100 American Classics


100 American Authors and the book associated with them. Once more, this is not a comprehensive list nor are all of these titles on a list that specifies them as “classic” but it is a sampling of American authors listed by several sites. Wikipedia offers a rather good list but is not comprehensive either. Some of these books are repeated on my 100 Banned Books list but I did attempt to not overlap but in some cases that was not possible. There are books that I consider to be classics due to referencing in other works and pop culture, so I listed them on both lists. I’m glad there is over-lapping!

Read:  6          Unread:  94

1. Rudolfo Anaya – Bless Me, Ultima

2. Isaac Asimov – The Gods Themselves

3. Maya Angelou – I Shall Not Be Moved

4. Gloria Anzaldua – This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

5. Kathy Acker – Blood and Guts in High School

6. James Baldwin – Go Tell It On the Mountain

7. Ray Bradbury

a. Fahrenheit 451

b. Something Wicked This Way Comes


8. L. Frank Baum – The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

9. William S. Burroughs – Naked Lunch

10. Truman Capote

a. In Cold Blood

b. Other Voices, Other Rooms


11. Willa Cather

a. One of Ours

b. Sapphira and the Slave Girl


12. Sandra Cisneros – The House on Mango Street

13. Ernest Hemmingway

a. For Whom the Bell Tolls

b. The Garden of Eden

c. The Sun Also Rises

d. A Farewell to Arms


14. E. E. Cummings – The Enormous Room

15. Stephen Crane – Maggie: A Girl of the Streets

16. Emily Dickinson – The Poems of Emily Dickinson

17. Betty Frieden – The Feminine Mystique

18. W. E. B. Du Bois – The Souls of Black Folk

19. T. S. Elliot – Tradition and the Individual Talent

20. Ralph Ellison – Invisible Man

21. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Essays: The First and Second Series

22. Bret Easton Ellis – American Psycho

23. William Faulkner

a. The Sound and the Fury

b. As I lay Dying

c. Requiem for a Nun


24. F. Scott Fitzgerald

a. This Side of Paradise

b. The Great Gatsby


25. Robert Frost – Selected Works

26. Marcus Garvey – The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey

27. Allen Ginsberg

a. Howl and Other Poems

b. The Fall of America: Poems of These States


28. Micahel Gold – Jews Without Money

29. Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton

a. Who Would Have Thought It?

b. The Squatter and the Don


30. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter

31. Joseph Heller – Catch-22

32. Langston Hughes – Not Without Laughter

33. Washington Irving - Salmagundi

34. Lawson Inada - Drawing the Line

35. William Inge – Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff

36. Helen Hunt Jackson - Ramona

37. Henry James

a. The Portrait of a Lady

b. The Wings of the Dove

c. The Ambassadors


38. June Jordan – Things I Do in the Dark

39. Jack Kerouac – On The Road

40. Ken Kesey – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

41. Yusef Komunyakaa – Thieves of Paradise

42. Stanley Kunitz – The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz

43. Philip Levine – What Work Is

44. Sinclair Lewis – Main Street

45. Mina Loy – The Lost Lunar Baedeker

46. Cormac McCarthy

a. The Road

b. No Country for Old Men


47. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick

48. Arthur Miller – The Crucible

49. Henry Miller – Tropic of Cancer

50. Toni Morrison – Song of Solomon

51. Vladimir Nabokov – Lolita

52. Joyce Carol Oates

a. Expensive People

b. Middle Age: A Romance

c. Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart


53. Flannery O’Connor – Wise Blood

54. Cynthia Ozick – Heir to The Glimmering World

55. Sylvia Plath – The Bell Jar

56. Edgar Allen Poe – The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

57. Ezra Pound – In a Station of the Metro

58. Thomas Pynchon

a. Gravity’s Rainbow

b. V

c. The Crying of Lot 49


59. Richard Rodriguez

a. Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez

b. Brown: The Last Discovery of America

c. Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father


60. Theodore Roethke – The Waking

61. J. D. Salinger

a. Nine Stories

b. Franny and Zooey


62. John Steinbeck

a. Of Mice and Men

b. East of Eden


63. Harriet Beecher Stowe – Uncle Tom’s Cabin

64. Gertrude Stein – The Things as They Are (Q.E.D.)

65. Henry David Thoreau

a. Walden

b. Civil Disobedience


66. James Thurber – Is Sex Necessary? Or Why You Feel The Way You Do

67. Mark Twain

a. The Prince and The Pauper

b. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

c. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc


68. John Updike – Rabbit, Run

69. Gore Vidal – The City and the Pillar

70. Kurt Vonnegut – Slaughterhouse-Five

71. Alice Walker - The Color Purple

72. Edith Wharton – The Age of Innocence

73. Richard Yates – Revolutionary Road

74. Anzia Yezierska – Bread Givers

75. Paul Zindel – The Pigman

Note:
Those books in red color font and strike-through have been read.

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