The College Board: 101 Great Books Recommended for College-Bound Readers

This is one of the 759 lists we use to generate our main The Greatest Books list.

About this list

The College Board, an American not-for-profit organization, 121 Books

The 101 great books recommended by "The College Board", an American not-for-profit organization that was formed in December 1899 as the College Entrance Examination Board (CEEB) to expand access to higher education.

This list was originally published in 2002 and was added to this site over 9 years ago.

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Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
669 Beowulf Unknown 1000 Unknown Old english
60 Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe 1958 Nigerian English
466 A Death in the Family James Agee 1957 American English
13 Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen 1813 British English
353 Go Tell it on the Mountain James Baldwin 1953 American English
101 Waiting for Godot Samuel Beckett 1953 Irish French
280 The Adventures of Augie March Saul Bellow 1953 American English
29 Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë 1847 British English
15 Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë 1847 British English
23 The Stranger Albert Camus 1942 French French
391 Death Comes for the Archbishop Willa Cather 1927 American English
110 The Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer 1400 British Middle english
877 The Cherry Orchard Anton Chekhov 1904 Russian Russian
271 The Awakening Kate Chopin 1899 American English
31 Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad 1899 British English
507 The Last of the Mohicans James Fenimore Cooper 1826 American English
552 The Red Badge of Courage Stephen Crane 1895 American English
30 The Divine Comedy Dante Alighieri 1308 Italian Italian
8 Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes 1605 Spanish Spanish
69 Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe 1719 British English
188 A Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens 1859 British English
11 Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoevsky 1866 Russian Russian
913 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass Frederick Douglass 1845 American English
195 An American Tragedy Theodore Dreiser 1925 American English
119 The Three Musketeers Alexandre Dumas 1844 French French
414 The Mill on the Floss George Eliot 1860 British English
36 Invisible Man Ralph Ellison 1952 American English
3236 The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson Ralph Waldo Emerson 2000 American English
79 As I Lay Dying William Faulkner 1930 American English
9 The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner 1929 American English
134 Tom Jones Henry Fielding 1749 British English
3 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925 American English
20 Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert 1857 French French
85 The Good Soldier Ford Madox Ford 1915 British English
96 Faust Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1808 German German
52 Lord of the Flies William Golding 1954 British English
117 Tess of the d'Urbervilles Thomas Hardy 1891 British English
74 The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne 1850 American English
33 Catch-22 Joseph Heller 1961 American English
67 A Farewell to Arms Ernest Hemingway 1929 American English
37 The Iliad Homer -750 Greek Ancient greek
24 The Odyssey Homer -740 Greek Ancient greek
366 The Hunchback of Notre-Dame Victor Hugo 1831 French French
68 Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston 1937 American English
50 Brave New World Aldous Huxley 1932 British English
424 A Doll's House Henrik Ibsen 1879 Norwegian Norwegian
73 The Portrait of a Lady Henry James 1881 American English
189 The Turn of the Screw Henry James 1898 American English
88 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man James Joyce 1916 Irish English
66 The Metamorphosis Franz Kafka 1915 Czech German
1037 The Woman Warrior Maxine Hong Kingston 1976 American English
16 To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee 1960 American English
256 Babbitt Sinclair Lewis 1922 American English
230 The Call of the Wild Jack London 1903 American English
25 The Magic Mountain Thomas Mann 1924 German German
5 One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez 1967 Colombian Spanish
460 Bartleby the Scrivener Herman Melville 1853 American English
7 Moby-Dick Herman Melville 1851 American English
9715 The Crucible Arthur Miller 1953 American English
49 Beloved Toni Morrison 1987 American English
208 A Good Man Is Hard to Find Flannery O'Connor 1953 American English
1305 Long Day's Journey Into Night Eugene O'Neill 1956 American English
55 Animal Farm George Orwell 1945 British English
112 Doctor Zhivago Boris Pasternak 1957 Russian Russian
103 The Bell Jar Sylvia Plath 1963 American English
98 The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe 1902 American English
2 In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust 1913 French French
441 The Crying of Lot 49 Thomas Pynchon 1966 American English
86 All Quiet on the Western Front Erich Maria Remarque 1928 German German
1308 Cyrano de Bergerac Edmond Rostand 1897 French French
519 Call It Sleep Henry Roth 1934 American English
4 The Catcher in the Rye J. D. Salinger 1951 American English
71 Hamlet William Shakespeare 1600 British English
155 Macbeth William Shakespeare 1606 British English
1661 A Midsummer Night's Dream William Shakespeare 1595 British English
337 Romeo and Juliet William Shakespeare 1597 British English
954 Pygmalion George Bernard Shaw 1913 British English
39 Frankenstein Mary Shelley 1818 British English
1002 Ceremony Leslie Marmon Silko 1977 American English
148 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 1962 Russian Russian
125 Antigone Sophocles -441 Greek Ancient greek
106 Oedipus the King Sophocles -429 Greek Ancient greek
383 Oedipus at Colonus Sophocles -401 Greek Ancient greek
26 The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck 1939 American English
115 Treasure Island Robert Louis Stevenson 1883 British English
184 Uncle Tom's Cabin Harriet Beecher Stowe 1852 American English
65 Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift 1726 British English
105 Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray 1847 British English
108 Walden Henry David Thoreau 1854 American English
12 War and Peace Leo Tolstoy 1869 Russian Russian
179 Fathers and Sons Ivan Turgenev 1862 Russian Russian
22 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain 1884 American English
80 Candide Voltaire 1759 French French
84 Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut 1969 American English
157 The Color Purple Alice Walker 1982 American English
217 The House of Mirth Edith Wharton 1905 American English
1379 The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty Eudora Welty 1980 American English
77 Leaves of Grass Walt Whitman 1855 American English
89 The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde 1890 Irish English
3458 The Glass Menagerie Tennessee Williams 1944 American English
27 To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf 1927 British English
107 Native Son Richard Wright 1940 American English
46 One Thousand and One Nights Unknown 800 Multiple Arabic
3453 Profiles in Courage John F. Kennedy 1956 American English
19 The Bible Unknown -1400 Jewish Hebrew, aramaic, greek
17114 A Testament of Hope Martin Luther King 1986 American English
377 The Education of Henry Adams Henry Adams 1907 American English
548 Le Morte d'Arthur Thomas Malory 1485 British Middle english
562 Aesop's Fables Aesop -560 Greek Ancient greek
152 The Prince Niccolo Machiavelli 1532 Italian Italian
225 Fairy Tales and Stories Hans Christian Andersen 1835 Danish Danish
324 Communist Manifesto Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels 1848 German German
402 The Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle -334 Greek Ancient greek
3423 Common Sense Thomas Paine 1776 British English
557 The Souls of Black Folk W. E. B. Du Bois 1903 American English
220 The Republic Plato -379 Greek Ancient greek
690 The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin Benjamin Franklin 1791 American English
229 Democracy in America Alexis de Tocqueville 1835 French French
985 Mythology Edith Hamilton 1942 American English
306 The Autobiography of Malcolm X Alex Haley 1965 American English