Dear Parents and Friends of Horace Mann School:
In response to many requests, I am delighted to provide a list of suggested reading for our students. I hope that this list will be useful to you, and that your children will be encouraged by it both during the summer and during the school year.
In our discussions of this matter in the Department of English, we were concerned to make available to our students such novels, poems, stories, autobiographies, essays, and plays as might suggest and celebrate the richness of literature in English. We have tried to compose a list of books appropriate to the intelligence of our students and to our own hopes for their intellectual development. We want the books to delight as well as to instruct, and to give pleasure as they prepare our students for the increasingly complex demands of our curriculum. Though the list pleases us for the moment, we recognize that it be neither perfect nor complete; and we console ourselves for its flaws with the knowledge that you and your children will modify in such ways as may suit your needs.
I need to stress that this is a list of suggested reading and not of required reading. It is intended only to guide our students. We are not inclined to assure ourselves that they have read some or all of these books by testing them or by demanding that they wirte book reports upon their return to school in the fall. To students who are concerned about preparing themselves to take the SAT and SAT II, which purport to test English aptitude and ability and are used in college admission, we recommend reading as many difficult eighteenth and nineteenth century English novels as possible.
Permit me to wish you and your children many happy hours of reading. If I can be of further use, please let me know.
| Enid Bagnold | National Velvet |
| Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The Sign of Four |
| Ursula K. Le Guin | The Word for World is Forest |
| Madelaine L'Engle | A Wrinkle in Time |
| Ann Moody | Coming of Age in Mississippi |
| William Shakespeare | Romeo and Juliet |
| John Steinbeck | The Red Pony |
| H. G. Wells | The Time Machine |
| Maya Angelou | I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings |
| Ray Bradbury | Dandelion Wine |
| Willa Cather | My Antonia |
| Stephen Crane | The Red Badge of Courage |
| Edith Hamilton | Mythology |
| Rudyard Kipling | Kim |
| George Orwell | 1984 |
| Kurt Vonnegut | Galapagos |
| T. H. White | The Once and Future King |
| Richard Wright | Native Son |
| Jane Austen | Sense and Sensibility |
| James Baldwin | Go Tell It On the Mountain |
| Charles Dickens | Great Expectations |
| Bessie Head | Stories |
| Alan Paton | Cry, The Beloved Country |
| I. J. Singer | The Brothers Ashkenazi |
| Erich Maria Remarque | All Quiet on the Western Front |
| Mark Twain | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court |
| Saul Bellow | Henderson the Rain King |
| Nadine Gordimer | The Lying Days |
| Thomas Hardy | Tess of the d'Urbervilles |
| Jack Kerouac | On the Road |
| Bernard Malamud | Pictures of Fidelman |
| Tim O'Brien | If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home |
| Sylvia Plath | The Bell Jar |
| George Bernard Shaw | Saint Joan |
| Alice Walker | The Color Purple |
| Various Authors | The Penguin Book of Ballads |
| Margaret Atwood | The Handmaid's Tale |
| Samuel Taylor Coleridge | "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" |
| Giusseppi de Lampedusa | The Leopard |
| Fyodor Dostoevsky | Crime and Punishment |
| John Le Carre | Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy |
| Maxine Hong Kingston | The Woman Warrior |
| Edgar Lee Masters | The Spoon River Anthology |
| Toni Morrison | Sula |
| William Shakespeare | A Midsummer Night's Dream |
| John Cheever | Stories |
| George Eliot | Silas Marner |
| Ralph Ellison | Invisible Man |
| Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, editors | The Rattle Bag |
| Kazuo Ishigura | The Remains of the Day |
| Franz Kafka | The Trial |
| R. K. Narayan | Waiting for the Mahatma |
| Phillip Roth | Goodbye, Columbus |
| Leo Tolstoy | Anna Karenina |
| William Shakespeare | The Tempest |
| Edith Wharton | The House of Mirth |