Nonfiction Reading List: Language and Composition

When students read, they should become aware of how stylistic effects are achieved by writers' linguistic choices. Since imaginative literature often highlights such stylistic decisions, fiction and poetry clearly have a place in the AP Language and Composition course. The main purpose of including such literature is to aid students in understanding rhetorical and linguistic choices, rather than to study literary conventions.

Because the AP course depends on the development of interpretive skills as students learn to write and read with increasing complexity and sophistication, the AP Language and Composition course is intended to be a full-year course. Teachers at schools that offer only a single semester block for AP are encouraged to advise their AP Language and Composition students to take an additional semester of advanced English in which they continue to practice the kind of writing and reading emphasized in the AP class.

Upon completing the Language and Composition course, then, students should be able to:

· analyze and interpret samples of good writing, identifying and explaining an author's use of rhetorical strategies and techniques;

· apply effective strategies and techniques in their own writing;

· create and sustain arguments based on readings, research, and/or personal experience;

· demonstrate understanding and mastery of standard written English as well as stylistic maturity in their own writings;

· write in a variety of genres and contexts, both formal and informal, employing appropriate conventions; and

· move effectively through the stages of the writing process, with careful attention to inquiry and research, drafting, revising, editing, and review.

The following authors and works indicate the range and quality of reading in an AP Language and Composition course.

1. Autobiographers and Diarists

Maya Angelou, James Boswell, Judith Oroz Cofer, Charles Dana, Thomas De Quincey; Frederick Douglass, Benjamin Franklin, Lillian Hellman, Helen Keller, Maxine Hong Kingston, T. E. Lawrence, John Henry Newman, Samuel Pepys, Richard Rodriguez, Richard Wright, Malcolm X, Anzia Yezierska.

2. Biographers and History Writers

Walter Jackson Bate, James Boswell, Thomas Carlyle, Winston Churhill, Vine Deloria, Jr., Leon Edel, Richard Ellmann, Shelby Foote, John Hope Franklin, Antonia Fraser, Edward Gibbon, Richard Holmes, Gerda Lerner, Thomas Macaulay, Samuel Eliot Morison, Francis Parkman, Arnold Rampersad, Simon Schama, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Ronald Takaki, George Trevelyan, Barbara Tuchman.

3. Critics

Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldua, Michael Arler, Matthew Arnold, Kenneth Clark, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Arlene Croce, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., William Hazlitt, bell hooks, Samuel Johnson, Pauline Kael, Joyce Carol Oates, Walter Pater, John Ruskin, George Santayana, George Bernard Shaw, Susan Sontag, Cornel. West, Oscar Wilde, Edmund Wilson

4. Essayists and Fiction Writers

Joseph Addison James Agee, Margaret Atwood, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, G. K Chesterton, Joan Didion, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Paul Fussell, Mavis Gallant, Nadine Gordimer, Edward Hoagland, Zora Neale Hurston, Jamaica Kincaid, Charles Lamb, Norman Mailer, Nancy Mairs, Mary McCarthy, N. Scott Momaday, Montaigne, V S. Naipaul, Tillie Olsen, George Orwell, Cynthia Ozick, Ishmael Reed, Adrienne Rich, Mordecai Richler, Sharman Apt Russell, Scott Russell Sanders, Richard Selizer, Richard Steele, Shelby Steele, Henry David Thoreau, John Updike, Alice Walker, Eudora Welty, E. B. White, Terry Tempest Williams, Virginia Woolf .

5. Journalists

Roger Angell, Maureen Dowd, Elizabeth Drew, Nora Ephron, M. K.F. Fisher; Frances Fitzgerald, Janet Flanner (Genet), Ellen Goodman, David Halberstam, Andy Logan, John McPhee, H.L. Mencken, Jan Morris, David Remnick, Red Smith, Lincoln Steffens, Paul Theroux, Calvin Trillin, Tom Wolfe.

6. Political Writers

Hannah Arendt, Simon de Beauvoir, William F. Buckley, Jean de Crevecoeur; W. E. B. DuBois, Margaret Fuller, John Kenneth Galbraith, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Jefferson, George Kennan, Martin Luther King, Jr., Lewis H. Lapham, John Locke, Niccolo Machiavelli, John Stuart Mill, John Milton, Thomas More, Thornas Paine, Olive.Schreiner, Jonathan Swift, Alexis de Tocqueville, Gore Vidal, George Will, Garry Wills, Mary Wollstonecraft.

7. Science and Nature Writers

Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Jacob Bronowski, Rachel, Carson, Charles Darwin, Annie Dillard, Gretel Ehrlich, Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Evelyn Fox Keller; Barry- Lopez, Peter Mathiessen, Margaret Mead, John Muir, David Quammen, Carl Sagan, Lewis Thomas, Jonathan Weiner

(from collegeboard.org)

Required Outside Reading List English III AP Ms. Shub Updated 8/02 See also: Nonfiction Authors List (The College Board recommends most of these titles and authors. This list excludes required reading for English IV AP.)
Achebe Aeschylus Albee Anaya Aristotle Arnow Atwood Austen Baldwin Bell Bolt Brecht Camus Capote Cather Cervantes Chekov Cisneros Conrad Crane Crevecoeur Dante Defoe Dickens	Things Fall Apart The Orestian Trilogy Who 's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Zoo Story Bless Me, Ultima The Poetics The Dollmaker The Handmaid's Tale Persuasion, Mansfield Park, Emma, Pride and Prejudice Go Tell it on the Mountain, Another Country Henderson, the Rain King A Man for all Seasons Mother Courage and her Children The Stranger, The Fall, The Myth of Sisyphus In Cold Blood 0, Pioneers! Don Quixote The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, The Seagull Woman Hollering Creek The Victory The Red Badge of Courage Letters from an American Farmer Divine Comedy, The Inferno Moll Flanders Hard Times, Our Mutual Friend, Bleak House, David Copperfield
Dillard Doctrow Douglass Dostoevsky Dreiser Eliot, G. Eliot, T.S. Ellison Erdrich Euripides Faulkner Fielding	Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Teaching a Stone to Talk Ragtime My Bondage and My Freedom The Brothers Karamazov, Notes from the Underground Sister Carrie, An American Tragedy The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch Murder in the Cathedral Invisible Man (NOT H.G. WELLS) Love Medicine The Trojan Women, Bacchae As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, The Bear Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews
Fitzgerald Flaubert Forster Garcia-Marquez Gardner Gould Greene Hansberry Hardy	Tender is the Night Madame Bovary A Passage to India, A Room with a View, Howard's End One Hundred Years of Solitude Grendel The Mismeasure of Man, The Flamingo's Smile Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory A Raisin in the Sun Jude, the Obscure, Tess of the D'Urbevilles, The Mayor of Castorbridge
Hawthorne Heller Hellman Hemingway	The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance Catch-22 The Little Foxes, Watch on the Rhine The Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises
Hesse Homer Horowitz Hurston Hwang Ibsen	Demian, Siddhartha The Iliad, The Odyssey Confederates in the Attic Their Eyes were Watching God M. Butterfly Hedda Gabler, An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck, Ghosts
Irving	A Prayer for Owen Meany, The Cider House Rules, The Hotel New Hampshire
Ionesco James	Rhinoceros Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, The Turn of the Screw, Daisy Miller, The Golden Bowl
Jonson Joyce Kafka Kesey Kingston Kogawa Laurence Lavergne Lawrence, M./L. Lawrence, D.H. Lawrence/Lee	Volpone Dubliners, Ulysses, The Dead The Trial, The Metamorphosis One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest The Woman Warrior, China Men Obasan The Stone Angel A Sniper in the Tower The Diviners Sons and Lovers The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail
Lewis Lorca	Main Street, Babbit, Elmer Gantry Blood Wedding, Dona Rosita, the Spinster, The House of Bernarda Alba
MacLeish Mailer Mann	J.B. Armies of the Night Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain, Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man
Marlowe	Doctor Faust
Marshall McCarthy McCullers Melville Miller Milton Momaday More Morrison Nabokov Okada O'Neill	Praisesong for the Widow All the Pretty Horses The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Member of the Wedding Moby Dick, Billy Budd, Benito Cereno All my Sons Paradise Lost House Made of Dawn, The Way to Rainy Mountain Utopia Beloved, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Jazz, Sula Pnin, Lolita No-No Boy Long Day's Journey into Night, Desire Under the Elms, The Hairy Ape
Orwell Paton Pinter Plato Porter Racine Rand Rhys Richardson Sartre Schlosser Scott Sebold Shaffer Shakespeare	Nineteen Eighty-Four Cry, the Beloved Country The Homecoming, The Birthday Party, The Caretaker Allegory of the Cave, Apology, Crito Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Ship of Fools Phaedre The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged Wide Sargasso Sea Pamela No Exit Fast Food Nation Ivanhoe The Lovely Bones Equus As You Like It, Anthony and Cleopatra, Henry IV Parts I & 2, Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, Othello, The Taming of the Shrew, Richard II and III, A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Shaw	Mrs. Warren's Profession, Pygmalion, Major Barbara, Man and Superman, Arms and the Man, Saint Joan, Candida
Shelley Silko Sinclair Spark Steinbeck Steme Stoker Stowe Strindberg Tan	Frankenstein Ceremony The Jungle The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie The Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row, The Pearl, East of Eden Tristram Shandy Dracula Uncle Tom 's Cabin Miss Julie The Joy Luck Club
Thoreau Tolstoy Trollope Turgenev Tyler Updike Valdez Virgil Vonnegu Walker Warren Waugh Welch Welty West Wharton White Wilde Wilder Williams Wilson Woolf, T. Woolf, V. Wright	Walden The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Anna Karenina The Warden Fathers and Sons Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant The Centaur Zoot Suit The Aeneid Slaughterhouse Five The Color Purple (page count may be negotiated) All the King's Men The Loved One Winter in the Blood Delta Wedding Miss Lonelyhearts, Day of the Locust The House of Mirth, Age of Innocence The Once and Future King The Importance of Being Earnest, The Picture of Dorian Gray Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth, The Bridge of San Luis Ray A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Fences, The Piano Lesson Look Homeward, Angel, You Can't Go Home Again, To the Lighthouse, A Room of One's Own, Mrs. Dalloway Native Son, Eight Men, Black Boy

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