AP Lang & Composition
Universal Theme Assignment
This essay must be typed, double spaced, and written in an easily legible font (no larger
than 12 point, no cursive, decorative, or shaded fonts will be accepted). All drafts must be in
MLA format (including a Works Cited Page). Completed essays must be at least seven full pages
long (margin to margin). Your Works Cited Page does not count as one of your seven required
pages! Essay must have one inch margins all around. Accurate citations for any and all
paraphrased and quoted material are required.
Read several of the works of the British author of your choice from the list below. You
will need to read and write over at least two of the works listed for your particular author. Be
sure to sign up for that particular author, as I limit the number of students assigned to each writer.
Do not wait until the last minute to begin your reading! If you begin reading early, you will be
better able to change authors if that becomes necessary.
After you have read at least two of the works listed, you should decide what that author’s
universal theme is. The universal theme is that theme which fits all of the works chosen, even
though each may have a more individualized theme, as well. The purpose of your essay is to
substantiate that your perception of the author’s universal theme is the correct one. To help you
pinpoint your author’s universal theme, I’d suggest reading literary criticisms of your author’s
works. Be sure that these criticisms are not merely book reviews and that they discuss the
development of the theme, characters, and/or symbolism. These elements will be key to
establishing your argument for the author’s universal theme. Try to apply what critics find to
your own evaluation so that you can use these criticisms as supporting evidence in your essay.
You will need to have at least two sources supporting your assertions (the novels themselves do
not count). Be sure that as you research and start to formulate your opinion of the author’s
universal theme, you write down all the citation information for the works you’ve consulted.
This will save you a great deal of time. You will be given specific due dates at a later time.
Any of the following reading author clusters may be used to fulfill this assignment:
Chinua Achebe
Things Fall Apart
No Longer at Ease
Arrow of God
Lewis Carroll
Alice in Wonderland
Through the Looking Glass
The Hunting of the Snark
Sylvie and Bruno
Geoffrey Chaucer
The Canterbury Tales (if all tales
are covered, this can be used
alone)
Troilus and Criseyde
Daniel Defoe
Moll Flanders
Robinson Crusoe
Charles Dickens
Bleak House
David Copperfield
Great Expectations
Hard Times
A Tale of Two Cities
Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse
Mrs. Dalloway
Orlando
Henry James
Daisy Miller
The Portrait of a Lady
The Turn of the Screw
Washington Square
The Wings of the Dove
The Ambassadors
The American
James Joyce
The Dead
A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man
Dubliners
Ulysses
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V.S. Naipaul
A Bend in the River
A House for Mr. Biswas
George Orwell
1984
Animal Farm
Coming Up for Air
Homage to Catalonia
Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina
The Death of Ivan Ilych
George Bernard Shaw
Major Barbara
Man and Superman
Pygmalion
St. Joan
Arms and the Man
Robert Louis Stevenson
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
The Black Arrow
Treasure Island
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Importance of Being
Earnest
An Ideal Husband
A Woman of No Importance
H.G. Wells
The War 0f the Worlds
The Invisible Man
The Island of Dr. Moreau
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale
Alias Grace
Cat’s Eye
Surfacing
Albert Camus
The Stranger
The Plague
Fyodor Dostoevski
The Brothers Karamazov
Crime and Punishment
Notes from the Underground
Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
The Autumn of the Patriarch
One Hundred Years of Solitude
In Evil Hour
Strange Pilgrims
Love and Other Demons
No One Writes to the Colonel
Henrik Ibsen
A Doll’s House
An Enemy of the People
Ghosts
Hedda Gabler
Moliere
Tartuffe
Misanthrope
Zora Neale Hurston
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Dust Tracks on a Road
Willa Cather
Death Comes for the Archbishop
My Antonia
O Pioneers!
The Professor’s House
James Fenimore Cooper
The Deerslayer
Last of the Mohicans
The Pathfinder
The Pioneers
The Prairie
Stephen Crane
The Red Badge of Courage
Maggie
Ralph Ellison
Invisible Man
Juneteenth
William Faulkner
Absalom, Absalom!
As I Lay Dying
Sartoris
The Sound and the Fury
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Last Tycoon
Tender is the Night
This Side of Paradise
The Great Gatsby
Joseph Heller
Closing Time
Catch-22
God Knows
Picture This
Something Happened
Ernest Hemingway
Across the River and Into the
Trees
For Whom the Bell Tolls
The Green Hills of Africa
To Have and Have Not
John Hersey
A Bell for Adano
The Wall
Hiroshima Blues
John Irving
Cider House Rules
The Hotel New Hampshire
A Prayer for Owen Meany
A Widow for One Year
The World According to Garp
Jack Kerouac
The Dharma Burns
On the Road
The Town and the City
Desolation Angels
Ken Kasey
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s
Nest
The Demon Box
Sometimes a Great Notion
Jack London
The Iron Heel
John Barleycorn
Martin Eden
The Sea Wolf
Cormac McCarthy
All the Pretty Horses
The Crossing
Cities on the Plains
Norman Mailer
The Armies of the Night
The Naked and the Dead
The Executioner’s Song
Bernard Malamud
The Fixer
The Natural
David Mamet
Glengarry Glen Ross
American Buffalo
Oleanna
Herman Melville
Moby Dick
Typee
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Billy Budd
Bartlby the Scrivner
Benito Cereno
J.D. Salinger
Catcher in the Rye
Frannie and Zooey
Raise High the Roofbeams,
Carpenters
Arthur Miller
All My Sons
Incident at Vichy
The American Clock
Focus
Broken Glass
After the Fall
A View from the Bridge
Death of a Salesman
Walter Miller
Saint Leibowitz and the Wild
Horse Woman
A Canticle for Leibowitz
The View from the Stars
Conditionally Human
Toni Morrison
Beloved
The Bluest Eye
Jazz
Paradise
Sula
Song of Solomon
Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Eugene O’Neil
Desire Under the Elms
Mourning Becomes Electra
The Hairy Ape
The Emperor Jones
The Iceman Cometh
John Steinbeck
East of Eden
In Dubious Battle
The Wayward Bus
Of Mice and Men
The Grapes of Wrath
Amy Tan
The Joy Luck Club
The Kitchen God’s Wife
Mark Twain
A Connecticut Yankee In King
Arthur’s Court
Innocents Abroad
Life on the Mississippi
The Personal Recollections of
Joan of Arc
The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead
Wilson
A Tramp Abroad
Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse Five
Hocus Pocus
Timequake
Jailbird
Cat’s Cradle
Alice Walker
The Color Purple
Meridian
Eudora Welty
The Optimist’s Daughter
Losing Battles
The Golden Apples
A Curtain Made of Green
Tennessee Williams
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Sweet Bird of Youth
The Night of the Iguana
A Streetcar Named Desire
The Glass Menagerie
The Rose Tattoo
Thomas Wolfe
Look Homeward Angel
You Can’t Go Home Again
Tom Wolfe
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
The Pumphouse Gang
The Right Stuff
Bonfire of the Vanities
Richard Wright
Native Son
Black Boy
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