Course Texts

Core and auxiliary texts for each course are specified below.  Where available, online sources for texts are listed in the left menu or by hovering over the “Course Texts” tab above on any page.

FRESHMAN ENGLISH

Core texts are centered around the “Discovery of the Self”: To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee), Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), The Oedipus Trilogy (Sophocles), Poetry selections from The Seagull Reader. 

Other texts may include I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Angelou), The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (Haddon), Hiroshima (Hersey), Into Thin Air (Krakauer), A Night to Remember (Lord), Brighton Beach Memoirs (Simon), Kindred (Spencer), Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck), and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson).

SOPHOMORE ENGLISH

The literature component of the sophomore year features American works in all major genres, centered on “The Individual Identity versus Society.” Core texts for all students are The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger) and Selections from Walden (Thoreau). Additional core texts for the Honors students are The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald) and Song of Solomon (Morrison).

Other texts may include The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Alexie), In the Time of the Butterflies (Alvarez), My Antonia (Cather), Ellen Foster (Gibbons), Six Degrees of Separation (Guare), The Kite Runner (Hosseini), The Bean Trees (Kingsolver), The Crucible (Miller), Death of a Salesman (Miller), Ethan Frome (Wharton), A Streetcar Named Desire (Williams), Fences (Wilson), and other short works of fiction and non-fiction.

JUNIOR ENGLISH

The fall semester literature component of the junior year features all major genres, centered on “Justice and Judgment.”  The core text is Things Fall Apart (Achebe).

Other works may include The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne), Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey), Macbeth (Shakespeare), Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare), Othello (Shakespeare), Huckleberry Finn (Twain),  Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut), The Color Purple (Walker), and other works of fiction and non-fiction.

SENIOR ENGLISH

The fall semester literature component of the senior year features all major genres, centered on “The Ways to Tell/Read a Story.”  The core text is The Things They Carried (O’Brien).

Other texts may include: Northanger Abbey (Austen), The Stranger (Camus), Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky), Silas Marner (Eliot), Madame Bovary (Flaubert), Lord of the Flies (Golding), The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Kundera), Interpreter of Maladies (Lahiri), Passing (Larsen), Beloved (Morrison), Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (Packer), Hamlet (Shakespeare), Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare), Fires in the Mirror (Smith), and Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf).