25 Literary Classics Everyone Should Read

We tried to balance British, American, European, African, Latin American, and Asian perspectives. And with suggestions from others, 9 women authors — Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, The Awakening, The Good Earth, To Kill a Mockingbird, Beloved, plus The Odyssey often attributed to oral tradition with female characters driving it.

The Odyssey does begin the foundational epic journey.  Adding Don Quixote (Michael’s favorite) gives the book that blew up the idea of epic heroes altogether. Cervantes basically invented the modern novel’s self-awareness, unreliable narrator, and blend of comedy and tragedy. The man from La Mancha’s story is the first book he ever bought – with paperboy money at age 12, a Pocket Edition paperback, .50 cents.  That copy is wrapped in plastic on our bookshelf.  For anyone interested, that is the Charles Jarvis translation.

1. The Odyssey by Homer, 8th century BC.  Odysseus spends 10 years getting home from Troy, facing Cyclops, Sirens, and suitors. It’s the original road-trip story. Read it because every quest narrative since borrows from it.  

   
   

2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare, c. 1600.   The Prince of Denmark avenges his father but can’t decide how to act. Soliloquies like “To be or not to be” wrestle with mortality, madness, and meaning. Read it because it’s the deepest character study in English and still feels shockingly modern. 

   
   

3. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, 1605-1615.  An aging gentleman loses his mind to chivalric romances and sets out as a knight-errant with Sancho Panza. It’s hilarious, heartbreaking, and deeply human. Read it as the novel that invented novels — a story about stories, idealism vs reality, and the nobility of tilting at windmills.  

   
   

4. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, 1813.  Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy’s battle of wits skewers class, marriage, and first impressions. Austen’s dialogue is unmatched. Read it to understand social comedy, to watch a heroine who thinks for herself, and because it invented half the romance tropes we still use.

   
   

5. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, 1818.   Victor Frankenstein assembles a creature and recoils from it, setting off a tragedy about creation and responsibility. Written when Shelley was 18, it essentially invented science fiction. Read it to see how quickly innovation outpaces ethics. 

   
   

6. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, 1847.  Orphaned Jane becomes governess at Thornfield Hall and falls for the brooding Mr. Rochester — who hides a secret. It’s gothic, passionate, and fiercely moral. Read it for one of literature’s first fully interior female voices and a heroine who demands equality. 

   
   

7. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, 1847.   Catherine and Heathcliff’s destructive love tears apart two families on the Yorkshire moors. It’s brutal, gothic, and utterly unlike Austen. Read it if you want passion without politeness — and to see how landscape becomes character.

   
   

8. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, 1851.  Captain Ahab’s obsessive hunt for the white whale becomes a sprawling meditation on fate, madness, and America itself. It’s dense, weird, and brilliant. Read it for its ambition — no novel risks more — and for passages on the ocean that still feel elemental.

   
   

9. Walden by Henry David Thoreau, 1854.  Thoreau’s account of two years living deliberately by Walden Pond. It’s part memoir, part philosophy, part call to simplify. Read it when you need to question consumerism, rethink your relationship with nature, or remember how to pay attention. 

   
   

10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1866. Impoverished student Raskolnikov murders a pawnbroker and spirals into guilt and paranoia. Dostoevsky gets inside his head before psychology was a field. Read it for a masterclass in moral torment and the idea that you can’t outrun conscience. 

    
    

11. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, 1884.   Huck and escaped slave Jim raft down the Mississippi, and Huck must decide whether to turn Jim in or defy everything his society taught him. Twain’s vernacular voice changed American writing. Read it as both adventure and moral awakening. 

    
    

12. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, 1895.  Crane strips away romantic ideas of war and drops you inside the mind of Henry Fleming, a young Union soldier. It’s one of the first modern psychological war novels. Read it to see how fear, cowardice, and courage really work under fire, without patriotic filter. 

    
    

13. The Awakening by Kate Chopin, 1899.   Edna Pontellier awakens to her desires and dissatisfaction as a wife and mother in 1890s Louisiana. Condemned when it appeared, it’s now recognized as an early feminist classic. Read it for its unflinching look at female autonomy, artistic identity, and the cost of defying social roles.

    
    

14. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, 1908.  Mole, Rat, Badger, and the chaotic Mr. Toad create a world of riverbank charm and gentle anarchy. It’s technically children’s literature, but the language is rich and the themes — friendship, home, excess — hit adults just as hard. Read it for comfort and to see how whimsy can carry real wisdom.

    
    

15. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925.   A lean, glittering portrait of the Jazz Age and the American Dream gone hollow. Gatsby’s pursuit of Daisy exposes wealth, obsession, and class. Read it for the prose alone — Fitzgerald’s sentences still set the standard — and for its warning about mistaking longing for love.

    
    

16. The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck, 1931.  Follows Chinese farmer Wang Lung from poverty to wealth and back to the land that sustains him. Buck won the Pulitzer and later the Nobel, partly for this book. Read it for its intimate look at pre-revolutionary Chinese rural life and how land shapes human dignity.

    
    

17. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, 1939.  The Joad family flees Dust Bowl Oklahoma for California, only to find exploitation waiting. Steinbeck blends biblical cadence with journalism to show economic injustice up close. Read it as the definitive Great Depression novel and for Tom Joad’s speech on collective decency.

    
    

18. The Stranger by Albert Camus, 1942.  Meursault shoots a man on a beach in Algiers, almost as an afterthought, and faces trial in a world that demands he fake feelings he doesn’t have. The foundational novel of existentialism/absurdism. Read it to confront the idea of a universe without inherent meaning. Chosen by Le Monde as the best novel of the 20^th Century. 

    
    

19. 1984 by George Orwell, 1949.   Winston Smith rebels against Big Brother in a surveillance state where language itself is weaponized. Orwell coined terms we now live with: doublethink, thoughtcrime. Read it to recognize how power manipulates truth, and why privacy matters. 

    
    

20. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, 1952.  Santiago, an old Cuban fisherman, battles a giant marlin in a brutal test of endurance. Hemingway’s late, spare masterpiece won the Pulitzer and helped clinch his Nobel. Read it for the cleanest example of his iceberg theory and for a meditation on grace under pressure.

    
    

21. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, 1954-55.  Technically three volumes — The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King — but written as one epic. Frodo’s quest to destroy the One Ring built modern fantasy from the ground up: invented languages, deep mythic history, clear morality without simplicity. Read it for world-building on a scale nobody had attempted and for its influence on everything from Star Wars to Game of Thrones.  It proves a “popular” book can also be a literary one.  150 million copies sold.

    
    

22. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, 1958.   Okonkwo’s life in an Igbo village unravels as British missionaries arrive. Achebe counters colonial narratives by showing pre-colonial society from the inside. Read it to see the human cost of empire and for a tragedy structured on African terms. 

    
    

23. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, 1960.  Scout Finch narrates her childhood in 1930s Alabama as her father Atticus defends a Black man falsely accused. It confronts racism, innocence, and moral courage without preaching. Read it to see empathy in action and why Atticus became a benchmark for integrity.

    
    

24. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, 1967.  The Buendía family’s rise and fall in Macondo blends myth, history, and magical realism. Time loops, ghosts, and banana companies collide. Read it to see how a novel can contain an entire world and why “magical realism” became a global force.

    
    

25. Beloved by Toni Morrison, 1987.   Sethe, an escaped enslaved woman, is haunted by the daughter she killed to save from slavery. Based on a true story, it’s lyrical and devastating. Read it to confront the psychic cost of slavery and for Morrison’s language, which carries history in its rhythm.