This is a chronological ordered list of classic literatures extracted from World Cloud Classics , The Literature Book and The Shakespeare Book and many must-read lists.
Here are some reading tips:- Read about author and book’s context.
- Be familiar with plot and characters. SparkNotes, Course Hero and CliffsNotes are some great resources.
- Be prepared to read a few times (if not dozen) with different goals each time: plot, meaning, rhetoric,…
- Get used to some literary devices : allegory, allusion, analogy, aphorism, archetype, euphemism, imagery, malapropism, metaphor, motif, oxymoron, paradox, periphrasis, personification, puns, symbol, theme,…
BCE — Heroes
Homer
Aesop
- Aesop’s Fables (560 BCE)
Virgil
- Aeneid (29-19 BCE)
Unknown
- One Thousand and One Nights (8th – 15th)
- Beowulf (975) Old English
1300 — Renaissance
Dante Alighieri
Geoffrey Chaucer
- The Canterbury Tales (1400)
William Shakespeare
- Shakespeare’s Comedies
- Shakespeare’s Tragedies
- Sonnets and Other Poems
- The Complete Works of Shakespreare
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
- Don Quixote (1615)
John Milton
- Paradise Lost (1667)
Daniel Defoe
- Robinson Crusoe (1719)
1800 — Romanticism
Jane Austen
- Sense and Sensibility (1811)
- Pride and Prejudice (1813)
- Mansfield Park (1814)
- Emma (1815)
- Northanger Abbey (1817)
- Persuasion (1818)
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
- Frankenstein (1818)
Washington Irving
- The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Tales (1819)
Jacob & Wilhelm Grimm
- The Brothers Grimm: 101 Fairy Tales, Volume I (1812)
- The Brothers Grimm: 101 Fairy Tales, Volume II (1819)
Hans Christian Andersen
Charles Dickens
- Oliver Twist (1839)
- A Christmas Carol (1843)
- David Copperfield (1850)
- Bleak House (1853)
- Little Dorrit (1857)
- A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
- Great Expectations (1861)
Alexandre Dumas
- The Count of Monte Cristo (1844)
- The Three Musketeers (1844)
Charlotte Brontë
- Jane Eyre (1847)
Emily Brontë
- Wuthering Heights (1847)
Nathaniel Hawthorne
- The Scarlet Letter (1850)
Harriet Beecher Stowe
- Uncle Tom’s Cabin: or, Life Among the Lowly (1851) Slavery
Herman Melville
- Moby-Dick (1851)
Thomas Bulfinch
- Bulfinch’s Mythology: Stories of Gods and Heroes (1855)
1855 — Realism
Walt Whitman
- Leaves of Grass (1855)
Gustave Flaubert
- Madame Bovary (1857)
Victor Hugo
- The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831)
- Les Misérables (1862) Social injustice
Lewis Carroll
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) Nonsense
- Through the Looking-Glass (1871) Imaginary
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Crime and Punishment (1866)
Louisa May Alcott
- Little Woman (1868)
Jules Verne
George Eliot
- Middlemarch (1872)
Mark Twain
Anna Sewell
- Black Beauty (1877)
Leo Tolstoy
- War and Peace (1869)
- Anna Karenina (1877)
Robert Louis Stevenson
Howard Pyle
Émile Zola
- Germinal (1885)
Emily Dickinson
Oscar Wilde
1890 — Modernism
Arthur Conan Doyle
Rudyard Kipling
Stephen Crane
Bram Stoker
- Dracula (1897)
Kate Chopin
L. Frank Baum
- The Wizard of Oz (1900)
Jack London
- The Call of the Wild (1903)
- The Sea Wolf (1904)
- White Fang (1906)
Kenneth Grahame
- The Wind in the Willows and Other Stories (1908)
L.M. Montgomery
- Anne of Green Gables (1908)
Gaston Leroux
- The Phantom of the Opera (1909)
Frances Hodgson Burnett
- A Little Princess (1906)
- The Secret Garden (1910) Imagery
J.M. Barrie
- Peter Pan (1911)
Edgar Rice Burroughs
- Tarzan of the Apes (1912)
- The Return of Tarzan (1913)
Franz Kafka
- Metamorphosis (1915)
