At some point, in 1992 or so, I decided to start reading classics. This, inevitably led to a list. I started with a list my sister picked up from the library, but I quickly became disenchanted with many of the selections and determined to come up with my own list. Some friends found out about it and asked if they could “join.” This led to Carpe Libra, a now defunct book club centered on a list of classics known as the Carp 500. I read the entire list. Then, in an effort to restructure the list to include less heavy stuff and more popular classics, we revised it, deleting 120 or so works and adding new ones. I also read this entire list.
Here is the combined list of 626 works. Works on the old list are in blue, works on the revised list are in red. The remaining works appeared on both lists.
Douglas Adams
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Richard Adams
- Watership Down
Aesop
- Fables
Louisa May Alcott
- Little Women
Horatio Alger
- Ragged Dick
Hervey Allen
- Anthony Adverse
Stephen E. Ambrose
- D-Day
- Undaunted Courage
Hans Christian Anderson
- Fairy Tales
Sherwood Anderson
- Winesburg, Ohio
Sir Robert Anderson
- The Silence of God
Aristophanes
- Lysistrata
Isaac Asimov
- Fantastic Voyage
Associated Press
- The Instant It Happened
Richard & Florence Atwater
- Mr. Popper’s Penguins
John Aubrey
- Brief Lives
Augustine
- Confessions
Jame Austen
- Emma
- Mansfield Park
- Northanger Abbey
- Persuasion
- Pride and Prejudice
- Sense and Sensibility
Francis Bacon
- Essays
Roland Herbert Bainton
- Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther
Honore de Balzac
- Le Pere Goriot
William & Ceil Baring-Gould
- The Annotated Mother Goose
Sir James Barrie
- The Little Minister
- Peter Pan
William Bartram
- The Travels of William Bartram
Kemp P. Battle
- Great American Folklore
L. Frank Baum
- The Wizard of Oz
Edward L. Beach
- Run Silent, Run Deep
Beaumarchais
- The Barber of Seville
- The Marriage of Figaro
Samuel Beckett
- Waiting for Godot
Ludwig Bemelmans
- Madeline
Robert Benchley
- Uncle Edith’s Ghost Story (Included in The Benchley Roundup)
Stephen Vincent Benet
- The Devil and Daniel Webster (Included in The Devil and Daniel Webster and Other Tales of American History)
Edmund Clerihew Bentley
- Trent’s Last Case
Felice Benuzzi
- No Picnic on Mount Kenya
Ambrose Bierce
- An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (Included in The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce)
- The Devil’s Dictionary
- In the Midst of Life
Walter Blair & Raven I. McDavid
- The Mirth of a Nation
William Blake
- The Tyger (Included in Songs of Innocence and Experience.)
Giovanni Boccaccio
- The Decameron
Michael Bond
- A Bear Called Paddington
James Boswell
- The Life of Samuel Johnson
Pierre Boulle
- The Planet of the Apes
Catherine Drinker Bowen
- Miracle at Philadelphia
Ray Bradbury
- Fahrenheit 451
- Something Wicked This Way Comes
Carol Ryrie Brink
- Caddie Woodlawn
Charlotte Bronte
- Jane Eyre
Emily Bronte
- Wuthering Heights
Terry Brooks
- The Sword of Shannara
Walter R. Brooks
- Freddy Goes to Florida
Margaret Wise Brown
- Goodnight Moon
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- How Do I Love Thee? (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
Robert Browning
- The Pied Piper of Hamelin (Included in Dramatic Lyrics, by Robert Browning)
Jean de Brunhoff
- The Story of Babar
William Cullen Bryant
- Thanatopsis (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
Sir John Buchan
- The Thirty-Nine Steps
Pearl S. Buck
- The Good Earth
John Bunyan
- The Pilgrim’s Progress
Frances Hodgson Burnett
- The Secret Garden
Fanny Burney
- Evelina
Olive Ann Burns
- Cold Sassy Tree
Robert Burns
- A Red, Red Rose (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
Edgar Rice Burroughs
- Tarzan of the Apes
Virginia Lee Burton
- Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel
Samuel Butler
- The Way of All Flesh
George Gordon Lord Byron
- Don Juan
Albert Camus
- The Plague
Dale Carnegie
- How to Win Friends and Influence People
Andrew Carroll (ed.)
- Letters of a Nation
Lewis Carroll
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
- Through the Looking Glass
Willa Cather
- My Antonia
- O Pioneers!
