Teachers' Resources

Representative Authors
The College Board does not mandate any particular authors or reading list. The choice of works for the AP course is made by the school in relation to the school's overall English curriculum sequence, so that by the time the student completes AP English Literature and Composition she or he will have studied during high school literature from both British and American writers as well as works written in several genres from the sixteenth century to contemporary times. The works selected for the course should require careful, deliberative reading that yields multiple meanings.

Poetry
W. H. Auden; Elizabeth Bishop; William Blake; Anne Bradstreet; Edward Kamau Brathwaite; Gwendolyn Brooks; Robert Browning; George Gordon, Lord Byron; Lorna Dee Cervantes; Geoffrey Chaucer; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; H. D. (Hilda Doolittle); Emily Dickinson; John Donne; Rita Dove; T. S. Eliot; Robert Frost; Joy Harjo; Seamus Heaney; George Herbert; Garrett Hongo; Gerard Manley Hopkins; Langston Hughes; Ben Jonson; John Keats; Philip Larkin; Robert Lowell; Andrew Marvell; John Milton; Marianne Moore; Sylvia Plath; Edgar Allan Poe; Alexander Pope; Adrienne Rich; Anne Sexton; William Shakespeare; Percy Bysshe Shelley; Leslie Marmon Silko; Cathy Song; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Derek Walcott; Walt Whitman; Richard Wilbur; William Carlos Williams; William Wordsworth; William Butler Yeats

Drama
Aeschylus; Edward Albee; Amiri Baraka; Samuel Beckett; Anton Chekhov; William Congreve; Oliver Goldsmith; Lorraine Hansberry; Lillian Hellman; David Henry Hwang; Henrik Ibsen; Ben Jonson; David Mamet; Arthur Miller; Molière; Sean O'Casey; Eugene O'Neill; Harold Pinter; Luigi Pirandello; William Shakespeare; George Bernard Shaw; Sam Shepard; Richard Brinsley Sheridan; Sophocles; Tom Stoppard; Luis Valdez; Oscar Wilde; Tennessee Williams; August Wilson

Fiction (Novel and Short Story)
Chinua Achebe; Kingsley Amis; Rudolfo Anaya; Margaret Atwood; Jane Austen; James Baldwin; Saul Bellow; Charlotte Brontë; Emily Brontë; Raymond Carver; Willa Cather; Sandra Cisneros; John Cheever; Kate Chopin; Colette; Joseph Conrad; Stephen Crane; Anita Desai; Charles Dickens; George Eliot; Ralph Ellison; Louise Erdrich; William Faulkner; Henry Fielding; F. Scott Fitzgerald; Ford Madox Ford; E. M. Forster; Thomas Hardy; Nathaniel Hawthorne; Ernest Hemingway; Zora Neale Hurston; Kazuo Ishiguro; Henry James; James Joyce; Maxine Hong Kingston; Joy Kogawa; Margaret Laurence; D. H. Lawrence; Bernard Malamud; Katherine Mansfield; Gabriel García Márquez; Bobbie Ann Mason; Carson McCullers; Herman Melville; Toni Morrison; Bharati Mukherjee; Vladimir Nabokov; Flannery O'Connor; Cynthia Ozick; Katherine Anne Porter; Jean Rhys; Jonathan Swift; Leo Tolstoy; Mark Twain; John Updike; Luisa Valenzuela; Alice Walker; Evelyn Waugh; Eudora Welty; Edith Wharton; John Edgar Wideman; Virginia Woolf; Richard Wright

Expository Prose
Joseph Addison; Gloria Anzaldúa; Matthew Arnold; James Baldwin; James Boswell; Thomas Carlyle; Jesús Colón; Ralph Waldo Emerson; William Hazlitt; Samuel Johnson; Charles Lamb; Norman Mailer; Mary McCarthy; H. L. Mencken; John Stuart Mill; George Orwell; Richard Steele; Lewis Thomas; Henry David Thoreau; Barbara Tuchman; Virginia Woolf

College Textbooks and Anthologies
The AP English Literature course is designed to provide students with a learning experience equivalent to that of a college course. The following list is not meant to be a comprehensive catalog of acceptable AP English Literature texts. The College Board does not endorse any particular textbook or even require that a single textbook be used in this course; it only requires that all the books used be on the college level. A teacher may choose to select a single textbook, a selection of individual works, or even a course pack with equal appropriateness. The textbooks and editions listed below are only a sampling of ones that teachers have used in their AP English Literature courses.

All editions of these texts are acceptable for use in the AP English Literature course.

Bedford/St. Martin's
Abcarian, R., and M. Klotz, eds. Literature: The Human Experience.
Charters, Ann, and Samuel Charters, eds. Literature and Its Writers.
Meyer, Michael, ed. The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing.

