What to Read - The Canon of English Literature

What to Read - List 2

The Canon of English Literature

The following list is reproduced from the http://readliterature.com web site. It is not a complete, nor an official list of any kind, but I believe it contains essential works from what is usually referred to as The Canon of English Literature.

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Martin Amis (1949)

• The Rachel Papers
• Dead Babies
• Success
• Other People: A Mystery Story
• Money: A Suicide Note
• Einstein’s Monsters
• London Fields
• Time’s Arrow
• The Information

Sir Kingsley Amis (1922 - 1995)

• Lucky Jim
• The Green Man
• Jake’s Thing
• The Old Devils

Jane Austen (1775 - 1817)

• Emma
• Sense and Sensibility
• Pride and Prejudice
• Mansfield Park
• Persuasion

J.G. Ballard (1930)

• The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard
• Concrete Island
• Crash
• Cocaine Nights
• Empire of the Sun
• The Drought
• Super-Cannes

Anne Bronte(1820 - 1849)

• Agnes Grey

Charlotte Bront?(1816 - 1855)

• Jane Eyre
• Shirley
• Villette

Emily Bronte(1818 - 1848)

• Wuthering Heights

Anthony Burgess (1917 - 1993)

• A Clockwork Orange

Fanny Burney (1752 - 1840)

• Evelina: Or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World

Lord Byron (1788 - 1824)

• Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
• Don Juan
• The Corsair: A Tale
• Selected Poetry

Thomas Carlyle 2 (1795 - 1881)

• The French Revolution (3 volumes)
• On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History
• The History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Called Frederic The Great (6 volumes)

Geoffrey Chaucer (1342/43 - 1400)

• The Canterbury Tales

Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965) Nobel Prize in Literature, 1953

• Memoirs of the Second World War
• History of the English-speaking Peoples

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834)

• Selected Poetry

Joseph Conrad 3 (1857 - 1924)

• Nostromo
• Lord Jim
• Heart of Darkness
• The Secret Agent
• Victory: An Island Tale

Daniel Defoe (1660 - 1731)

• Moll Flanders
• Robinson Crusoe

Charles Dickens (1812 - 1870)

• A Tale of Two Cities
• David Copperfield
• Oliver Twist
• The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewitt
• Bleak House

John Dryden (1631 - 1700)

• Virgil’s Aeneid (trans. by J.D.) {Virgil: Roman, 70 BC - 19 BC}
• Virgil’s Georgics (trans. by J.D.)
• Eclogues of Virgil (trans. by J.D.)
• All for Love
• Ovid’s Metamorphoses (trans. by J.D.) {Ovid: Roman, 43 BC - AD 17}
• Plutarch’s Lives (trans. by J.D.) {Plutarch: Greek, AD 46 - c. AD 119}
• Plays of John Dryden
• Astraea Redux
• Annus Mirabilis
• The Hind and the Panther
• Eleonora

Lawrence Durrell 4 (1912 - 1990)

• The Alexandria Quartet (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea)
• Justine
• Balthazar
• Mountolive
• Clea
• The Black Book

George Eliot Mary Ann (Marian) Evans (1819 - 1880)

• Silas Marner
• Romola
• Middlemarch

T. S. Eliot 5 (1888 - 1965) Nobel Prize in Literature, 1948

• Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats
• The Waste Land
• The Family Reunion
• Murder in the Cathedral

Henry Fielding (1707 - 1754)

• Joseph Andrews
• Tom Jones
• Jonathan Wild

Ford Madox Ford (1873 - 1939)

• The Shifting of Fire
• Romance
• The Good Soldier : A Tale of Passion
• Parade’s End
• The Call: The Tale of Two Passions
• Some Do Not
• Return to Yesterday
• No More Parades
• A Man Could Stand Up
• Fifth Queen
• Last Post

E.M. Forster (1879 - 1970)

