CIHS Approved Reading List
The
following books are currently approved for the additional reading
selection for
“College in the High School” students. Students must sign
up for a specific
book with me to avoid the impractical problems of too many students
seeking the
same book. Many of these books are available for free download on the
internet.
Some may have to be requested by inter-library loan, and may thus
require
special arrangements with the public or UMC library. In any case,
obtain
approval from me BEFORE going to the trouble to acquire any particular
book.
Adams, Henry, Democracy (a novel by the scholarly grandson of a former President)
Addams, Jane, Twenty Years at
Hull-House (Addams was a pioneer in social reform)
Alcott, Louisa May, A Modern
Mephistopheles (the “dark side” of
Louisa May)
Anderson, Sherwood, Winesburg,
Ohio (one of the early “regional” voices)
Bellamy, Edward, Looking
Backward (an early “time travel” and
utopian novel)
Brown, William Wells, Clotelle (the first novel by an African-American)
Buck, Pearl S., The Good Earth (the first novel of the first female American Nobel Laureate)
Burroughs, Edgar Rice, Tarzan of
the Apes (one of the most successful “dime
novel”
series)
Butler, Samuel, Erewhon
(another American utopian novel—read the title backwards, exact
translation of
“utopia”)
Cisneros, Sandra, The House on
Mango Street (a successful first effort by a young
Latina)
Crane, Stephen, The Red Badge of
Courage (one of the finest war novels ever written)
Dreiser, Theodore, Sister Carrie
(shocking adventures of the seduced and abandoned
Carrie)
DuBois, W.E.B., The Souls of
Black Folks (essays by a premier Black intellectual)
Faulkner, William, The Sound and
the Fury (another Nobel Prize laureate, which
signifies something)
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Great
Gatsby (a Minnesota writer who did
well—sometimes)
Frederick, Nathan, The Damnation
of Theron Ware (one of dozens of Pulitzer Prize
winners)
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, Herland
(a women’s version of Utopia—heaven on
earth)
Grey, Zane, Riders of the Purple
Sage (one of the finest writers of Western
fiction ever)
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The
Scarlet Letter (America’s greatest Romantic
novelist)
Hemingway, Ernest, For Whom the
Bell Tolls (his impact on the craft of writing is
immeasurable)
Hurston, Zora Neale, Their Eyes
Were Watching God (an anthropologist who also wrote
great fiction)
Jackson, Helen Hunt, Ramona (a novel from the writer of A
Century of Dishonor)
Jacobs, Harriet, Incidents in
the Life of a Slave Girl (a phenomenal story of the
love of freedom)
Keller, Helen, The Story of My
Life (simply told, one of America’s most
influential characters)
Lewis, Sinclair, Babbitt (America’s first Nobel Prize winner in Literature,
another Minnesota
boy)
London, Jack, The Sea-Wolf (a shipwreck adventure by a rough-and-tumble writer, the
author of Call of the Wild)
Melville, Herman, Typee (a cannibal adventure, the first novel by the writer of Moby-Dick)
Morrison, Toni, Beloved (one of the first novels by America’s first Black Nobel
Prize Laureate)
Norris, Frank, The Octopus (one of America’s earliest novels of social and
economic
self-criticism: the railroads)
Parkman, Francis, The Oregon
Trail (an early memoir of the Westward experience)
Sinclair, Upton, The Jungle (another novel of social and economic self-criticism: the
meat-packing
industry)
Steinbeck, John, The Grapes of
Wrath (a Nobel-Prize winner, looking at the Dust
Bowl migrants of the Great Depression)
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle
Tom’s Cabin (an anti-slavery novel that may
still be the
best-selling novel of all time)
Styron, William, The Confessions
of Nat Turner (an anti-slavery
novelization—graphic
violence)
Tan, Amy, The Joy-Luck Club (the Chinese-American experience—would make a good
co-read with Buck’s
Good Earth)
Twain, Mark, Life on the
Mississippi (Twain’s life as a steamboat
pilot, not
fiction—but Twain lied a lot)
Velazquez, Loreta Janeta, The
Woman in Battle (she disguised herself as a man and
served
the Confederacy as an officer)
Wallace, Lew, Ben-Hur, a Tale of
the Christ (one of the first and most effective
Biblical novelizations)
Warton, Edith, Ethan Frome (Warton’s shortest and least characteristic novel, a
love story)
Washington, Booker T., Up from
Slavery (the autobiography of an early leader in the
Black community)
Wilson, Harriet E., Our Nig (the first “novel” written by an
African-American woman)
“Don’t see what you want? Come see me about it.”
Substitutions
may be arranged with me. Other titles written by the authors listed
are
probably acceptable. Twentieth-century titles and authors are
especially
welcome as substitutes, but care must be taken to select works that are
significant—culturally, socially, literarily, or historically. See
me with information
justifying your substitution request in terms of its importance to
the
development of U.S. literature or the author’s career.