Bruce Catton
- This Hallowed Ground
Miguel de Cervantes
- Don Quixote
Raymond Chandler
- The Big Sleep
Geoffrey Chaucer
- The Canterbury Tales
Anton Chekhov
- The Bet (Included in The Bet and Other Stories)
G.K. Chesterton
- The Innocence of Father Brown
Erskine Childers
- The Riddle of the Sands
Kate Chopin
- The Awakening
Agatha Christie
- And Then There Were None
- The Body in the Library
Winston Churchill
- The Crisis
Walter Van Tilburg Clark
- The Ox-Bow Incident
Beverly Cleary
- Henry Huggins
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Kubla Khan (Included in A Second Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
- The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
Wilkie Collins
- The Moonstone
- The Woman in White
Carlo Collodi
- The Adventures of Pinocchio
Richard Connell
- The Most Dangerous Game (Included in Currents in Fiction, by Macmillan Literary Heritage)
Joseph Conrad
- Heart of Darkness
- Lord Jim
Constitutional Convention
- The Constitution of the United States (Included in Miracle at Philadelphia, by Catherine Drinker Bowen)
Captain James Cook
- Voyages of Discovery
James Fenimore Cooper
- The Deerslayer
- The Last of the Mohicans
Stephen Crane
- The Open Boat (Included in The Open Boat and Other Stories)
- The Red Badge of Courage
Michael Crichton
- Timeline
Roald Dahl
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
- Two Years Before the Mast
Dante
- Inferno
- Purgatorio
- Paradiso
Alphonse Daudet
- Adventures of Tartarin of Tarascon
Clarence Day
- Life with Father
Thomas De Quincey
- Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Daniel Defoe
- A Journal of the Plague Year
- Moll Flanders
- Robinson Crusoe
John William DeForest
- Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty
Rene Descartes
- Discours de la Methode
Charles Dickens
- Barnaby Rudge
- Bleak House
- A Christmas Carol
- David Copperfield
- Dombey and Son
- Great Expectations
- Hard Times
- Little Dorrit
- Martin Chuzzlewit
- Nicholas Nickleby
- The Old Curiosity Shop
- Oliver Twist
- Our Mutual Friend
- The Pickwick Papers
- A Tale of Two Cities
Emily Dickinson
- I Died for Beauty (Included in A Third Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
Isak Dinesen
- Out of Africa
- Seven Gothic Tales
F.W. Dixon
- The Tower Treasure
Mary Mapes Dodge
- Hans Brinker
John Donne
- Death Be Not Proud (Included in A Second Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- The Brothers Karamazov
- Crime and Punishment
Lloyd C. Douglas
- The Robe
Frederick Douglass
- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Robert B. Downs
- Books That Changed the World
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
- The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes
- His Last Bow
- The Hound of the Baskervilles
- Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
- The Return of Sherlock Holmes
- The Sign of Four
- A Study in Scarlet
- The Valley of Fear
- The White Company
Theodore Dreiser
- An American Tragedy
- Sister Carrie
Allen Drury
- Advise and Consent
Daphne Du Maurier
- Rebecca
George Du Maurier
- Trilby
Alexandre Dumas
- The Count of Monte Cristo
- The Three Musketeers
Maria Edgeworth
- Castle Rackrent
Walter D. Edmonds
- Drums Along the Mohawk
Jonathan Edwards
- Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God
Tim Egan
- Burnt Toast on Davenport Street
Edward Eggleston
- The Hoosier School-Master
George Eliot
- Adam Bede
- Middlemarch
- Mill on the Floss
- Silas Marner
T.S. Eliot
- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (Included in A Third Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
- Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats
Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Concord Hymn (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
Desiderius Erasmus
- In Praise of Folly
Anne Fadiman
- Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
Walter Farley
- The Black Stallion
William Faulkner
- The Sound and the Fury
Richard P. Feynman
- The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
Eugene Field
- Jest ‘Fore Christmas (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
- Little Boy Blue (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
Henry Fielding
- Joseph Andrews
- Tom Jones
Jack Finney
- Time and Again
F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Great Gatsby
Louise Fitzhugh
- Harriet the Spy
Gustave Flaubert
- Madame Bovary
Estern Forbes
- Johnny Tremain
- Paul Revere and the World He Lived In
C.S. Forester
- Beat to Quarters
- Ship of the Line
- Flying Colors
- The African Queen
E.M. Forster
- A Room With a View
John Fox, Jr.
