Here is a massive list, for massive attack, of major works with which one should be familiar: 1) Aeschylus — The Libation Bearers 2) Sophocles — Oedipus the King & Antigone 3) Aristophanes — Lysistrata 4) Plato — Phaedo (specifically Allegory of the Cave & the Death of Socrates) 5) Beowulf 6) Dante — Inferno (from the Divine Comedy) 7) Chaucer — The Canterbury Tales 8) Machiavelli — The Prince 9) Christopher Marlowe — Doctor Faustus 10) John Milton — Paradise Lost 11) Jonathan Swift — Gulliver’s Travels & A Modest Proposal 12) Alexander Pope — An Essay On Man & An Essay On Criticism 13) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — Faust (pts. 1&2) 14) William Blake (poetry) — The Tyger 15) Wordsworth (poetry) — Ode on Intimations of Immortality 16) Samuel Taylor Coleridge — Rhi me of the Ancient Mariner 17) Percy Bys she Shelly — Ode to the Western Wind 18) Lord Tennyson — Ulysses & Idylls of the King 19) Robert Browning — My Last Duchess 20) Frederick Douglass — Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass 21) Walt Whitman — Song of Mys lef 22) Emily Dickinson 23) Gustave Flaubert — Madame Bovary 24) Dostoyevsky — Notes From Underground 25) Tolstoy — Death of Ivan Ilynich 26) Yeats 27) Thomas Mann — Death in Venice 28) Rainer Maria Rilke 29) James Joyce — Ulysses & The Dead 30) Virginia Woolf — A Room of One’s Own 31) Franz Kafka — The Trial & Metamorphosis 32) T. S. Eliot — Waste Land 33) John Smith — The General History of Virginia 33) Robert Burns 34) Elizabeth Barret Bronzing — So nents from the Portuguese 35) Edward Fitzgerald — The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam 36) George Eliot — Silas Marner 37) Matthew Arnold — Dover Beach 38) Christina Rossetti — Goblin Market 39) Oscar Wilde — The Picture of Dorian Gray 40) Thomas Hardy — Jude the Obscure & HAP (poem) 41) Joseph Conrad — Heart of Darkness 42) A. E. Housman — Terrance This Is Stupid Stuff 43) Benjamin Frnaklin — Autobiography 44) Emerson — The American Scholar, Self-Reliance, The Over-Soul, & Fate 45) Nathaniel Hawthorne — Young Goodman Brown, The Minister’s Black Veil, Rappaccini’s Daughter, & The Scarlet Letter 46) Edgar Allan Poe — The Imp of the Perverse, The Fall of the House of Usher, Annabel Lee, & The Raven 47) Harriet Beecher Stowe — Uncle Tom’s Cabin 48) Thoreau — Walden & Nature Writings 49) Ambrose Bierce — Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge 50) Sarah Orne Jewett — A White Heron 51) Kate Chopin — The Awakening 52) Charles W.
Chestnutt — The Goophered Grapevine 53) Charlotte Perkins Gilman — The Yellow Wall-paper 54) W. E. B Du Bois — The Souls of Black Folk 55) Ezra Pound — The Cantos 56) e. e. cummings 57) F. Scott Fitzgerald — Babylon Revisited 58) Amiri Baraka — Dutchman 59) Theodore Roethke 60) Gertrude Stein — The Making of Americans Well, there you have it: a list of major literary works that are usually not covered in high-school, but should be in college; and which one definitely will have to be familiar with for the English GRE if one plans on going to Graduate School.
I hope that you enjoy… and I have read all of these: so if you have any questions please do not hesitate to ask… Also, obviously, there is more to the list, but I figured sixty is enough for now… lol… let me know when you are finished and I will give you another list.