English Major Starter Kit – 99 Essential Books All Aspiring English Majors Should Read

Let’s get one fact straight right from the get go: no, reading these books will not make you a straight A student.

What it will do, however, is prep you for the kind of text you will not only be exposed to, but expected to read and dissect as an English major. While I read Jane Austen’s books and a few other classics on my own time in high school, it wasn’t enough to fully prepare me for the dense and often dull books I would be forced to read and study in university. (No, you won’t be reading Harry Potter. And if you are, I feel gypped!)

As an English Major (just like my book blogging buddy, Amber), I wish I had jumped on the Interwebs and looked for lists like this one. Mind you, I graduated high school in 2008 and had just got a Facebook account the year before, so I do give myself some slack on this account.

Nevertheless, we realize there are a TON of reading lists out there. What makes ours different is that this is a compilation of books we were actually required to read (in their entirety or excerpts from) through our four year post-secondary agony journey.

You can download our FREE English Major Starter Kit list here by subscribing to our email list.

99 Essential Books All Aspiring English Majors Should Read

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen 
2. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen 
3. Emma – Jane Austen 
4. Mansfield Park – Jane Austen 
5. Persuasion – Jane Austen 
6. Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
8. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
9. Villette – Charlotte Brontë
10. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley 

11. Dracula – Bram Stoker
12. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
13. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
14. Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
15. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
16. The Legend Sleepy Hollow – Washington Irving
17. A Little Princess – Frances Hodgson Burnett
18. Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
19. The Awakening – Kate Chopin 
20. Castle of Otranto – Horace Walpole 

21. Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stephenson
22. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe 
23. Incidents In the Life of a Slave Girl – Harriet Ann Jacobs 
24. A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolfe
25. Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolfe
26. For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway 
27. That Summer in Paris – Morley Callaghan 
28. Le Morte d’Arthur – Thomas Malory 
29. Paradise Lost – John Milton
30. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl  
31. Beowulf  – Unknown
32. Divine Comedy – Dante Alighieri
33. Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
34. Androids Dream of Electric Sheep – Philip K. Dick
35. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
36. Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
37. Clarissa – Samuel Richardson
38. Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller
39. Songs of Innocence and Experience – William Blake
40. Astrophil and Stella – Philip Sidney

41. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald 
42. Poetics – Aristotle
43. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath 
44. Ariel – Sylvia Plath 
45. Tender Buttons – Gertrude Stein
46. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
47. Macbeth – William Shakespeare
48. Julius Caesar – William Shakespeare
49. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
50. Far from the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy 
51. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman – Mary Wollstonecraft
52. Utopia – Thomas Moore
53. Everyman – Unknown
54. Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
55. Love Poems – Ovid
56. The Bloody Chamber – Angela Carter
57. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson
58. Wide Sargaso Sea – Jean Rhys
59. The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway 
60. The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammet 

61. Frannie and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
62. Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
63. Iliad – Homer
64. Odyssey – Homer
65. Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence
66. Lyrical Ballads – William Wordsworth
67. Selected Poems – Emily Dickinson
68. The Complete Poems – John Keats
69. The Fairie Queene – Edmund Spenser
70. Songs and Sonnets – John Donne

71. Little Women – Louisa Alcott
72. Adventures of Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain
73. Leaves of Grass – Mark Twain
74. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain 
75. The Glass Menagerie – Tennesse Williams
76. North and South – Elizabeth Gaskell 
77. Cranford – Elizabeth Gaskell
78. Daisy Miller – Henry James
79. Howl – Allen Ginsberg
80. Evelina – Frances Burney 

81. Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand
82. Fountainhead – Ayn Rand
83. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert 
84. Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
85. Tess of the d’Ubervilles – Thomas Hardy 
86. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift 
87. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – Gawain Poet
88. The Book of Margery Kempe – Margery Kempe
89. Doctor Faustus – Christopher Marlowe
90. Biographia Literaria – Samuel Taylor Coleridge

91. The Rights of Man – Thomas Paine
92. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
93. The Lady of Shalott – Alfred Tennyson
94. Walden – Henry James Thoreau
95. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – Henry James
96. Middlemarch – George Eliot
97. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy 
98. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
99. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas 

There’s a lot of books, so we made a printable PDF checklist of every must read book for English Majors. Hang it on your wall, your fridge, your bathroom mirror, wherever.

Subscribe to our email list for the full printable list. Click here!

If you are a current English Major, drop a comment below and let us know what kinds of books are on your syllabus! We would love to know how things have changed and add it to our current reading list.

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