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Literary Research Paper Book List
The Accidental Tourist
Anne Tyler
Recently divorced, self-absorbed and lonely, travel writer Macon Leary begins a new life with an eccentric
dog trainer.
The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow
A picaresque story of a poor Jewish youth from Chicago. This novel follows his progress through the world
of the 20th century, and his attempts to make sense of it.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is at once a comic and poignant story about the fears and fantasies of a
boy's world, and a brilliant satire of the culture and institutions of the times.
The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton
Welcome to the New York of the 1870's, where everyone in the upper crust fits into the mold or is
ostracized for nonconformity.
All the King’s Men
Robert Penn Warren
All the King's Men tells the story of Willie Stark, a southern-fried politician who builds support by
appealing to the common man and playing dirty politics with the best of the back-room dealmakers.
All My Sons (Drama)
Arthur Miller
This story, set shortly after World War II, is about Joe Keller, who became rich as a manufacturer of
substandard war materials in a conflict that took one of his sons and imprisoned a colleague.
The Ambassadors
Henry James
James recounts the journey of Louis Strether--who has been dispatched abroad by a rich widow. His
mission: to save her son from the clutches of a wicked woman, and to convince the prodigal to return home.
An American Tragedy
Theodore Dreiser
Griffiths is just a Midwest kid, the son of a preacher in Kansas City, who tastes a little sophistication and
then hits the road seeking pleasure and success.
The Awakening
Kate Chopin
The Awakening begins at a crisis point in twenty-eight year-old Edna Pontellier's life. Edna is a passionate
and artistic woman who finds few acceptable outlets for her desires in her role as wife and mother of two
sons living in conventional Creole society.
The Blithedale Romance
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Blithedale Romance recreates Hawthorne's experience in a socialist utopian community. The fields of
Blithedale offer freedom and the chance to reinvent life - until life, ambitions and secret passions threaten
to flood this happy community with tragedy.
Bless Me, Ultima
Rudolfo Anaya
Antonio's life is forever altered when his Aunt Ultima, a curandera (healer) comes to live with the family;
she teaches Antonio many things, most importantly how to gather the self-knowledge that will help carry
him into adulthood.
The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison
A young black girl thinks her life will be forever changed for the better if she could only have blue eyes.
Call it Sleep
Henry Roth
This novel tells two stories: the immigrant experience in America and the coming of age of one
immigrant, David Schearl.
Call of the Wild
Jack London
Buck must choose between life in the wild or life among humans.
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Literary Research Paper Book List
Cannery Row
John Steinbeck
Peopled by stereotypical good-natured bums and warm-hearted prostitutes living on the fringes of
Monterey, Calif., the picaresque novel celebrates lowlifes who are poor but happy.
Carrie
Stephen King
A high school misfit turned prom queen gets revenge on her peers.
Cat On a Hot Tin Roof (Drama)
Tennessee Williams
The play exposes the emotional lies governing relationships in the family of a wealthy Southern planter of
humble origins.
The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger
Holden Caulfield gets thrown out of his prep school and learns about life and phoniness on his way home.
Cat’s Cradle
Kurt Vonnegut
A satire on the religion and the government of the modern world.
Catch-22
Joseph Heller
Catch 22 is a gut-wrenching satire which attacks the absurdities in the dehumanizing military bureaucracy
of WW II.
The Color Purple
Alice Walker
Celie learns to survive and gain self-acceptance in a world that is often unfair.
Daisy Miller
Henry James
Young Daisy Miller is an American on holiday in Switzerland. Daisy’s friendship with an American man,
Mr. Winterbourne, and her subsequent infatuation with a passionate but impoverished Italian bring to life
the great Jamesian themes of Americans abroad, innocence versus experience, and the grip of fate.
Desire Under the Elms (Drama)
Eugene O’Neill
Ephraim Cabot, greedy and hard like the stone walls that surround his farm, brings his bride home to meet
the family. His grown sons do not approve. Two leave for California to find their fortune in gold. But the
third son remains to fight for his claim to the farm.
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
Anne Tyler
Pearl Tull is nearing the end of her life but not her memory. Ever since her husband left her, she has raised
her three very different children on her own. Now grown, they have gathered together--with anger, with
hope, and with a beautiful, harsh, and dazzling story to tell....
Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury
Nowadays firemen start fires. Fireman Guy Montag loves to rush to a fire and watch books burn up. Then
he met a seventeen-year old girl who told him of a past when people were not afraid, and a professor who
told him of a future where people could think. And Guy Montag knew what he had to do....
A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway
This is the WWI story of Lieutenant Henry, an American, and Catherine Barkley, a British nurse. The two
meet in Italy, and almost immediately Hemingway sets up the central tension of the novel: the tenuous
nature of love in a time of war.
Fences (Drama)
August Wilson
Fences by August Wilson presents a slice-of-life in a black tenement in Pittsburgh. The main character,
Troy Maxson is a garbage collector who has taken great price in keeping his family together and providing
for them.
