Summer Reading for American Literature
To be read in the following order:
Theme: Plasticity of Identity
§ Richard Wright, Black Boy (Wright’s autobiographical account of the
development of Black identity)
§ J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey (The conflict of emotion and
intelligence)
Theme: Possibility of Love
§ J.D. Salinger, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (Does modern psychology leave room for love?)
§ John Updike, Rabbit, Run (Mid-life crisis and complex
responsibilities)
Theme: The Problem of Order
§ Frank Norris, McTeague
(Darwinian Naturalism in
literature)
§ Stephen Crane, “The Open Boat” (Realism
+ Irony = Naturalism)
§ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five
(Perceptions of time and space
affect ideas of order)
Be
prepared to sit for a full-period examination on each of these texts in
September.
Academic Year Reading List
Theme: Plasticity of Identity
§ Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
(Selections)
§ John Locke, An Essay Concerning
Human Understanding & An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent and End
of Civil Government (Selections)
§ Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
§ E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime
§ Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
§ F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great
Gatsby
§ Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey
into Night
§ Poetry
cited in Long Day’s
Journey into Night
Theme: Possibility of Love
§ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A
Dissertation on the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality of Mankind, The
Social Contract (Selections)
§ Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other
Rooms
§
§ William Shakespeare, Macbeth
§ William Faulkner, The Sound
and the Fury
§ John
Keats, Ode to a Nightengale, Ode on a Grecian Urn
§ Eudora Welty, Collected Stories, “Lilly Daw and the
Three Ladies,” “Petrified Man,” “Keela, the Outcast
Indian Maiden,” “Why I Live at the P.O.,” “A Curtain of Green,” “Powerhouse,”
“A Worn Path,” “The Wide Net”
Theme: The Problem of Order
§ Friedrich
von Schiller, “On the Sublime”
§ James Dickey, Selected Poems
§ James Dickey, Deliverance
§ Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to
Arms
§ Herman Melville, Moby Dick
§ T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral
§ T.S. Eliot, “The Love-Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock,” “The
§ Wallace Stevens, Selected Poems, concluding with “The Idea of Order at