Harcourt
Arp, Thomas, Greg Johnson, and Laurence Perrine, eds. Perrine's Literature: Structure Sound
       and Sense.

Heath
Landy, Alice, ed. The Heath Introduction to Literature.

Houghton Mifflin
Hunt, Douglas, ed. The Riverside Anthology of Literature.
Schwiebert, John E, ed. Reading and Writing from Literature.

Longman
Damrosch, David, and Stuart Sherman, eds. The Longman Anthology of British Literature.
Kennedy, X. J., and Dana Goia, eds. Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama.
McQuade, Donald, ed. The Harper American Literature.

McGraw-Hill
DiYanni, Robert, ed. Literature: Reading Fiction Poetry and Drama.
Perkins, George, and Barbara Perkins, eds. The American Tradition in Literature.

Norton
Abrams, M. H., and Stephen Greenblatt, eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature,
       Vol. 1a: The Middle Ages.
Baym, Nina, ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature.
Beaty, Jerome, Alison Booth, Kelly J. Mays, and J. Paul Hunter, eds. The Norton Introduction
       to Literature.
Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, The Major Authors.
Lawall, Sarah N., ed. The Norton Anthology of Western Literature.
Lawall, Sarah N., ed. The Norton Anthology of World Literature.
Mack, Maynard. The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces.

Prentice Hall
Guth, Hans P., and Gabrielle Rico, eds. Discovering Literature: Stories, Poems, and Plays.
McMichael, George, ed. The Anthology of American Literature.
Roberts, Edgar J., and H. Jacobs, eds. Literature: Introduction to Reading and Writing.

Thomson/Wadsworth
Kirszner, Laurie G., and Stephen R. Mandell, eds. Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing.

Poetry Anthologies
Bedford/St. Martin's
Meyer, Michael, ed. Poetry: An Introduction.
Vendler, Helen, ed. Poems, Poets, and Poetry.

Farrar/Straus/Giroux
Pinsky, Robert, ed. The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide.

Harcourt
Arp, Thomas, Greg Johnson, and Laurence Perrine, eds. Perrine's Sound and Sense.

McGraw-Hill
DiYanni, Robert, ed. The McGraw Hill Book of Poetry.
Macmillan Literature Heritage -- The English Tradition: Poetry.

Norton
Ferguson, Margaret, ed. The Norton Anthology of Poetry.
Hunter, Paul J., ed. The Norton Introduction to Poetry.
Pinsky, Robert, and Maggie Dietz, eds. An Invitation to Poetry: A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology.
Ramazani, Jahen, et al., eds. Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry.

Prentice Hall
Guth, Hans P., and Gabrielle Rico, eds. Discovering Poetry.

Fiction Anthologies
Bedford/St. Martin's
Charters, Ann, and Samuel Charters, eds. The Story and Its Writer.

Harcourt
Arp, Thomas, Greg Johnson, and Laurence Perrine, eds. Perrine's Story and Structure.

McGraw Hill
DiYanni, Robert, ed. Literature: Approaches to Fiction.

Norton
Beaty, Jerome, ed. The Norton Introduction to the Short Novel.
Cassill, R.V. ed. The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.
Cassill, R.V., and Joyce Carol Oates, eds. The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction.

Prentice Hall
Bohner, Charles H., ed. Classic Short Fiction.
Bohner, Charles H., and Lyman Grant, eds. Short Fiction: Classic and Contemporary.

Guides to Writing About Literature
Allyn & Bacon
Ramage, Joseph, et al. Allyn & Bacon Guide to Writing.

Arco
Kenney, William. How to Read and Write about Fiction.
Vena, Gary. How to Read and Write about Drama.

Bedford/St. Martin's
Axelrod, Rise B. St. Martin's Guide to Writing.

Harcourt Brace
Giffith, Kelley. Writing Essays about Literature: A Guide and Style Sheet.

Houghton Mifflin
Bloom, Lynn Z. The Essay Connection.
Schwiebert, John E., ed. Reading and Writing from Literature.
Trimmer, Joseph F. Writing with a Purpose.

Mayfield
Hickey, Dona J. Developing a Written Voice.

Oxford University Press
Kane, Thomas S. Writing Prose: Techniques and Purposes.

Pearson/Longman
Anderson, Daniel. Writing About Literature in the Media Age.
Barnett, Sylvan, and William E. Cain. Literature for Composition.
Barnett, Sylvan, and William E. Cain. A Short Guide to Writing about Literature.
DiYanni, Robert, and Pat C. Hoy II. The Scribner Handbook for Writers.

Prentice Hall
Harmon, William, and Hugh Holman. A Handbook to Literature.
McMahon, Elizabeth. Literature and the Writing Process.
Roberts, Edgar J. Writing about Literature.