<p>Rather than Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer (my D read these in earlier grades), what about something else from Twain? One of my favorites is “The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories” - satire at its best. </p>
<p>Raymond Chandler - The Big Sleep or The Long Goodbye</p>
<p>Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse Five - one of the better later-20th century American writers</p>
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I agree completely. The problem with Hughes is that he was too good for his own good; he exemplified Yeats’ advice about making one’s verse “seem a moment’s thought” so well that it’s easy to overlook the brilliant craftsmanship in it.</p>
<p>Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (better/less tendentious than Beloved IMO)
Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark or The Professor’s House
Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night
Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Henry James, Portrait of a Lady</p>
<p>John Hersey’s Hiroshima everyone should read. If he likes Sci-Fi, might find Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward interesting.</p>
<p>As far as movies of Tennessee Williams’ plays are concerned, Streetcar has so many iconic moments, but I really have to watch it with the captions…can’t decide which one of them is harder to understand.</p>
<p>Cat on Hot Tin Roof is fabulous for a boy to watch because in the movie, Elizabeth Taylor is about the prettiest thing ever. Paul Newman isn’t bad either. And the color is LUSH. Just gorgeous.</p>
<p>Son likes the Glass Menagerie, but I think it’s too sad.</p>
<p>I’m really impressed by the quality of the recommendations here!</p>
<p>My own 2 cents:</p>
<p>Their Eyes Were Watching God – this is really now part of the American canon, an educated person ought to read it</p>
<p>Song of Solomon – ditto. I agree with mathmom that it’s much easier to take than Beloved. I have read – and enjoyed – it multiple times.</p>
<p>Twain’s “Letters From The Earth” is not a coherent book, just a collection of essays that were never published (or, if published, never collected) because of their scandalous nature. Absolutely, 100% hilarious, fall-down funny. The title essay is a set of letters Lucifer writes back to the other archangels describing the odd project God has undertaken in an obscure backwater of the universe. </p>
<p>I agree with everyone who recommended My Antonia. I agree with everyone who recommended The Invisible Man. Richard Wright (Native Son, Black Boy) has more historical than literary interest.</p>
<p>Faulkner’s The Sound And The Fury is a pretty useful book to have read. I think you can survive growing up now without reading Hemingway, Lewis, Dos Passos, but not Faulkner.</p>
<p>I would try to read some Henry James. Maybe short works like Daisy Miller or What Maisie Knew, but the longer books are worth the effort.</p>
<p>Poetry: Walt Whitman! Almost anything famous will do. Emily Dickinson!</p>
<p>Insofar as I can remember it, here is the main part of my mother’s 10th Grade American Lit syllabus from the 1970s:</p>
<p>Anne Bradstreet poetry
Washington Irving stories
Thoreau essays
Emerson essays
Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Whitman poetry
Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
Twain, Huckleberry Finn
Norris, The Octopus
London, Martin Eden
Faulkner, Sanctuary
Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Ellison, The Invisible Man
Ginsburg, Howl
Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five</p>
<p>(She probably would have taught a Hemingway novel, but everyone would have read The Sun Also Rises in 9th grade.)</p>
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I read this one, but I found the thick dialect very difficult. How does that come across at the student level? I think I would have given up at that age…</p>
<p>Jack London’s To Build a Fire was one of the better pieces of my “American Literature since 1865” course.</p>
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<p>I truly had to mouth the words of the dialect to myself. I had it with me on a plane and decided that I couldn’t read it on the plane because it would be pretty unPC of me to be mouthing the dialect in public!</p>
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<p>My husband can get really cheap and I always want to make jokes about unscrewing the lightbulbs, but I’m the only one in the house who is famliar with the play.</p>
<p>Outside of your first list of requirements, OP, but he should read Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.</p>
<p>It wasn’t me who preferred Song of Solomon, I just know I should give Morrison another chance. I did meet her once under amusing circumstances (her son and I were in the same art exhibit) and she was very pleasant. </p>
<p>I meant to put Emerson and Thoreau in my post. And yeah Whitman and Dickinson. If we are going into poetry - I’d add my favorites from high school Theodore Roethke, e. e. cummings, Amy Lowell and Wallace Stevens.</p>
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<ol>
<li><p>Shakespearian language is much more difficult, and we don’t hesitate to ask high school students to read it.</p></li>
<li><p>Faulkner and Twain also use a lot of dialect. Ditto.</p></li>
<li><p>One of the reasons to read TEWWG is its challenge to the notion of what great literature should look and sound like, and whose lives it should deal with, and how. Hurston, a well-educated woman (Barnard BA, Columbia grad student) who could write standard English perfectly well, knew exactly what she was doing.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I think the book is very worthwhile, but you just have to be willing to do whatever you need to do to understand the dialect. When I read dialogue written in ANY type of dialect, I usually have to mouth lots of the words to get them.</p>
<p>American authors from S2’s IB program:
Catch 22
A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway
To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own, V. Woolf
As I Lay Dying, Faulkner
Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad (universally disliked)</p>
<p>It was a world lit class, so they read a lot of things in translation. S2 actually preferred a lot of the other pieces they read to the US authors selected for their IB program. In particular, S2 liked poetry by Derek Wollcott, a Nobel-winning poet from the Caribbean, Durrenmatt’s The Visit, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (after reading Hamlet), and Garcia-Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold (which he also read in IB/AP Spanish that year – and liked the original better). Thomas Mann’s A Death in Venice and Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary (both in translation) were not necessarily the most loved readings, but among the most hotly discussed. Part of this year’s summer reading for seniors was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by By Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. </p>
<p>Note – the school has a lot of control over the specific titles that are read, so there may be a wide scope of literature over a number of schools.</p>
<p>S2 found reading As I Lay Dying easier to get through if he read it aloud.</p>
<p>(Neither Virginia Woolf nor Joseph Conrad would be considered American. On any theory.)</p>
<p>(And I should have included Bernard Malamud, The Natural in my mother’s syllabus.)</p>
<p>For the Afro-American author, if he wants a challenge I would do Invisible Man. If he wants something a little easier, I would go with Toni Morrison or Zora Neale Hurston. Their Eyes Were Watching God is a common one as is Song of Solomon, he would be able to use either on his exam and they’re great books. </p>
<p>For women authors, there’s usually a lot of focus on turn of the century (Age of Innocence, House of Mirth, the Awakening) but I honestly find a lot of those extremely dull. Actually I liked the Awakening but thought Age of Innocence was a very difficult one to slog through. So I would go with someone more mid-century (Hurston and Morrison apply here too, but there are others).</p>
<p>I can’t figure out why every HS English department seems to think The Awakening is essential reading.</p>
<p>Every American should read all of the *Little House *books…They’re a quick read since they’re technically children’s books but my my…what person can be left with dry eyes when Mr. Edwards brings sweet potatoes and a piece of candy and a penny for each girl and they think it is just too much…</p>
<p>sylvan: I agree my daughter’s list is a bit much, she attends a catholic hs and they are quite known for their english dept. She is not a fan of the quick pace of the class as she tends to be a more deliberate reader. You should have seen some of the books she read last year for her AP Brit Lit class! But here is my personal opinion about that list. I would like to see a few more contemporary novels in the mix in place of things like the Grapes of Wrath or Sound and the Fury. I do think that they have a little bit for everyone though although I have to say that when my son took the class he did not like Beloved or The Bluest Eye.</p>