What Are Books All English Lit Majors Should Have Read?
Write a novel.
I have a nugget of an idea and a nugget of a character: A recent college graduate who is giving herself a gap year before graduate school. I picture her as an English literature major and want to bring that body of knowledge to her consciousness.I may have some reading to do myself. I minored in English many, many years ago but the classics and (shamefully?) contemporary reading are not always top of mind.
Help me build her intellectual library. Weigh in:
Here's the start based on my favorites and some Google searches; I'll add your suggestions as they come:
1) Zora Neal Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God
2) James Joyce's Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and however much of Finnegan's Wake as you can get through before you feel like drinking
3) The Harry Potter series (obviously)
4) F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby and This Side of Paradise
5) Richard Wright: Native Son
6) Henry David Thoreau's Walden
7) Maus
8) Virginia Wolf's Mrs. Dalloway
9) Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
10) Tennesee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire
11) Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis
12) Voltaire's Candide
13) Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlett Letter
17) Charles Dickens' Great Expectations
18) Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange
20) Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms
21) Jack Kerouac's On the Road
22) Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale
23) Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca
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