TeachersFirst's Lifetime Reading LIst
Here's our list of all-time great works for students young and old. While this list contains many classics for adult and young adult readers, it also includes many contemporary works, as well as material suitable for milddle school students.
Looking for more specialty reading lists? Check out the TeachersFirst Reading Lists page.
| Author | Title |
| Adams, Richard | Watership Down |
| Adams, Douglas | Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, A |
| Adamson, Joy | Born Free |
| Albee, Edward | Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? |
| Alcott, Louisa May | Little Women |
| Aligheri, Dante | Divine Comedy |
| Allende, Isabel | House of the Spirits, The |
| Austen, Jane | Northanger Abbey, others |
| Beckett, Samuel | Waiting for Godot |
| Bellow, Saul | Humbolt's Gift, Henderson the Rain King |
| Blake, William | Poems |
| Boccaccio | Decameron, The |
| Bolt, Robert | A Man for All Seasons |
| Bradbury, Ray | Fahrenheit 451 |
| Bradley, Marion Zimmer | Mists of Avalon |
| Bronte, Emily | Wuthering Heights |
| Bronte, Charlotte | Jane Eyre - Lesson Plan |
| Browning, Robert | Poems |
| Buck, Pearl | Good Earth, The |
| Burgess, Anthony | Clockwork Orange, A |
| Burnett, Frances H. | Secret Garden, The |
| Burnford, Sheila | Incredible Journey, The |
| Burns, Olive Ann | Cold Sassy Tree |
| Byatt, A.S. | Possession |
| Byron, George Gordon Lord | Poems |
| C.S. Lewis | Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, The |
| Camus, Albert | Plague, The |
| Card, Orson Scott | Ender's Game |
| Cather, Willa | My Antonia, Song of the Lark |
| Cervantes | Don Quixote |
| Chaucer, Geoffrey | Canterbury Tales |
| Chekov, Anton | Cherry Orchard, The |
| Chinua, Achebe | Things Fall Apart |
| Chopin, Kate | Awakening, The |
| Cisneros, Sandra | House on Mango Street, The |
| Coleridge, Samuel | Poems |
| Collins, Wilkie | Moonstone, The |
| Conrad, Joseph | Secret Sharer, Heart of Darkness |
| Crane, Stephen | Red Badge of Courage, The |
| Craven, Margaret | I Heard the Owl Call My Name |
| Crichton, Michael | Andromeda Strain, The, others |
| Defoe, Daniel | Robinson Crusoe |
| Descartes, Rene | Discourse on Method, A |
| Dickens, Charles | Tale of Two Cities, A |
| Dickinson, Emily | Poems |
| Dillard, Annie | Pilgrim at Tinker Creek |
| Dinesen, Isak | Out of Africa |
| Donleavy, J.P. | Ginger Man, The |
| Dostoevsky, Feodor | Crime and Punishment |
| Douglas, Lloyd C. | Robe, The |
| Doyle, Arthur Conan | Hound of the Baskervilles, others |
| Dreeiser, Theodore | An American Tragedy |
| Dumas, Alexandre | Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo |
| DuMaurier, Daphne | Rebecca |
| Eliot, George | Adam Bede, Mill on the Floss |
| Eliot, T.S. | Murder in the Cathedral, Poems |
| Ellison, Ralph | Invisible Man |
| Emerson, Ralph Waldo | Poems |
| Esquivel, Laura | Like Water for Chocolate |
| Euripides | Tragedies |
| Flaubert, Gustave | Madame Bovary |
| Forster, E. M. | Passage to India, A Room With a View |
| Fowles, John | French Lieutenant's Woman, others |
| Frank, Pat | Alas, Babylon |
| Franklin, Benjamin | Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin |
| Frazer, James | Golden Bough, The |
| Frazier, Charles | Cold Mountain |
| Freud, Sigmund | any work |
| Fromm, Erich | Escape from Freedom, others |
