The College Board’s SAT recommended reading list
| – | Beowulf |
| Achebe, Chinua | Things Fall Apart |
| Agee, James | A Death in the Family |
| Austen, Jane | Pride and Prejudice |
| Baldwin, James | Go Tell It on the Mountain |
| Beckett, Samuel | Waiting for Godot |
| Bellow, Saul | The Adventures of Augie March |
| Brontë, Charlotte | Jane Eyre |
| Brontë, Emily | Wuthering Heights |
| Camus, Albert | The Stranger |
| Cather, Willa | Death Comes for the Archbishop |
| Chaucer, Geoffrey | The Canterbury Tales |
| Chekhov, Anton | The Cherry Orchard |
| Chopin, Kate | The Awakening |
| Conrad, Joseph | Heart of Darkness |
| Cooper, James Fenimore | The Last of the Mohicans |
| Crane, Stephen | The Red Badge of Courage |
| Dante | Inferno |
| de Cervantes, Miguel | Don Quixote |
| Defoe, Daniel | Robinson Crusoe |
| Dickens, Charles | A Tale of Two Cities |
| Dostoyevsky, Fyodor | Crime and Punishment |
| Douglass, Frederick | Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass |
| Dreiser, Theodore | An American Tragedy |
| Dumas, Alexandre | The Three Musketeers |
| Eliot, George | The Mill on the Floss |
| Ellison, Ralph | Invisible Man |
| Emerson, Ralph Waldo | Selected Essays |
| Faulkner, William | As I Lay Dying |
| Faulkner, William | The Sound and the Fury |
| Fielding, Henry | Tom Jones |
| Fitzgerald, F. Scott | The Great Gatsby |
| Flaubert, Gustave | Madame Bovary |
| Ford, Ford Madox | The Good Soldier |
| Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von | Faust |
| Golding, William | Lord of the Flies |
| Hardy, Thomas | Tess of the d’Urbervilles |
| Hawthorne, Nathaniel | The Scarlet Letter |
| Heller, Joseph | Catch 22 |
| Hemingway, Ernest | A Farewell to Arms |
| Homer | The Iliad |
| Homer | The Odyssey |
| Hugo, Victor | The Hunchback of Notre Dame |
| Hurston, Zora Neale | Their Eyes Were Watching God |
| Huxley, Aldous | Brave New World |
| Ibsen, Henrik | A Doll’s House |
| James, Henry | The Portrait of a Lady |
| James, Henry | The Turn of the Screw |
| Joyce, James | A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man |
| Kafka, Franz | The Metamorphosis |
| Kingston, Maxine Hong | The Woman Warrior |
| Lee, Harper | To Kill a Mockingbird |
| Lewis, Sinclair | Babbitt |
| London, Jack | The Call of the Wild |
| Mann, Thomas | The Magic Mountain |
| Marquez, Gabriel García | One Hundred Years of Solitude |
| Melville, Herman | Bartleby the Scrivener |
| Melville, Herman | Moby Dick |
| Miller, Arthur | The Crucible |
| Morrison, Toni | Beloved |
| O’Connor, Flannery | A Good Man is Hard to Find |
| O’Neill, Eugene | Long Day’s Journey into Night |
| Orwell, George | Animal Farm |
| Pasternak, Boris | Doctor Zhivago |
| Plath, Sylvia | The Bell Jar |
| Poe, Edgar Allan | Selected Tales |
| Proust, Marcel | Swann’s Way |
| Pynchon, Thomas | The Crying of Lot 49 |
| Remarque, Erich Maria | All Quiet on the Western Front |
| Rostand, Edmond | Cyrano de Bergerac |
| Roth, Henry | Call It Sleep |
| Salinger, J.D. | The Catcher in the Rye |
| Shakespeare, William | Hamlet |
| Shakespeare, William | Macbeth |
| Shakespeare, William | A Midsummer Night’s Dream |
| Shakespeare, William | Romeo and Juliet |
| Shaw, George Bernard | Pygmalion |
| Shelley, Mary | Frankenstein |
| Silko, Leslie Marmon | Ceremony |
| Solzhenitsyn, Alexander | One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich |
| Sophocles | Antigone |
| Sophocles | Oedipus Rex |
| Steinbeck, John | The Grapes of Wrath |
| Stevenson, Robert Louis | Treasure Island |
| Stowe, Harriet Beecher | Uncle Tom’s Cabin |
| Swift, Jonathan | Gulliver’s Travels |
| Thackeray, William | Vanity Fair |
| Thoreau, Henry David | Walden |
| Tolstoy, Leo | War and Peace |
| Turgenev, Ivan | Fathers and Sons |
| Twain, Mark | The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn |
| Voltaire | Candide |
| Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. | Slaughterhouse-Five |
| Walker, Alice | The Color Purple |
| Wharton, Edith | The House of Mirth |
| Welty, Eudora | Collected Stories |
| Whitman, Walt | Leaves of Grass |
| Wilde, Oscar | The Picture of Dorian Gray |
| Williams, Tennessee | The Glass Menagerie |
| Woolf, Virginia | To the Lighthouse |
| Wright, Richard | Native Son |
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Thank you for this list. It is very helpful.
Thanks for sharing this list!
Hay mucho libros!! Estoy un loco mexicano.
Thank you for the list. I don’t know why and who I’m thanking for
Thank you very much for the list. It saved me a lot of time hunting on Google and the College Board website.
Thank you so much!
How long would it take to finish this list of books?
Missy,
I Stumbled across your SAT reading list and loved your blog. Thank you so much for brightening the day with your inspirations. It is always fun to discover another person who enjoys my favorite activities- reading and knitting – as much as I do ! Blessings !
You saved me so much time of searching for this list. Thank you.
Thank u for this.
http://www.philiphawessat.com/SAT_PSAT_Tutoring_Test_Prep.html
I made my SAT reading list/summer reading list myself. Not surprisingly, there are a few books in common with the list above. But my list is better. Who can read all those novels on the College Board list???? Plus, some of that stuff won’t help on the critical reading. Beowulf and Shakespeare won’t help a bit because the SAT Critical Reading is all in modern English! Some of those novels are too easy to read to do any good. I like “Animal Farm,” but I didn’t put it on my list. The list above should be called the favorites list of everyone who has an important job at The College Board, because, basically, that’s what it is.
It’s a terrific list for an aspiring English Lit major and that’s about it.