Textbooks used in the 1st Quarter:

  1. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations.  Translated by Martin Hammond.  Penguin Books, 2006
  2. Elie Wiesel, Night.  Translated by Marion Wiesel.  Hill and Wang, 2006.
  3. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.  Dover Thrift Editions, 1995
  4. Land of Hope by Wilfred McClay
  5. All Things Shine  by Hubert Dreyfus, Sean Dorrance Kelly
  6. Plato Six Pack
  7. Mere Christianity
  8. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
  9. Thomas More, Utopia.  1516  (orig. Latin)
  10. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart.  1958
  11. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy.  1308-21†  (orig. Italian)
  12. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen (A funny and sharp look at how two people, who might not like each other at all, might just like each other a little bit. Hard to read at first, but once you understand the tone, it’s impossible to put down.)
  13. James Arthur Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain.  1953
  14. Beowulf.  8th-10th Cent.?§  (orig. Anglo-Saxon)
  15. The Bible.  6th Cent. BC to 2nd Cent. AD‡  (orig. Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek)
  16. Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451.  1953
  17. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales.  Ca. 1400∫  (orig. Middle English)
  18. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.  1903
  19. The Constitution of the United States. 1787⌂
  20.  Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage.  1895
  21.  Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species.  1859**
  22.  Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment.  1866††  (orig. Russian)
  23.   Thomas Stearns Eliot, The Waste Land.  1922
  24.  Francis Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.  1925
  25.  Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.  1967  (orig. Spanish)
  26.  [Alexander Hamilton, John Jay & James Madison], The Federalist. 1788§§
  27.  Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter.  1850
  28.  Joseph Heller, Catch-22.  1961
  29.  Mark Helprin, Ellis Island and Other Stories.  1981
  30.  Mark Helprin, A Soldier of the Great War.  1991
  31.  Homer, The Odyssey.  8th Cent. BC‡‡  (orig. Greek)
  32.  Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.  1932
  33.  James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  1916
  34.  Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have a Dream.”  1963
  35.  Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” 1963
  36.  Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon.  1940
  37.  Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird.  1960
  38.  Thomas Mann, Death in Venice.  1912  (orig. German)
  39.  Herman Melville, Moby-Dick.  1851
  40.  Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon. 1977
  41.  “George Orwell” (Eric Blair), Animal Farm.  1943
  42.  “George Orwell” (Eric Blair), 1984.  1948
  43.  Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front. 1929  (orig. German)
  44.  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Night Flight.  1931 (orig. French)
  45.  Jerome David Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye.  1951
  46.  “William Shakespeare”, Macbeth. 1623∫∫
  47.  “William Shakespeare”, Othello.  1622∫∫
  48.  Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.  1961 (orig. Russian)
  49.  Henry David Thoreau, Walden.  1854
  50.  Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War.  410 BC  (orig. Greek)
  51.  Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men.  1946
  52.  Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny.  1951
  53. The Stranger, Albert Camus
  54. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
  55. The Fountainhead, by Ann Rand

NOTES:

*     The following selection corresponds roughly to what an American high-school student might reasonably be expected to encounter, however superficially,  over four years of study.  Dates given here are those of original publication; there are of course many more recent printings available for most of these items.

†     Best English version is the translation by John Ciardi, 1954-70.

§     Anonymous; by far the best translation (in a parallel text) is Seamus Heaney’s (2000).

‡    There are, of course, many versions of the Bible in English; always be sure to cite at least the individual book, e.g. “Genesis”, “Psalms”, “Gospel of Matthew”.

∫     Middle English is quite removed from modern in both orthography and pronunciation; A. S. Kline’s modern verse rendering is quite adequate.

⌂    Including the Bill of Rights (1789); always cite by article number or number of amendment, e.g. First, Fifth, etc.

**   This was the first edition; five more were overseen by Darwin before his death.

††  The 1992 translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky is superior.

§§  Papers 10, 85 and 87 are especially important.

‡‡  Verse translations by Richard Lattimore (1965) and Robert Fagles (1996) are highly recommended.

∫∫    Contrary to the mainstream belief, two recent biographers of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550-1604), champion their subject as the “real Shakespeare” most persuasively:  Charlton Ogburn Jr., The Mysterious William Shake-

speare (1984) and Mark Anderson, “Shakespeare” by Another Name (2005).

NOTE:  Unless your high school English teacher has clearly indicated a favorable attitude toward the anti-Stratfordian view, you should definitely NOT bring up the identity question in class.  Even though you may have actually read the two works of scholarship mentioned above (and are thereby almost certainly better educated on the issue than your teacher is!), prudence counsels silence on this “hot” topic.