What Are Books All English Lit Majors Should Have Read?

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I have a big, scary, hairy goal for 2018:

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

14) John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress

15) Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest

16) Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice

17) Charles Dickens' Great Expectations

18) Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange

19) John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath

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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