- The Trial (1925)
James Joyce
- Dubliners (1914)
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
- Ulysses (1922)
Willa Cather
- My Ántonia (1918)
Edith Wharton
- The Age of Innocence (1920)
T.S.Eliot
- The Waste Land (1922)
F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Beautiful And Damned (1922)
- The Great Gatsby (1925) American Dream
D.H. Lawrence
- Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1923)
Thomas Mann
- Death in Venice (1912)
- The Magic Mountain (1924)
Aldous Huxley
Raymond Chandler
John Steinbeck
H.P. Lovecraft
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
1945 — Postwar
Ayn Rand
- The Fountainhead (1943) Objectivism
- Atlas Shrugged (1956)
George Orwell
- Animal Farm (1943) Socialism
- Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) Totalitarian
Ralph Ellison
Ernest Hemingway
Ray Bradbury
William Golding
J. R. R. Tolkien
Vladimir Nabokov
Edgar Allan Poe
- Selected Works of Edgar Allan Poe (1956)
Chinua Achebe
Günter Grass
Harper Lee
Joseph Heller
Ken Kesey
Anthony Burgess
Truman Capote
Gabriel García Márquez
1970 — Contemporary
Thomas Pynchon
Italo Calvino
Salma Rushdie
Toni Morrison
Bret Easton Ellis
Vikram Seth
José Saramago
Zadie Smith
Margaret Atwood
- The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) Complicity
- The Testament (2019)
- The Blind Assassin (2000)
Yann Martel
Zane Grey
Kids
- Aesop’s Fables (560 BCE) 5
- One Thousand and One Nights (8th – 15th)
- The Brothers Grimm: 101 Fairy Tales, Volume I (1812) 6
- The Brothers Grimm: 101 Fairy Tales, Volume II (1819)
- Hans Christian Andersen Tales (1835)
- Bulfinch’s Mythology: Stories of Gods and Heroes (1855)
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) 5
- Through the Looking-Glass (1871) 5
- Little Woman (1868) 7
- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) 7
- Treasure Island (1879) 7
- The Jungle Book (1894)
- The Wizard of Oz (1900) 6
- A Little Princess (1906) 6
- The Secret Garden (1910) 4
- Anne of Green Gables (1908) 8
- Life of Pi (2001)
Charles Dickens
- Oliver Twist (1839) 7
- A Christmas Carol (1843) 7
- David Copperfield (1850) 8
- Little Dorrit (1857)
- Great Expectations (1861) 8
Poetry
Homer
Virgil
- Aeneid (29-19 BCE)
Dante Alighieri
Geoffrey Chaucer
- The Canterbury Tales (1400)
William Shakespeare
John Milton
- Paradise Lost (1667)
Emily Dickinson
T.S.Eliot
- The Waste Land (1922)
Utopia
- Men Like Gods (1923)
Dystopia
- World War I (28 July 1914 — 11 November 1918) Dystopian Fictions
- We (1924)
- Brave New World (1932)
- It can’t happen here (1935)
- Animal Farm (1943)
- World War II (1 September 1939 — 2 September 1945)
- Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
- Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
- Lord of the Flies (1954)
- A Clockwork Orange (1962)
- Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
- Mockingbird (1980)
- Neuromancer (1984)
- The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)
- The Hunger Games (2008)
- 1Q84 (2009)
- Ready Player One (2011)
- The Testament (2019)
Unreliable Narrators
Child
- To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
- The Tin Drum (1959)
- A Clockwork Orange (1962)
- The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
- Life of Pi (2001)
Mentally Unstable/Mad
- One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962)
- American Psycho (1991)
- The Sound and the Fury (1929)
Lying/Confused
- Midnight’s Children (1981)
- The Blind Assassin (2000)
- Heart of Darkness (1902)
- Tristram Shandy (1759)
Concealed Facts
- Wuthering Heights (1847)
- The Turn of the Screw (1898)
- The Moonstone (1868)