- The Trail of the Lonesome Pine
John Foxe
- The Book of Martyrs
Anne Frank
- The Diary of Anne Frank
Benjamin Franklin
- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
- Poor Richard’s Almanack
Charles Frazier
- Cold Mountain
Robert Frost
- Mending Wall (Included in The Family Album of Favorite Poems, by P. Edward Ernest, ed.)
- The Road Not Taken (Included in A Third Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
- Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (Included in A Second Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
Elizabeth Gaskell
- Cranford
Edward Gibbon
- The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Stella Gibbons
- Cold Comfort Farm
Dorothy Gilman
- The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax
Nikolai Gogol
- The Overcoat (Included in The Overcoat and Other Stories)
William Golding
- The Lord of the Flies
William Goldman
- The Princess Bride
Oliver Goldsmith
- She Stoops to Conquer
- The Vicar of Wakefield
Goscinny and Uderzo
- Asterix the Gaul
Kenneth Grahame
- The Wind in the Willows
Ulysses S. Grant
- Personal Memoirs
Robert Graves
- I, Claudius
Thomas Gray
- Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
Graham Greene
- Our Man in Havana
Jakob & Wilhelm Grimm
- Grimm’s Fairy Tales
H. Rider Haggard
- King Solomon’s Mines
Edward E. Hale
- The Man Without a Country
Alex Haley
- Roots
James Norman Hall
- Doctor Dogbody’s Leg
Richard Halliburton
- The Royal Road to Romance
Edith Hamilton
- Mythology
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison & John Jay
- The Federalist Papers
Dashiell Hammett
- The Maltese Falcon
Helene Hanff
- 84, Charing Cross Road
Thomas Hardy
- Far From the Madding Crowd
- Jude the Obscure
- The Mayor of Casterbridge
- The Return of the Native
- Tess of the d’Urbervilles
- Under the Greenwood Tree
- The Woodlanders
Joel Chandler Harris
- Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings
Bret Harte
- The Luck of Roaring Camp (Included in The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Stories)
Nathaniel Hawthorne
- The House of the Seven Gables
- The Scarlet Letter
Robert A. Heinlein
- The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Joseph Heller
- Catch-22
Felicia Dorothea Hemans
- Casabianca (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
Ernest Hemingway
- A Farewell to Arms
- For Whom the Bell Tolls
- The Old Man and the Sea
Marguerite Henry
- Misty of Chincoteague
O. Henry
- The Four Million
- The Gift of the Magi (Included in The Four Million, by O.Henry)
- The Ransom of Red Chief (Included in Currents in Fiction, by Macmillan Literary Heritage)
Patrick Henry
- Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
Frank Herbert
- Dune
Herge
- The Calculus Affair
Herodotus
- Histories
James Herriot
- All Creatures Great and Small
Hermann Hesse
- Steppenwolf
James Hilton
- Lost Horizon
Thomas Hobbes
- Leviathan
Holling Clancy Holling
- Paddle-to-the-Sea
Oliver Wendell Holmes
- Old Ironsides (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
Homer
- Iliad
- Odyssey
Anthony Hope
- The Prisoner of Zenda
Richard Hough
- Captain James Cook
William Dean Howells
- The Rise of Silas Lapham
W.H. Hudson
- Green Mansions
Thomas Hughes
- Tom Brown’s School Days
Victor Hugo
- The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
- Les Miserables
Leigh Hunt
- Jenny Kissed Me (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
Aldous Huxley
- Brave New World
Henrik Ibsen
- A Doll’s House
- An Enemy of the People
Washington Irving
- A History of New York
- The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Included in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.)
- Rip Van Winkle (Included in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.)
- The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.
