Twentieth Century American Literature Reading List

The following reading list for the English and Film Studies PhD program is provided by the department and is updated yearly to reflect changes in the discipline.

For more information about reading lists, see the Comprehensive Area Exam page.

Updated: September 2025

Fiction

• Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie
• Edith Wharton: House of Mirth
• Willa Cather: My Ántonia
• Gertrude Stein: Tender Buttons
• Sherwood Anderson: Winesburg, Ohio
• F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
• Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises
• James Weldon Johnson: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
• William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury
• Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God
• John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath
• Richard Wright: Native Son
• Vladimir Nabokov: Pale Fire
• Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man
• Jack Kerouac: On the Road
• James Baldwin: Another Country
• J.D. Salinger: Catcher in the Rye
• William Burroughs: Naked Lunch
• Paule Marshall: Brown Girls, Brownstones
• Flannery O'Connor: The Complete Stories
• Thomas Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49
• Saul Bellow: Herzog
• N. Scott Momaday: House Made of Dawn
• Maxine Hong Kingston: China Men
• Ishmael Reed: Mumbo Jumbo
• Rudolfo A. Anaya: Bless Me, Ultima
• Jamaica Kincaid: Lucy
• Eudora Welty: The Optimist's Daughter
• Raymond Carver: Collected Stories
• Sandra Cisneros: The House on Mango Street
• Leslie Marmon Silko: Ceremony
• Don De Lillo: White Noise
• Philip Roth: American Pastoral
• Toni Morrison: Beloved
• David Foster Wallace: Infinite Jest

Poetry

• Robert Frost: "Mending Wall," "Home Burial," "After Apple-Picking," "The Wood-Pile," "The Road Not Taken," "Out, Out—," "Fire and Ice," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "Departmental," "Desert Places," "Design," "Provide, Provide," "Directive."
• T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land, "The Hollow Men,"
• Ezra Pound: "In a Station of the Metro," Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, The Cantos (I, XVII, XLV), "The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter."
• Edna St. Vincent Millay: "I Think I Should Have Loved You Presently," "[I, being born a woman]," "Apostrophe to Man," "I Too beneath Your Moon, Almighty Sex," "I Forgot for a Moment."
• e.e. cummings: "in Just-" "O sweet spontaneous," "Buffalo Bill's," "the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls," "next to of course god america i," "I sing of Olaf glad and big," "somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond," "my father moved through dooms of love," "pity this busy monster, manunkind."
• Marianne Moore: "Poetry," "A Grave," "To a Snail," "What Are Years?" "The Paper Nautilus," "The Mind Is An Enchanting Thing," "In Distrust of Merits."
• Wallace Stevens: "The Snow Man," "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman," "The Emperor of Ice-Cream," "Sunday Morning," "Anecdote of the Jar," "Peter Quince at the Clavier," "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,""The Idea of Order at Key West," "Study of Two Pears," "Of Modern Poetry," "The Plain Sense of Things."
• Langston Hughes: "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "Mother to Son," "I, Too," "The Weary Blues," "Mulatto," "Song for a Dark Girl," "Visitors to the Black Belt," "Note on Commercial Theatre," "Vagabonds," "Words Like Freedom," Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz.
• William Carlos Williams: "The Red Wheelbarrow," "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus."
• Robert Lowell: "For the Union Dead," "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket," Life Studies.
• Elizabeth Bishop: "The Fish," "Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance," "The Bight," "At the Fishhouses," "Questions of Travel," "The Armadillo," "Sestina," "In the Waiting Room," "One Art."
• Allen Ginsberg: Howl, "A Supermarket in California," "Sunflower Sutra."
• Frank O'Hara: "To the Harbormaster," "Why I Am Not a Painter," "A Step Away From Them," "The Day Lady Died," "A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island."
• Gwendolyn Brooks: A Street In Bronzeville
• Adrienne Rich: "Diving Into The Wreck," "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law," "'I Am in Danger—Sir—," "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning," "Power," "Transcendental Etude," "Shattered Head," "Five O'Clock, January 2003," "Wait."
• John Berryman: 77 Dream Songs
• Sylvia Plath: Ariel
• John Ashbery: Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
• Charles Olson: "I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You," "Maximus, to Himself," "[When Do Poppies Bloom]," "Celestial Evening, October 1967."
• Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones): "An Agony. As Now." "Legacy," "Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note," "Black Bourgeoisie," "A Poem for Willie Best," "Will They Cry When You're Gone, You Bet."
• Denise Levertov: "Hypocrite Women," "The Ache of Marriage," "Our Bodies," "To the Snake," "The Jacob's Ladder," "In Mind," "September 1961," "What Were They Like?" "Caedmon."
• Audre Lorde: "Father Son And Holy Ghost," "Coal," "October," "Sisters in Arms," "The Woman Thing," "Black Mother Woman," "Outlines," "Call."
• Rita Dove: "Geometry,""Banneker," "Parsley," Thomas and Beulah, "Poem In Which I Refuse Contemplation," "Missing," "Rosa," "Fox Trot Fridays."Li-Young Lee: "The Gift," Persimmons," "Eating Alone," "Eating Together," "Mnemonic," "This Room and Everything In It."

Drama

• Eugene O'Neill: The Hairy Ape
• Lillian Hellman: The Children's Hour
• Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire
• Arthur Miller: The Death of a Salesman
• Lorraine Hansberry: A Raisin in the Sun
• René Marqués: The Oxcart
• Amiri Baraka: The Dutchman
• Edward Albee: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
• Hanay Geiogamah: Body Indian
• Wakako Yamauchi: And the Soul Shall Dance
• Sam Shepard: True West
• Luis Valdez: Zoot Suit
• David Mamet: American Buffalo
• David Henry Hwang: M. Butterfly