| Frost, Robert | Poetry |
| Gaines, Ernest | A Gathering of Old Men |
| Gaines, Ernest | Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman, The |
| Galsworthy, John | Forsythe Saga, The |
| Goethe, Wolfgang | Faust |
| Golding, William | Lord of the Flies |
| Goldsmith, Oliver | She Stoops To Conquer |
| Green, Hannah | I Never Promised You a Rose Garden |
| Greene, Graham | Power and the Glory, The |
| Hawthorne, Nathaniel | Scarlet Letter, The |
| Heinlein, Robert | Stranger in a Strange Land |
| Heller, Joseph | Catch 22 |
| Hemingway, Ernest | Old Man and the Sea, The, others |
| Herriot, James | All Creatures Great and Small, others |
| Hesse, Herman | Siddartha, others |
| Hilton, James | Lost Horizon |
| Homer | Iliad, The - The Odyssey |
| Hudson, W.H. | Green Mansions |
| Hugo, Victor | Les Miserables |
| Hume, David | Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding |
| Hurston, Zora Neale | Their Eyes Were Watching God |
| Huxley, Aldous | Brave New World |
| Ibsen, Henrick | Hedda Gabler, others |
| Irving, Washington | Stories |
| Irving, John | A Prayer for Owen Meany The World According to Garp |
| James, Henry | Turn of the Screw, The |
| Jean-Paul Sarte | No Exit |
| Jones, James | From Here To Eternity |
| Joyce, James | Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man |
| Kafka, Franz | Metamorphosis |
| Kant, Immanuel Kant | Metaphysics |
| Keats, John | Poems |
| Keller, Helen | Story of My Life, The |
| Kerouac, Jack | On the Road |
| Kesey, Ken | One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest |
| Kesselring, Joseph | Arsenic and Old Lace |
| Kinsella, W.P. | Shoeless Joe |
| Kinston, Maxine Hong | Woman Warrior, The |
| Kipling, Rudyard | Kim, others |
| Knowles, John | A Separate Peace |
| Koestler, Arthur | Darkness at Noon |
| Lamb, Charles | Essays |
| Lawrence, D.H. | Sons and Lovers, others |
| Lee, Harper | To Kill A Mockingbird |
| LeGuin, Ursula | A Wizard of Earthsea |
| Llewellyn, Richard | How Green Was My Valley |
| London, Jack | Call of the Wild, The |
| Machiavelli, Nicolo | Prince, The |
| MacLeish, Archibald | J.B. |
| Malamud, Bernard | Assistant, The |
| Malory, Thomas | Le Morte d' Arthur |
| Mann, Thomas | Magic Mountain, The |
| Marlowe, Christopher | Dr. Faustus |
| Marquez, Gabriel Garcia | One Hundred Years of Solitude |
| Marshall, Catherine | Christy |
| Maugham, Somerset | Of Human Bondage |
| McCourt, Frank | Angela's Ashes |
| McCullers, Carson | Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The |
| Melville, Herman | Moby Dick, Billy Budd |
| Michener, James | Hawaii |
| Mill, John Stuart | On Liberty |
| Miller, Walter M. | Canticle for Leibowitz, A |
| Miller, Arthur | Death of a Salesman |
| Milton, John | Paradise Lost |
| Mitchell, Margaret | Gone With the Wind |
| Moliere | Misanthrope, The |
| Momaday, M. Scott | Ancient Child, The |
| Montaigne | Essays |
| Montgomery, Lucy Maud | Anne of Green Gables series |
| Morrison, Toni | Beloved |
| Nordhof, Charles B. | Bounty triology, The |
| O'Connor, Flannery | Wise Blood |
| Orwell, George | 1984, Animal Farm |
| Paine, Thomas | Rights of Man |
| Pasternak, Boris | Dr. Zhivago |
| Paton, Alan | Cry the Beloved Country |
| Percy, Walker | Moviegoer, The |
| Pirsig, Robert | Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance |
| Plato | Dialogues |
| Plutarch | Lives |