Shirley Jackson
- The Lottery (Included in Dark Tales, by Shirley Jackson)
Henry James
- Daisy Miller
- The Portrait of a Lady
- The Turn of the Screw
Thomas Jefferson
- The Declaration of Independence (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
Jerome K. Jerome
- Three Men in a Boat
- Three Men on the Bummel
John, King of England
- Magna Carta
Crockett Johnson
- Harold and the Purple Crayon
Samuel Johnson
- Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland
James Joyce
- Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Norton Juster
- The Phantom Tollbooth
Franz Kafka
- Metamorphosis
Bel Kaufman
- Up the Down Staircase
John Keats
- Ode on a Grecian Urn (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
Carolyn Keene
- The Secret of the Old Clock
Helen Keller
- The Story of My Life
Thomas Keneally
- Schindler’s List
Ken Kesey
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Francis Scott Key
- The Star-Spangled Banner (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
Daniel Keyes
- Flowers for Algernon
Omar Khayyam
- The Rubaiyat
Joyce Kilmer
- Trees (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
Mary Kingsley
- Travels in West Africa
Rudyard Kipling
- Captains Courageous
- Gunga Din (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
- The Jungle Book
- Kim
John Knowles
- A Separate Peace
Arthur Koestler
- Darkness at Noon
E.L. Konigsburg
- From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler
Louis L’Amour
- Last of the Breed
Ring W. Lardner
- The Golden Honeymoon (Included in Ring Lardner: Stories and Other Writings)
Emma Lazarus
- The New Colossus (Included in A Second Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
Edward Lear
- The Owl and the Pussycat (Included in A Second Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
John LeCarre
- The Spy Who Came In from the Cold
Harper Lee
- To Kill a Mockingbird
Madeleine L’Engle
- A Wrinkle in Time
Gaston Leroux
- The Phantom of the Opera
Gail Carson Levine
- Ella Enchanted
C.S. Lewis
- The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
- Prince Caspian
- The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
- The Silver Chair
- The Horse and His Boy
- The Magician’s Nephew
- The Last Battle
- Mere Christianity
Meriwether Lewis & William Clark
- Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition
Sinclair Lewis
- Babbitt
- Main Street
Abraham Lincoln
- Gettysburg Address (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
- Second Inaugural Address (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
- Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead
Charles Lindbergh
- The Spirit of St. Louis
Richard Llewellyn
- How Green Was My Valley
Hugh Lofting
- The Story of Dr. Dolittle
Jack London
- The Call of the Wild
- White Fang
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- Evangeline
- Paul Revere’s Ride (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
- The Song of Hiawatha
Walter Lord
- A Night to Remember
H.P. Lovecraft
- The Colour out of Space
James Russell Lowell
- What is So Rare as a Day in June (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
David Macaulay
- Cathedral
Thomas Babington Macaulay
- The History of England
- Horatius at the Bridge (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
Betty MacDonald
- The Egg and I
George MacDonald
- At the Back of the North Wind
Niccolo Machiavelli
- The Prince
Alfred Thayer Mahan
- The Influence of Sea Power Upon History
Malcolm X
- The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Sir Thomas Malory
- Le Morte d’Arthur
William Manchester
- Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory
Alessandro Manzoni
- The Betrothed
Beryl Markham
- West with the Night
Christopher Marlowe
- Doctor Faustus
- The Passionate Shepherd to His Love (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
Captain Frederick Marryat
- Mr. Midshipman Easy
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels
- The Communist Manifesto
W. Somerset Maugham
- Of Human Bondage
- The Razor’s Edge
Bill Mauldin
- Up Front
Guy de Maupassant
- Boule de Suif
Peter Mayle
- A Year in Provence
Robert McCloskey
- Homer Price
- Make Way for Ducklings
Lieut.-Col. John McCrae
- In Flanders Fields (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
David McCullough
- The Johnstown Flood
Josh McDowell
- Evidence That Demands a Verdict
Patrick McManus
- They Shoot Canoes, Don’t They?
Herman Melville
- Billy Budd
- Moby Dick
George Meredith
- The Egoist
James A. Michener
- Tales of the South Pacific
Edna St. Vincent Millay
- Recuerdo (Included in The Family Album of Favorite Poems, by P. Edward Ernest, ed.)
