Former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett once put the following question to 325 selected scholars and intellectuals: What books should every high school student have read by the time he/she graduates?
Thirty works were mentioned most frequently. Mr. Bennett commented that any 10 of them "would compare favorably to what is read in many schools," and added that he himself had not read all 30 on the list.
Not surprisingly, no book published in the last 30 years made the list.
Shakespeare's plays, especially Macbeth and Hamlet, were the only works listed by a majority of the participants - 71 percent.
Fifty percent cited such documents of United States history as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Next came Huckleberry Finn, the Bible and the following works of literature, philosophy and politics:
- Homer's Odyssey and Iliad.
- Dickens's Great Expectations and Tale of Two Cities.
- Plato's Republic.
- John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter.
- Sophocles' Oedipus.
- Melville's Moby Dick.
- Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
- Thoreau's Walden.
- The poems of Robert Frost.
- Whitman's Leaves of Grass.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby.
- Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
- Marx's Communist Manifesto.
- Aristotle's Politics.
- The poems of Emily Dickinson.
- Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment.
- The novels of William Faulkner.
- J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye.
- De Tocqueville's Democracy in America.
- Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.
- The essays and poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
- Machiavelli's Prince.
- Milton's Paradise Lost.
- Tolstoy's War and Peace.
- Virgil's Aeneid.
I don't know many of these you read before you graduated (if you're a graduate) or have read since, but I guess I do know what should be on my reading list this summer - lots of poetry and lots of Faulkner.
RLC
