When someone discovers that you are working on a doctorate, they typically ask what type of medicine you are studying. After explaining that you’re in the English department and receiving their empathetic glance (“you poor dear”), you will likely receive two questions. The first will be about grammar: You won’t correct my grammar, will you? Once you’ve earnestly distanced yourself from the punctuation police, they might ask you, “What should I read?”
This is a complicated, though fabulous question, involving several unspoken questions hiding within it:
1) What books are pleasant to read?
2) What books are entertaining?
3) What books are informative?
4) What books are classics?
Although each type has its time and place, the books in the final category hold a special place in our vocation. Recently, one of my friends asked me to suggest a classic. She’s an avid reader and wanted to stretch beyond her typical reading habits, a noble aim. After a few follow-up questions, I recommended a book.
But what is a classic? When we reference a text as a “classic,” we adopt a blurry label. Yet, such a label broadly denotes a book which one ought to read because it’s intrinsically valuable.
This value is multifaceted, involving both personal and social import. Not only do classics disclose something about the human condition, but they also help us recognize that such a condition is not thwarted by temporal and geographic limitations. Furthermore, in speaking to the individual reader, classics form a community of readers which can better relate to themselves and others.
Reading a classic is like accepting an invitation. They promise to elucidate (if only slightly) the perennial questions we ask about God, the universe, society, ourselves, and others. Classics ultimately encounter us in a spiritual, historical, or aesthetically significant way. They change us for the better.
The “cannon” has historically been an attempt to (incompletely) identify such classics. Questions of canonicity are endlessly debated and haggled over, and we won’t engage that body of opinion here. Instead, we will address this issue indirectly.
About a month after my friend’s inquiry, I was standing in my office, holding an anthology of Greek tragedies. I asked myself: If I surveyed someone’s bookshelf, what texts would show fluency in the classics? Books that would make me say, “Ah, this person is well-read.”
Our post is an attempt to answer this question. As such, we are not trying to pin down the cannon or give a complete list of The Classics. Instead, this is two literature professors’ modest attempt to sketch a “Classics Starter Package.” One must not have read all of these, but the titles are on the shelf (digital or physical), asking to be picked up and cared for. They are begging to be encountered.
A few caveats:
The list is purposely novel-heavy and stops around 1990.
For poets, whole collections are recommended rather than specific texts.
Each text has been read by Carter or Alex—or by both of us. (There are several texts that warrant inclusion, but we haven’t read them, notably: Cervantes, Roth, Nabokov, DeLilo)
The list is weighted toward American writers due to our area of expertise.
Certain authors’ texts may be exchanged with one of comparable merit. For example, one need not have Euripides Medea; you could have the Bacchae. Or, you might have The Sun Also Rises instead of A Farewell to Arms.
Homer, The Odyssey (~700 BC)
Plato, The Republic (~375 BC)
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex (429 BC)
Euripedes, Medea (431 BC)
Unknown, Beowulf (1025)
Unknown, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1375)
Goeffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (1400)
Sir Thomas Mallory, Le Morte D’Arthur (1485)
William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1623)
John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667)
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
Lord Byron, Don Juan (1819)
Collection from a Romantic poet (Shelly, Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Tennyson)
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
Emily Dickinson, Collected poems
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855)
Edgar Allan Poe, Collected short stories
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1860)
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1865)
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (1866)
Henry James, Daisy Miller (1878)
Mark Twain, The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)
Anton Chekhov, Three Sisters (1901)
W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
Jack London, Call of the Wild (1903)
Robert Frost, North of Boston (1914)
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis (1915)
Willa Cather, My Ántonia (1918)
Edith Wharton, Age of Innocence (1920)
James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
W. B. Yeats, Collected poems
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)
Langston Hughes, Collected poems
Wallace Stevens, Collected poems
F. S. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930)
Flannery O’Connor, Collected short stories
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942)
George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1952)
Allen Ginsberg, Howl (1956)
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (1969)
Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose (1971)
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (1985)
Toni Morison, Beloved (1987)
Whew! I have some work to do, but excellent list to aspire to.