Mandatory American literature books – alphabetical order. Edition specifications are generally also mandatory. Updated August 2, 2009.
- Adams: The Education of Henry Adams (Massachusetts Historical Society edition)
- Bierce: The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce (Bison Books)
- Crews: A Childhood: The Biography of a Place
- Cooper: Leatherstocking Saga” (Nevins editor)
- Cummings: Selected Poems: 1923-1958 (Faber)
- Cummings: The Enormous Room (Modern Library)
- Dana: Two Years Before the Mast and Other Voyages (Library of America)
- Dewey: Democracy and Education
- Dewey: How We Think
- Dewey: Quest for Certainty
- Dewey: Studies in Logical Theory (Philosophy in America)
- Eliot: Selected Essays (Harcourt Revised Edition)
- Eliot: Selected Poems
- Faulkner: Essays, Speeches, and Public Letters (Modern Library)
- Faulkner: Selected Short Stories (Modern Library)
- Faulkner: The Reivers
- Faulkner: Three Famous Short Novels: Spotted Horses, Old Man, The Bear (Modern Library)
- Fitzgerald: The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Scribner)
- Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays (Library of America)
- Garland: Boy Life on the Prairie (Bison Book or Kessinger edition)
- Irving: The Complete Tales of Washington Irving (Neider editor)
- Lockridge: Raintree County (edition with Herman Wouk forward)
- Longfellow (trans.): The Divine Comedy
- Longfellow: Poems and Other Writings (Library of America)
- Lovell and Kluger: Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13
- Mason: Chickenhawk/Chickenhawk Back in the World: Life after Vietnam
- McCullers: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter/Reflections in a Golden Eye/The Ballad of the Sad Cafe/The Member of the Wedding/The Clock Without Hands (Library of America)
- Melville: Typee, Omoo, Mardi (Library of America)
- Mencken: Days (Happy, Newspaper, Heathen) (Dorset Press)
- Millay: Selected Poems (American Poets Project edition)
- Moore: The Poems of Marianne Moore (Grace Schulman, ed.)
- Robinson: The Poetry of E. A. Robinson (Modern Library)
- Steinbeck: In Dubious Battle
- Tarkington: Penrod, His Complete Story (Doubleday)
- Twain: The Library of America set of Mark Twain
- Veblen: The Theory of the Leisure Class (Modern Library)
- Watkins and Haise: Apollo Moon Missions: the Unsung Heroes
- Whitman: Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (OUP 150th anniversary edition)
- Willeford: Something About a Soldier
- Wolfe: The Right Stuff/The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
