 | Ulysses | James Joyce |
| 192- | Poems | ee cummings |
| 1922 | Rootabago Stories | Carl Sandburg |
| 1923 | Spring and All | William Carlos Williams |
| 1923 | The Great American Novel | William Carlos Williams |
| 1923 | Poems | Wallace Stevens |
| 1923 | Cane | Jane Toomer |
| 1925 | The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald |
| 1926 | The Sun Also Rises | Ernest Hemingway |
| 1928 | Orlando | Virginia Woolf |
| 1928 | Lady Chatterly’s Lover | D.H. Lawrence |
| 1928 | Quicksand | Nella Larsen |
| 1929 | The Sound and the Fury | William Faulkner |
| 1929 | A Farewell to Arms | Ernest Hemingway |
| 193- | Poems | Langston Hughes |
| 1930 | Memories of an Infantry Officer | Seigfried Sassoon |
| 1930 | Alison’s House | Susan Glaspell |
| 1931 | Good Earth | Pearl S. Buck |
| 1931 | Mourning Becomes Electra | Eugene O’Neil |
| 1932 | Black Elk Speaks | Black Elk |
| 1933 | Southern Road | Sterling Brown |
| 1934 | Tender Is the Night | F. Scott Fitzgerald |
| 1936 | Absalom, Absalom! | William Faulkner |
| 1939 | The Grapes of Wrath | John Steinbeck |
| 194- | Poems | Carlos Bolosan |
| 194- | Poems | HD |
| 194- | Poems | Marriane Moore |
| 1940 | For Whom the Bell Tolls | Ernest Hemingway |
| 1940 | You Can’t Go Home Again | Thomas Wolfe |
| 1941 | A Curtain of Greene | Eudora Welty |
| 1942 | Dust Tracks on a Road | Zora Neal Hurston |
| 1944 | Collected Stories | Katherine Anne Porter |
| 1945 | Black Boy | Richard Wright |
| 1946 | The Iceman Cometh | Eugene O’Neil |
| 1946 | All the King’s Men | Robert Penn Warren |
| 1946 | Poems | Robert Penn Warren |
| 195- | Poems | Charles Olson |
| 1951 | The Old Man and the Sea | Ernest Hemingway |
| 1952 | Wise Blood | Flannery O’Connor |
| 1952 | East of Eden | John Steinbeck |
| 1953 | The Waking | Theodore Roethke |
| 1953 | The Long Goodbye | Raymond Chandler |
| 1954 | Poems | Randall Jarell |
| 1955 | A Good Man Is Hard to Find | Flannery O’Connor |
| 1955 | A Journey to Love | William Carlos Williams |
| 1955 | The Quiet American | Graham Greene |
| 1955 | Howl | Allen Ginsberg |
| 1955 | Cat on a Hot Tin Roof | Tennessee Williams |
| 1956 | Poems | Elizabeth Bishop |
| 1957 | Poems | Richard Wilbur |
| 1960 | The Country Girls | Edna O’Brien |
| 1960 | Poems | Robert Lowell |
| 1962 | The Golden Notebook | Doris Lessing |
| 1962 | One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest | Ken Kesey |
| 1962 | Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems | William Carlos Williams |
| 1963 | Paterson | William Carlos Williams |
| 1963 | Poems | Robert Creeley |
| 1963 | Poems | Sylvia Plath |
| 1964 | Sometimes a Great Notion | Ken Kesey |
| 1964 | Herzog | Saul Bellow |
| 1964 | Dream Songs | John Berryman |
| 1965 | Everything that Rises Must Converge | Flannery O’Connor |
| 1966 | Wide Sargasso Sea | Jean Rhys |
| 1967 | Poems | Anne Sexton |
| 1968 | King, Queen, Knave | Vladimir Nabokov |
| 1968 | The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test | Tom Wolfe |
| 1968 | Stories | Donald Barthelme |
| 1968 | Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone | James Baldwin |
| 197- | Poems | Denise Levertov |
| 1970 | Poems | Robert Hayden |
| 1970 | Poems | Michael S. Harper |
| 1971 | Old Times | Harold Pinter |
| 1971 | Pilgrim at Tinker Creek | Annie Dillard |
| 1971 | The Lives of Women and Girls | Alice Munroe |
| 1972 | Gorilla My Love | Toni Cade Bambera |
| 1972 | Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 | Hunter S. Thompson |
| 1972 | The Optimist’s Daughter | Eudora Welty |
| 1973 | Gravity’s Rainbow | Thomas Pynchon |
| 1973 | Poems | A. R. Ammons |
