50 Classic Books Everyone Should Read in Their Lifetime

1984 by George Orwell 

A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy 

Cane by Jean Toomer 

Emma by Jane Austen 

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley 

Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin 

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens 

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Howards End by E.M. Forster

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison 

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte 

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott 

Middlemarch by George Eliot 

Moby-Dick; or The Whale by Herman Melville 

My Antonia by Willa Cather 

Native Son by Richard Wright 

 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass 

Night by Elie Wiesel 

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov 

Paradise Lost by John Milton 

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier 

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse 

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison 

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky 

The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty by Eudora Welty

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare

The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams 

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy 

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald 

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers 

The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper 

Metamorphoses by Ovid 

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy 

The Odyssey by Homer 

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde 

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner 

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway 

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston 

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe 

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee 

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Ulysses by James Joyce 

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys 

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte