[MUM] 100 Novels for the College-bound student

100 Novels for the College-bound student [MUM]

Published circa 2000.

In the months prior to graduating high school, my English teacher passed around a two-page handout with this title at the top. The pages were gray around the edges from being photocopied too many times and they had the look of something originally written on an electric typewriter. It was a list of books our teachers recommended we read to be “prepared” for college. I can’t remember if we were told who compiled the list, or what the criteria were for its selections, but it didn’t much matter. I have always loved lists – both making them and finishing them – and ten seconds after getting this handout I was checking off the few books on it that I had read. This was my first introduction to the idea of a literary canon. I brought it home and showed it to my mother. A former English major at Boston’s Emmanuel College, she’d had the kind of classic liberal arts education that meant she’d probably read close to two-thirds of the list by the time she reached her senior year. When I gave it to her she began marking it up right there on the kitchen table, giving the initials HS or C or A for whether she’d read a particular book in high school, college, or “after.” For purely sentimental reasons I’m putting this 100 book list with no known author in the blender, abbreviating it [MUM] in honor of my mother, who made it more than just another classroom handout. It, along with her collection from the Easton Press [EP], was my starting point. As far as lists go, it is conservative like the Radcliff [RR] with the telltale plugs for the briefer, student-friendly classics like Portrait and Ethan Frome. Still, it is ambitious in its breadth. Like the Observer [O], the [MUM] rambles across the centuries, handpicking favorites from Cervantes onward. All but ten of its entries have made it onto the master list. The outliers are a combination of “books of the times” from the boomer generation (Ordinary People, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden), high school-friendly dramas with non-Anglo-American protags, and, oddly, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer.

Here’s the full list. All of them made the Master List except for the selection separated by a space at the bottom.

MIGUEL DE CERVANTES – Don Quixote de La Mancha

DANIEL DEFOE – Robinson Crusoe

JONATHAN SWIFT – Gulliver’s Travels

HENRY FIELDING – Joseph Andrews

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE – The Sorrows of Young Werther

WALTER SCOTT – The Heart of Midlotian

JANE AUSTEN – Pride and Prejudice

STENDHAL – The Red and the Black

HONORE DE BALZAC – Eugenie Grandet

VICTOR HUGO – Les Miserables

ALEXANDRE DUMAS – The Three Musketeers

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE – The Scarlet Letter

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY – Vanity Fair

CHARLES DICKENS – David Copperfield

CHARLOTTE BRONTE – Jane Eyre

EMILY BRONTE – Wuthering Heights

HERMAN MELVILLE – Moby-Dick

GEORGE ELIOT – The Mill on the Floss

FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY – The Brothers Karamazov; Crime and Punishment

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT – Madame Bovary

LEO TOLSTOY – Anna Karenina

MARK TWAIN – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

THOMAS HARDY – The Mayor of Casterbridge

HENRY JAMES – The Turn of the Screw

SARAH ORNE JEWETT – The Country of the Pointed Firs

KATE CHOPIN – The Awakening

OSCAR WILDE – The Picture of Dorian Gray

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW – Androcles and the Lion

JOSEPH CONRAD – Heart of Darkness; Lord Jim

EDITH WHARTON – Ethan Frome

RUDYARD KIPLING – Kim

JOHN GALSWORTHY – The Forsyte Sage

EDMOND ROSTAND – Cyrano de Bergerac

STEPHEN CRANE – The Red Badge of Courage

WILLA CATHER – My Antonia

W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM – Of Human Bondage

THOMAS MANN – The Magic Mountain

HERMAN HESSE – Siddhartha

E. M. FORSTER – A Passage to India

JAMES JOYCE – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

SIGRID UNDSET – Kristin Lavrandsdatter

FRANZ KAFKA – The Metamorphosis

SINCLAIR LEWIS – Arrowsmith

D. H. LAWRENCE – Sons and Lovers

EUGENE O’NEILL – Long Day’s Journey into Night

KATHERINE ANNE PORTER – Collected Stories

PEARL BUCK – The Good Earth

J. R. R. TOLKIEN – The Lord of the Rings

ALDOUS HUXLEY – Brave New World

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD – The Great Gatsby

WILLIAM FAULKNER – Collected Stories

MARJORIE KINNAN RAWLINGS – The Yearling

THORNTON WILDER – Our Town

ERICH REMARQUE – All Quiet on the Western Front

ERNEST HEMINGWAY – A Farewell to Arms

MARGARET MITCHELL – Gone With the Wind

THOMAS WOLFE – Look Homeward, Angel

ANTOINE DE SAINT EXUPERY – The Little Prince

ANDRE MALRAUX – Man’s Fate

JOHN STEINBECK – The Grapes of Wrath

GEORGE ORWELL – Animal Farm

ALAN PATON – Cry, the Beloved Country

GRAHAM GREENE – The Power and the Glory

SAMUEL BECKETT – Waiting for Godot

DAPHNE DU MAURIER – Rebecca

RICHARD WRIGHT – Native Son; Black Boy

JAMES AGEE – A Death in the Family

WILLIAM GOLDING – The Lord of the Flies

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS – The Glass Menagerie

ALBERT CAMUS – The Plague; The Stranger

BERNARD MALAMUD – The Fixer

RALPH ELLISON – Invisible Man

SAUL BELLOW – The Adventures of Augie March

ARTHUR MILLER – The Death of a Salesman

CARSON MCCULLERS – The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch

J. D. SALINGER – The Catcher in the Rye

KURT VONNEGUT – Cat’s Cradle

JOSEPH HELLER – Catch-22

JAMES BALDWIN – Go Tell It On the Mountain

JOHN KNOWLES – A Separate Peace

HARPER LEE – To Kill A Mockingbird

GUNTER GRASS – The Tin Drum

MAYA ANGELOU – I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

URSULA K. LE GUIN – The Left Hand of Darkness

JOHN UPDIKE – Rabbit Angstrom

ALICE WALKER – The Color Purple

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OLE ROLVAAG – Giants in the Earth

HANNAH GREENBERG – I Never Promised you a Rose Garden

JUDITH GUEST – Ordinary People

JOHN HERSEY – The Wall

KAMALA MARKANDAYA – Nectar in a Sieve

YUKIO MISHIMA – The Sound of Waves

JOYCE CAROL OATES – A Garden of Earthly Delights

TILLIE OLSEN – Tell Me a Riddle

RACHEL CARSON – The Silent Spring

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER – The Pathfinder

JAMES HALL AND CHARLES NORDHOFF- Mutiny on the Bounty