| 1973 | Poems | Gallway Kinnel |
| 1973 | Collected Works | Grace Paley |
| 1973 | Breakfast of Champions | Kurt Vonnegut |
| 1974 | High Windows | Philip Larkin |
| 1974 | Poems | Adrienne Rich |
| 1974 | The Woman Warrior | Maxine |
| 1975 | Turtle Island | Gary Snyder |
| 1975 | The Changing Light at Sandover | James Merrill |
| 1976 | Poems | John Ashberry |
| 1976 | Love Story | Erich Segal |
| 1977 | Song of Solomon | Toni Morrison |
| 1977 | Ceremony | Leslie Mormon Silko |
| 1979 | The Stories of | John Cheever |
| 1980 | Waiting for the Barbarians | J. M. Coetzee |
| 1981 | What We Talk About When We Talk About Love | Raymond Carver |
| 1981 | Midnight’s Children | Salman Rushdie |
| 1981 | Poems | Simon J Ortiz |
| 1982 | The Color Purple | Alice Walker |
| 1982 | The Real Thing | Tom Stoppard |
| 1982 | Poems | Cathy Song |
| 1984 | Love Medicine | Louise Erdich |
| 1984 | Cathedral | Raymond Carver |
| 1987 | Beloved | Toni Morrison |
| 1987 | Where I’m Calling From | Raymond Carver |
| 1988 | Speed-the-Plow | David Mamet |
| 1988 | Bad Behavior | Mary Gaitskill |
| 1990 | The Things They Carried | Tim O’Brien |
| 1991 | Woman Hollering Creek | Sandra Cisneros |
| 1993 | Poems | Louise Gluck |
| 1993 | Arcadia | Tom Stoppard |
| 1994 | The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven | Sherman Alexie |
| 1995 | Billy Collins | Poems |
| 1995 | Poems | Li-Young |
| 1996 | Infinite Jest | David Foster Wallace |
| 1997 | Underworld | Don DeLillo |
| 1999 | Interpreter of Maladies | Jhumpa Lahi |
| 2000 | City of God | E. L. Doctorow |
| 2000 | Fasting, Feasting | Anita Desai |
| 2002 | Coast of Ethiopia | Tom Stoppard |
| 2006 | The Beet Queen | Louise Erdich |
| 2008 | Lavinia | Ursula K Le Guin |
| 2008 | A Mercy | Toni Morrison |
| 2009 | A Gate at the Stairs | Lorrie Moore |
| 2009 | The Plague of Doves | Louise Erdich |
sydneyreadseverything 
Infinite jest by David foster Wallace
where’d you get the list?
Koala, I will add Infinite Jest!
Simone, good question. I compiled it myself using Norton Anthologies of English and American Literature as guides. I also threw in a few things I have always wanted to read. For example, Kurt Vonnegut does not appear in the Norton Anthology of American Literature! I have been meaning to read Breakfast of Champions, so I added it.
You have Gravity’s Rainbow, that’s all that matters. If you’d like, add Underworld by Don DeLillo and Portnoy’s Complaint by Phillip Roth.
So this means that you haven’t read ANY Fitzgerald before? How on earth do you get to be 27 and not have read, at the very least, Gatsby? I’m astonished.
PS please add ‘Sometimes A Great Notion’ by Ken Kesey. It’s wonderful, you will love it.
Also, is there no Steinbeck on your list because you’ve read it all? If it’s just an omission, you should add ‘East of Eden’, because it’s probably the most important, and ‘Travels With Charley’, because it’s thoroughly enjoyable.
Keep it together, Claire. I have read Gatsby twice. I didn’t like it either time. Everyone and their dog claims to love that book so, I put it on the list cuz I want to give it one last shot.
There’s a couple other things on the list that are rereads for me.
I’m not sure how Steinbeck got left off. I will remedy that when I update the list, which should be today or tomorrow.
Also, add some Hunter S. Thompson.
Fear and Loathing and Rum Diary are the most accessible.
I have read Fear and Loathing. I’ll look into adding something else by him. Good idea.
Electric kool-aid acid test by Tom wolfe
yes add Electric Kool-aid Acid Test, but then seriously, add some Kesey… Acid Test is about him…