| Poe, Edgar Allen | Short Stories and Poems |
| Pope, Alexander | Rape of the Lock, The |
| Porter, Katherine Anne | Ship of Fools |
| Potok, Chaim | Chosen, The - The Promise, others |
| Proulx, Annie | Shipping News, The |
| Proust, Marcel | Remembrance of Things Past |
| Pynchon, Thomas | Gravity's Rainbow |
| Rand, Ayn | Anthem, The Fountainhead |
| Rawlings, Marjorie | Cross Creek, The Yearling |
| Rawls, Wilson | Where the Red Fern Grows |
| Remarque, Erich Maria | All Quiet on the Western Front |
| Rhys, Jean | Wide Sargasso Sea |
| Richard D. Blakemore | Lorna Doone |
| Rostand, Edmond | Cyranno de Bergerac |
| Rousseau, Jean-Jacques | Confessions |
| Rusdie, Salman | Midnight's Children |
| Saint-Exupery, Antoine de | Little Prince, The |
| Salinger, J.D. | Catcher in the Rye, Franny and Zooey |
| Scott, Sir Walter | Ivanhoe |
| Shakespeare, William | All! |
| Shaw, G. B. | Pygmalion, others |
| Shelley, Percy Bysshe | Poems |
| Shelley, Mary | Frankenstein |
| Shute, Nevil | On the Beach |
| Silone, Ignazio | Bread and Wine |
| Sinclair, Upton | Jungle, The |
| Singer, Isaac Bashevis | Short Stories |
| Smith, Betty | Tree Grows in Brooklyn, The |
| Solzhenitsyn, Alexander | First Circle, The - others |
| Sophocles | Oedipus Rex, Antigone |
| Soto, Gary | Pacific Crossing |
| Steinbeck, John | Grapes of Wrath, others |
| Stendhal | Red and the Black, The |
| Sterne, Laurence | Tristram Shandy |
| Stevenson, Robert Louis | Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, others |
| Stoker, Bram | Dracula |
| Stone, Irving | Agony and the Ecstasy, The |
| Stoppard, Tom | Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead |
| Swift, Jonathan | Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal |
| Tan, Amy | Joy Luck Club, The |
| Ten Boom, Corrie | Hiding Place, The |
| Tennyson, Alfred Lord | Poems |
| Thackery, William | Vanity Fair |
| Theroux, Paul | Mosquito Coast, The |
| Thurber, James | Stories |
| Tolkein, J.R.R. | Hobbit, The |
| Tolkien, J.R.R. | Lord of the Rings |
| Tolstoy, Leo | Anna Karenina, The Death of Ivan Illich, others |
| Turgenev, Ivan | Fathers and Sons |
| Twain, Mark | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court |
| Tyler, Anne | Accidental Tourist, The |
| Undset, Sigrid | Kristin Lavansdatter |
| Updike, John | Rabbit, Run, others |
| Uris, Leon | Trinity |
| Verne, Jules | Around the World in Eighty Days, others |
| Virgil | Aeneid, The |
| Virginia Woolf | To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway |
| Voltaire | Candide |
| Vonnegut, Kurt | Slaughterhouse 5, others |
| Walker, Alice | Color Purple, The |
| Walker, Alice | Temple of my Familiar, The |
| Waltari, Mika | The Egyptian, The Roman, The Etruscan |
| Warren, Robert Penn | All The Kings Men |
| Washington, Booker T. | Up From Slavery |
| Waugh, Evelyn | Brideshead Revisited |
| Welty, Eudora | Optimist's Daughter, The |
| Wharton, Edith | Ethan Frome |
| White, T.H. | Once and Future King, The |
| Whitman, Walt | Leaves of Grass |
| Wilde, Oscar | Picture of Dorian Gray, The |
| Wilder, Thornton | Our Town |
| Williams, Tennessee | Glass Menagerie, The |
| Wister, Owen | Virginian, The |
| Wolfe, Thomas | Look Homeward, Angel |
| Wordsworth | Poems |
| Wouk, Herman | Caine Mutiny, The |
| Wright, Richard | Black Boy |
| Wyss, Johann | Swiss Family Robinson |