Arthur Miller
- Death of a Salesman
A.A. Milne
- Winnie-the-Pooh
- The House at Pooh Corner
- When We Were Very Young
- Now We are Six
John Milton
- Paradise Lost
Else Holmelund Minarik
- Little Bear
Margaret Mitchell
- Gone With the Wind
Moliere
- The Misanthrope
L.M. Montgomery
- Anne of Green Gables
Clement Clarke Moore
- A Visit from St. Nicholas (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
Sir Thomas More
- Utopia
Christopher Morley
- Parnassus on Wheels
- The Haunted Bookshop
John Muir
- A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf
Ogden Nash
- I’m a Stranger Here, Myself
Charles Nordhoff & James Norman Hall
- Mutiny on the Bounty
- Men Against the Sea
- Pitcairn Island
Frank Norris
- McTeague
Alfred Noyes
- The Highwayman (Included in A Second Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
Patrick O’Brian
- Master and Commander
- Post Captain
Robert C. O’Brien
- Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh
Flannery O’Connor
- The Displaced Person
- Good Country People
- A Good Man is Hard to Find
- The Life You Save May Be Your Own
Scott O’Dell
- The Island of the Blue Dolphins
Eugene O’Neill
- Long Day’s Journey into Night
E. Phillips Oppenheim
- The Great Impersonation
Baroness Orczy
- The Scarlet Pimpernel
George Orwell
- 1984
- Animal Farm
Thomas Paine
- The American Crisis
- Common Sense
Peggy Parish
- Amelia Bedelia
Francis Parkman
- The Oregon Trail
Blaise Pascal
- Pensees
Boris Pasternak
- Doctor Zhivago
Alan Paton
- Cry, the Beloved Country
Samuel Pepys
- The Diary of Samuel Pepys
S.J. Perelman
- Dental or Mental, I Say It’s Spinach (Included in Most of S.J. Perelman)
Ellis Peters
- A Morbid Taste for Bones
Henry Petroski
- The Book on the Bookshelf
Plato
- The Republic
Plutarch
- Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans
Edgar Allan Poe (All Included in The Collected Tales and Poems, by Edgar Allan Poe)
- Annabel Lee
- The Bells
- The Cask of Amontillado
- The Fall of the House of Usher
- The Murders in the Rue Morgue
- The Pit and the Pendulum
- The Raven
- The Tell-Tale Heart
Marco Polo
- The Travels
Chaim Potok
- My Name is Asher Lev
Beatrix Potter
- The Tale of Peter Rabbit
J.B. Priestley
- The Good Companions
Howard Pyle
- The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
- The Astonishing History of Troy Town
Francois Rabelais
- Gargantua and Pantagruel
Ann Radcliffe
- The Mysteries of Udolpho
Sir Walter Raleigh
- Even Such is Time (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
Any Rand
- Atlas Shrugged
Arthur Ransome
- Swallows and Amazons
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
- The Yearling
Miss Read
- Thrush Green
Charles Reade
- The Cloister and the Hearth
Erich Maria Remarque
- All Quiet on the Western Front
H.A. Rey
- Curious George
Samuel Richardson
- Pamela
James Whitcomb Riley
- Little Orphant Annie (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
Ann Rinaldi
- Time Enough for Drums
O.E. Rolvaag
- Giants in the Earth
Franklin D. Roosevelt
- Pearl Harbor Speech (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
Theodore Roosevelt
- Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail
Edmond Rostand
- Cyrano de Bergerac
J.K. Rowling
- Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
Frank Rowsome, Jr.
- The Verse by the Side of the Road
Damon Runyon
- The Three Wise Guys (Included in Furthermore, by Damon Runyon)
Witold Rybczynski
- Home: A Short History of an Idea
Rafael Sabatini
- Captain Blood
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
- The Little Prince
Saki
- The Open Window
J.D. Salinger
- The Catcher in the Rye
George Sand
- The Haunted Pool
Carl Sandburg
- Chicago (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
Dorothy L. Sayers
- The Nine Tailors
Jack Schaefer
- Shane
Frances Schaeffer
- The God Who Is There
Charles Schulz
- Happiness Is a Warm Puppy
Sir Walter Scott
- Ivanhoe
- The Heart of Midlothian
Alan Seeger
- I Have a Rendezvous With Death (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
Maurice Sendak
- Where the Wild Things Are
Robert Service
- The Cremation of Sam McGee
Anya Seton
- Katherine
Ernest Thompson Seton
- Two Little Savages
- Wild Animals I Have Known
Dr. Seuss
- Fox in Socks
- Green Eggs and Ham
- The Cat in the Hat
Anna Sewell
- Black Beauty
Michael Shaara
- The Killer Angels
William Shakespeare
- The Comedy of Errors
- Hamlet
- Julius Caesar
- King Lear
- The Life and Death of King Richard III
- Macbeth
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream
- Much Ado About Nothing
- Othello
- Romeo and Juliet
- The Taming of the Shrew
George Bernard Shaw
- Pygmalion
Mary Shelley
- Frankenstein (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Ozymandias
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
- The Rivals
- The School for Scandal
Robert E. Sherwood
- Abe Lincoln in Illinois
William L. Shirer
- The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Nevil Shute
- On the Beach
- Pastoral
Henryk Sienkiewicz
- Quo Vadis
- The Teutonic Knights
Shel Silverstein
- The Giving Tree
- Where the Sidewalk Ends
Neil Simon
- The Odd Couple
Upton Sinclair
- The Jungle
Betty Smith
- A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Dodie Smith
- I Capture the Castle
Tobias Smollett
- The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker
Dava Sobel
- Longitude
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
E.E. Somerville & Martin Ross
- The Irish R. M.
