Looking for a good read for my American Lit survey next term.

What’s a well-written, gripping, yet breezy novel (something that will engage students who would otherwise be distracted by late April weather)?

A colleague has chosen The Virgin Suicides.

What about The Secret Life of
Bees? The Hunger Games? Little Brother?
(Yes, I know Cory Doctorow is Canadian)

I’ll likely need to trim some of these works, but so far..

  • Frost, poems (assorted)
  • Fitzgerald, short stories (assorted)
  • Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
  • London, “To Build a Fire”
  • Glaspell, “Trifles”
  • O’Neill, The Great God Brown
  • Treadwell, Machinal
  • modernist poems (assorted)
  • Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
  • Harlem Renaissance (assorted)
  • Wiliams, A Streetcar Named Desire
  • O’Connor, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”
  • Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun
  • Heller, Catch-22
  • Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay
  • Miller, Resurrection Blues
  • [TBA final novel]

2 thoughts on “Looking for a good read for my American Lit survey next term.

  1. I’ve had good luck with McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men and the Road. Not American-authored, but Watchmen is thematically American and fun. Doing Extremely Loud, Incredibly Close next semester.

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