The Fixer
Bernard Malamud
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Set in Kiev in 1911 during a period of heightened anti-Semitism, the novel tells the story of Yakov Bok, a
Jewish handyman blamed for the brutal murder of a young Russian boy.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ernest Hemingway
The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist
guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death
of an ideal.
The Glass Menagerie (Drama)
Tennessee Williams
In this semi-autobiographical play the domineering matriarch of the Wingfield family tries to find a
"gentleman caller" for her fragile daughter. This is a "memory play"; the narrator/character, Tom,
continually shifts from narration to his "in scene" character.
Go Tell it on the Mountain
James Baldwin
Based on the author's experiences as a teenaged preacher in a small revivalist church, the novel describes
two days and a long night in the life of the Grimes family, particularly the 14-year-old John and his
stepfather Gabriel.
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck
When The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939, America, still recovering from the Great Depression,
came face to face with itself in a startling, lyrical way. John Steinbeck gathered the country's recent shames
and devastations--the Hoovervilles, the desperate, dirty children, the dissolution of kin, the oppressive labor
conditions--in the Joad family.
The Great Santini
Pat Conroy
A tyrannical father, a military "ace" brutalizes his family and particularly his oldest son, interpreting
humanity as weakness in this unsparing novel.
The House of Mirth
Edith Wharton
As Lily approaches thirty, still unmarried, and without financial resources, her value - in this society declines. Part of the responsibility for her fate can be placed on her lack of a maternal influence, on her
own irresolution, on the weakness of her primary suitor, on the viciousness of the other rich women in the
novel, but the ultimate blame has to fall on society.
House of the Seven Gables
Nathaniel Hawthorn
Set in mid-19th-century Salem, MA, the work is a somber study in hereditary sin based on the legend of a
curse pronounced on Hawthorne's own family by a woman condemned to death during the infamous Salem
witchcraft trials. The greed and arrogant pride of the novel's Pyncheon family through the generations is
mirrored in the gloomy decay of their seven-gabled mansion.
The Iceman Cometh (Drama)
Eugene O’Neill
The pipe-dreaming drunks of Harry Hope's bar numb themselves with rotgut gin and make grandiose plans,
while waiting for the annual appearance of the big-spending, fast-talking salesman, Hickey. But this year's
visit fails to bring the expected good times, as a changed Hickey tries to rouse the barflies from their
soothing stupor with a proselytizing message of salvation through self-knowledge.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou
In this first of five volumes of autobiography, poet Maya Angelou recounts a youth filled with
disappointment, frustration, tragedy, and finally hard-won independence.
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
A classic from the moment it first appeared in 1952, Invisible Man chronicles the travels of its narrator, a
young, nameless black man, as he moves through the hellish levels of American intolerance and cultural
blindness.
The Joy Luck Club
Amy Tan
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Chronicles the 40-year friendship of four Chinese women, and how the death of one member brings her
daughter into the group, creating a new understanding for each.
The Jungle
Upton Sinclair
Sinclair’s indictment of the horrors of the meatpacking industry in the early 1900’s, and its effect on one
family of immigrants.
The Kitchen God’s Wife
Amy Tan
Winnie weaves an account of a childhood of loneliness and abandonment and a young adulthood marred by
a nightmarish arranged marriage. Winnie survives her many ordeals because of the friendship and strength
of her female friends, the love of her second husband, and her own courage and endurance.
The Last of the Mohicans
James Fennimore Cooper
The story of the desperate struggle of the American Indian against the pressures and restrictions of white
civilization.
Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Drama)
Eugene O’Neill
Theirs is not a happy tale: The youngest son is sent to a sanitarium to recover from tuberculosis; he
despises his father for sending him; his mother is wrecked by narcotics; and his older brother by drink.
Lost in Yonkers
Neil Simon
Grandma Kurnitz has endured many crises, ranging from a harsh childhood in Germany to being a young
widow with six children in a foreign country. From her life she learned to be strong, hard, and cold, and
this is the lesson she tries to instill in her four remaining children. While her two teenage grandsons are in
her care, the three learn the importance of being loved and loving, and the difference between living and
surviving.
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
Stephen Crane
This is the harrowing story of a young girl whose parents utterly fail her. In love and eager to escape her
violent home life, she allows herself to be seduced into living with a young man, who soon deserts her.
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
Oscar Hijuelos
It's 1949. It's the era of the mambo, and two young Cuban musicians make their way up from Havana to the
grand stage of New York. The Castillo brothers, workers by day, become by night stars of the dance halls,
where their orchestra plays the lush, sensuous, pulsing music that earns them the title of the Mambo Kings.
This is their moment of youth--a golden time that thirty years later will be remembered with nostalgia and
deep affection.
Martin Eden
Jack London
The title character becomes a writer, hoping to acquire the respectability sought by his society-girl
sweetheart. She spurns him, however, when his writing is rejected by several magazines and when he is
falsely accused of being a socialist. She tries to win him back after he achieves fame, but Eden realizes her
love is false.
Moby Dick
Herman Melville
Epic saga of Captain Ahab, a one-legged fanatic, who vows revenge on the white whale that crippled him.
Captain Ahab's hunt for the white whale drives the narrative at a relentless pace, while Ishmael's
meditations on whales and whaling, on the sublime indifference of nature, and on the grimy physical details
of the extraction of oil provide a reflective counterpoint to the headlong idolatrous quest.
My Antonia
Willa Cather
Saga of an immigrant girl and her family who come to America from Czechoslovakia.
Native Son
Richard Wright
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Caught up by forces of racism he can’t understand or control, Bigger Thomas turns to violence.
The Natural
Bernard Malamud
Roy Hobbs makes the mistake of pronouncing aloud his dream: to be the best there ever was.
O Pioneers!
Willa Cather
Cather's heroine is Alexandra Bergson, who arrives on the wind-blasted prairie of Hanover, Nebraska, as a
girl and grows up to make it a prosperous farm. But this archetypal success story is darkened by loss, and
Alexandra's devotion to the land may come at the cost of love itself.
On the Road
Jack Kerouac
Like nearly all of Kerouac's writing, On The Road is thinly fictionalized autobiography, filled with a cast
made of Kerouac's real life friends, lovers, and fellow travelers. Narrated by Sal Paradise, On the Road is a
cross-country bohemian odyssey that not only influenced writing in the years since its 1957 publication but
penetrated into the deepest levels of American thought and culture.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Ken Kesey
Randle P. McMurphy, an inmate of a mental institution, tries to find independence he feels he deserves.
Rabbit Run
John Updike
Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom was a high school superstar. Now he is a young married father, trapped in the
suburbs, unhappy with a cluttered house, a drunken wife, and a son who will never be the athlete he was.
Will this former star find a way to make his life better, or will he run like a rabbit?
The Red Badge of Courage
Stephen Crane
The Red Badge is a solid story about a young man named Henry who goes off to fight in the civil war. Most
of the book deals with Henry's moral dilemmas, whether he should run away from the war or whether he
should stay and fight.
The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorn
In the early days of Puritan Boston, Hester Prynne braves the stigma of adultery by wearing the
embroidered scarlet "A" on her clothing.
Saint Maybe
Anne Tyler
In Saint Maybe, protagonist Ian Bedloe, stricken with guilt over the death of his older brother, raises three
children unrelated to him by blood. He is strengthened in this Herculean task by the storefront Church of
the Second Chance, to which he devotes himself with equal fervor.
The Skin of Our Teeth (Drama)
Thornton Wilder
Wilder has an Eternal Family narrowly escape one disaster after another, from ancient times to the present.
Meet George and Maggie (married only 5,000 years); their two children, Gladys and Henry (perfect in
every way!); and their maid, Sabina (the ageless vamp) as they overcome ice, flood, and war -- by the skin
of their teeth.
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes
unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of
virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his shattering
experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden.
Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison
In an effort to hide his Southern, working class roots, Macon Dead, an upper-class Northern black
businessman, tries to insulate his family from the danger and despair of the rank and file blacks with whom
he shares the neighborhood. The plan leads his son, "Milkman”onto a path exactly opposite the one his
father had hoped.
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The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner
First published in 1929, Faulkner created his "heart's darling," the beautiful and tragic Caddy Compson,
whose story Faulkner told through separate monologues by her three brothers—the idiot Benjy, the neurotic
suicidal Quentin and the monstrous Jason.
A Streetcar Named Desire (Drama)
Tennessee Williams
Taking place in New Orleans, "Streetcar" tells the painful story of aging southern belle Blanche DuBois,
her sister Stella, Stella's brutish husband Stanley, and the circle of people who frequent Stella's home.
The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway
Jake Barnes, Hemingway's narrator with a mysterious war wound that has left him sexually incapable, is
the heart and soul of the book. Brett, the beautiful, doomed English woman he adores, provides the glamour
of natural chic and sexual unattainability.
Tender is the Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Set in the French Riviera in the 1930’s, this is the story of how psychiatrist Dick Diver and his former
patient-turned-wife, Nicole Warren, meet, love, and self destruct.
A Thousand Acres
Jane Smiley
Aging Larry Cook announces his intention to turn over his 1,000-acre farm--one of the largest in Zebulon
County, Iowa--to his three daughters. While Larry Cook deteriorates into a pathetic drunk, his daughters
are left to cope with the often grim realities of life on a family farm.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe
This is a book that changed history. Harriet Beecher Stowe was appalled by slavery, and she took one of
the few options open to nineteenth century women who wanted to affect public opinion: she wrote a novel,
a huge, enthralling narrative that claimed the heart, soul, and politics of pre-Civil War Americans.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Drama)
Edward Albee
A married couple’s imaginary child keeps their marriage together, and threatens to tear it apart.
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