Sophocles
- Oedipus Rex
Robert Specht
- Tisha
Edmund Spenser
- The Faerie Queene
Johanna Spyri
- Heidi
Miles Stanford
- The Complete Green Letters
Marion L. Starkey
- The Devil in Massachusetts
William Steig
- Yellow and Pink
John Steinbeck
- East of Eden
- The Grapes of Wrath
- Of Mice and Men
- The Pearl
- Winter of Our Discontent
Stendhal
- The Red and the Black
Laurence Sterne
- Tristram Shandy
Robert Louis Stevenson
- A Child’s Garden of Verses
- Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
- Kidnapped
- Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes
- Treasure Island
Bram Stoker
- Dracula
Irving Stone
- The Agony and the Ecstasy
Harriet Beecher Stowe
- Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Edward Streeter
- Father of the Bride
William Strunk, Jr. & E.B. White
- The Elements of Style
R.S. Surtees
- Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities
Jonathan Swift
- Gulliver’s Travels
John Millington Synge
- Playboy of the Western World
Booth Tarkington
- The Magnificent Ambersons
- Penrod
Alfred Lord Tennyson
- The Charge of the Light Brigade (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
- Idylls of the King
Josephine Tey
- The Franchise Affair
William Makepeace Thackeray
- Vanity Fair
Ernest Lawrence Thayer
- Casey at the Bat (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
Dylan Thomas
- Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night (Included in A Third Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
Henry David Thoreau
- Walden
James Thurber
- The Catbird Seat
- The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Alexis de Tocqueville
- Democracy in America
J.R.R. Tolkien
- The Hobbit
- The Fellowship of the Ring
- The Two Towers
- The Return of the King
Leo Tolstoy
- Anna Karenina
- War and Peace
B. Traven
- The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Robert Traver
- Anatomy of a Murder
P.L. Travers
- Mary Poppins
Anthony Trollope
- Barchester Towers
Frances Trollope
- Domestic Manners of the Americans
Dalton Trumbo
- Johnny Got His Gun
Barbara Tuchman
- The Guns of August
Mark Twain
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
- The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
- Life on the Mississippi
- The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg
- The Prince and the Pauper
- Pudd’nhead Wilson
United States Congress
- Articles of Confederation
Unknown
- The Arabian Nights
- Beowulf
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Chris Van Allsburg
- Jumanji
- The Polar Express
Jules Verne
- Around the World in Eighty Days
- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Virgil
- Aeneid
Voltaire
- Candide
Elizabeth von Arnim
- Christopher and Colulmbus
Kurt Vonnegut
- Slaughterhouse-Five
Lewis Wallace
- Ben Hur
Izaak Walton
- The Compleat Angler
Lynd Ward
- The Biggest Bear
Robert Penn Warren
- All the King’s Men
Booker T. Washington
- Up From Slavery
George Washington
- Farewell Address (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
Charles Waterton
- Wanderings in South America
Alison Weir
- The Six Wives of Henry VIII
Orson Welles
- The War of the Worlds Radio Script
H.G. Wells
- The Invisible Man
- The War of the Worlds
Edith Wharton
- The Age of Innocence
- Ethan Frome
E.B. White
- Charlotte’s Web
- Stuart Little
Gilbert White
- The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne
T.H. White
- The Once and Future King
Walt Whitman
- O Captain! My Captain! (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
John Greenleaf Whittier
- Barbara Frietchie (Included in A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods, ed.)
Kate Douglas Wiggin
- Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
Eliot Wigginton (ed.)
- The Foxfire Book #1
Oscar Wilde
- The Importance of Being Earnest
- The Picture of Dorian Gray
Laura Ingalls Wilder
- Little House on the Prairie
Thornton Wilder
- Our Town
Margery Williams
- The Velveteen Rabbit
Tennessee Williams
- The Glass Menagerie
- A Streetcar Named Desire
Connie Willis
- Doomsday Book
- To Say Nothing of the Dog
Sloan Wilson
- The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
Owen Wister
- The Virginian
P.G. Wodehouse
- Thank You, Jeeves
Gordon S. Wood
- Radicalism of the American Revolution
William Wordsworth
- She Was a Phantom of Delight (Included in The Family Album of Favorite Poems, by P. Edward Ernest, ed.)
Herman Wouk
- The Caine Mutiny
P.C. Wren
- Beau Geste
Richard Wright
- Black Boy
Tim Wynne-Jones
- Zoom at Sea
J.R. Wyss
- The Swiss Family Robinson
Philip Yancey
- Where Is God When It Hurts?