• A Passage to India
• A Room with a View

John Galsworthy (1867 - 1933) Nobel Prize in Literature, 1932

• The Forsyte Saga
• The Man of Property
• Indian Summer of a Forsyte
• In Chancery
• Awakening
• To Let
• A Modern Comedy
• The White Monkey
• The Silver Spoon
• Swan Song
• Castles in Spain
• Flowering Wilderness
• The Country House
• The Patrician
• The Freelands

Sir William Golding (1911 - 1993) Nobel Prize in Literature, 1983

• Lord of the Flies

Oliver Goldsmith (1730 - 1774)

• Vicar of Wakefield

Robert Graves (1895 - 1985)

• I, Claudius

Graham Greene (1904 - 1991)

• Brighton Rock
• The Power and the Glory
• The Heart of the Matter
• A Burnt-out Case
• The Quiet American
• Our Man in Havana
• The Comedians

Thomas Hardy (1840 - 1928)

• Tess of the d’Urbervilles
• Jude the Obscure

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 - 1889)

• Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Ted Hughes (1930 - 1998)

• Crow
• Tales from Ovid

Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)

• Point Counter Point
• Brave New World
• Eyeless in Gaza
• The Devils of Loudun
• The Doors of Perception

James I, King of England from 1603 to 1625 (1566 - 1625)

• The King James Bible

Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784)

• The Lives of the Poets
• The Vanity of Human Wishes
• The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia
• Selected Poetry and Prose

John Keats (1795 - 1821)

• Endymion
• Sleep and Poetry
• The Complete Poems

Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936) Nobel Prize in Literature, 1907

• Just So Stories
• The Jungle Book

Philip Larkin (1922 - 1985)

• The Whitsun Weddings
• High Windows

D.H. Lawrence (1885 - 1930)

• Lady Chatterley’s Lover

John Le Carre (1931)

• The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
• Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
• The Little Drummer Girl
• Doris Lessing (1919)
• The Golden Notebook
• To Room Nineteen
• In Pursuit of the English

Richard Llewellyn 6 (1906 - 1983)

• How Green Was My Valley

Christopher Marlowe (1564 - 1593)

• Doctor Faustus

William Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965)

• The Moon and Sixpence
• Of Human Bondage
• The Narrow Corner
• Cakes and Ale
• Short Stories
• Ashenden
• Far Eastern Tales
• South Sea Tales
• For Services Rendered
• The Razor’s Edge
• The Merry-Go-Round
• Don Fernando
• On a Chinese Screen
• The Painted Veil
• Catalina
• Up at the Villa
• Mrs Craddock
• The Casuarina Tree
• Christmas Holiday
• Liza of Lambeth
• The Magician
• Selected Plays

Ian McEwan (1948)

• Black Dogs
• The Comfort of Strangers
• The Child in Time
• Enduring Love
• Amsterdam
• The Innocent
• The Cement Garden
• Atonement

John Milton (1608 - 1674)

• Paradise Lost

Dame Iris Murdoch 7 (1919)

• The Bell
• A Severed Head
• The Red and the Green
• The Nice and the Good
• The Black Prince
• Henry and Cato
• The Sea, the Sea
• The Philosopher’s Pupil
• The Good Apprentice
• The Book and The Brotherhood
• The Message to the Planet

Sir V. S. (Vidiadhar Surajprasad) Naipaul 8 (1932) Nobel Prize in Literature, 2001

• The Mystic Masseur
• The Suffrage of Elvira
• Miguel Street
• A House for Mr. Biswas
• In a Free State
• Guerrillas
• A Bend in the River
• The Mimic Men</li>
• The Enigma of Arrival
• Beyond Belief
• Among the Believers

George Orwell ( 1903 - 1950)

• Down and Out in Paris and London
• Animal Farm
• Nineteen Eighty-Four

Harold Pinter (1930)

• Complete Works, Volume I
• Complete Works, Volume II
• Complete Works, Volume III
• Complete Works, Volume IV
• Betrayal

Alexander Pope (1688 - 1744)

• An Essay on Criticism
• The Rape of the Lock
• The Dunciad
• An Essay on Man
• Poems, Epistles and Satires

Salman Rushdie 9 (1947)

• Grimus
• Midnight’s Children
• Shame
• Imaginary homelands
• East, West
• Haroun and the Sea of Stories
• The Moor’s Last Sigh
• The Ground Beneath Her Feet
• (The Satanic Verses has been removed from this list because it is offensive to Muslims.)

Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970) Nobel Prize in Literature, 1950

• History of Western Philosophy
• Religion and Science
• The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell
• Human Knowledge
• Sceptical Essays

Sir Walter Scott 10 (1771 - 1832)

• Waverley
• Ivanhoe

William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616)

• Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
• Romeo and Juliet
• King Lear
• Julius Caesar
• Othello
• Macbeth
• Henry VIII
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• The Sonnets

Tom Sharpe (1928)

• Riotous Assembly
• Indecent Exposure
• Porterhouse Blue
• Blott on the Landscape
• Wilt
• The Great Pursuit
• The Throwback

Mary Shelley (1797 - 1817)

• Frankenstein

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 - 1822)

• The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley

Robert Louis Stevenson 11 (1850 - 1895)

• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811 - 1863)

• Vanity Fair
• The History of Henry Esmond

Dylan Thomas 12 (1914 - 1953)

• Eighteen Poems (18 Poems)
• Twenty-five Poems (25 Poems)
• The Map of Love
• Fern Hill
• Deaths and Entrances
• Under Milk Wood
• Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (1934 - 1952)
• Portrait of the Artist As a Young Dog

J.R.R. Tolkien (1892 - 1973)

• The Hobbit
• The Lord of the Rings

Anthony Trollope (1815 - 1882)

• Orley Farm (1860)
• He Knew He Was Right (1869)
• The Way We Live Now (1875)
• Dr. Wortle’s School (1881)
• The Barsetshire Chronicles
• The Warden (1855)
• Barchester Towers (1857)
• Doctor Thorne (1858)
• Framley Parsonage (1861)
• The Small House at Allington (1864)
• The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867)
• The Palliser Novels
• Can You Forgive Her? (1864)
• Phineus Finn (1869)
• The Eustace Diamonds (1873)
• Phineas Redux (1874)
• The Prime Minister (1876)
• The Duke’s Children (1880)
• Evelyn Waugh (1903 - 1966)
• Decline and Fall
• Vile Bodies
• Black Mischief
• A Handful of Dust
• Put Out More Flags
• When the Going Was Good
• Brideshead Revisited
• Men at Arms
• Officers and Gentlemen
• Unconditional Surrender
• The Loved One
• The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold
• A Little Learning
• Diaries

Denton Welch (1915 - 1948)

• In Youth is Pleasure
• Maiden Voyage
• A Voice Through a Cloud

H.G. (Herbert George) Wells (1866 - 1946)

• Invisible Man
• The Time Machine
• The War of the Worlds
• Tono-Bungay
• The History of Mr. Polly
• The New Machiavelli

Patrick White 13 (1912 - 1990) Nobel Prize in Literature, 1973

• Happy Valley
• The Tree of a Man
• Voss
• Riders in the Chariot
• The Solid Mandala
• The Twyborn Affair
• A Fringe of Leaves
• The Vivesector
• The Cockatoos
• Collected Plays

Sir P.G. (Pelham Grenville) Wodehouse 14 (1881 - 1975)

• The Code of Woosters
• Jeeves and the Tie That Binds
• How Right You Are, Jeeves
• Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves
• Jeeves in the Morning
• Cocktail Time

Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941)

• Mrs. Dalloway
• To the Lighthouse

William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850)

• Selected Poems

Continue to List 3 - Wisdom Literature

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