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PLEASE NOTE: ALL CITATIONS ARE IN MLA 7 FORMAT. THE PREFERRED FORMAT IS MLA 8. SEE OWL PURDUE FOR PROPER CITATIONS.
Books
Alighieri, Dante. Inferno. London: Hesperus Poetry, 2005.
Belonging in the company of the works of Homer and Virgil, The Inferno is a moving human drama, a journey through the torment of Hell, an expression of the Middle Ages, and a protest against the ways in which men have thwarted the divine plan. -Amazon
Brown, Margaret Wise. Goodnight Moon. New York: HarperCollins, 2005.
In this classic of modern children’s literature, beloved by generations of readers and listeners, the quiet poetry of the words and the gentle, lulling illustrations combine to make a perfect book for the end of the day. -Amazon
Cheever, John. The Stories of John Cheever. New York: Knopf, 1978.
Here are sixty-one stories that chronicle the lives of what has been called “the greatest generation.” From the early wonder and disillusionment of city life in “The Enormous Radio” to the surprising discoveries and common mysteries of suburbia in “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” and “The Swimmer,” Cheever tells us everything we need to know about “the pain and sweetness of life.” –Amazon
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, 1952.
The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of “the Brotherhood”, and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be. -Amazon
Faulkner, William. The Requiem for a Nun. New York: Vintage, 1951.
Temple is now married to Gowan Stevens. The book begins when the death sentence is pronounced on the nurse Nancy for the murder of Temple and Gowan’s child. Told partly in prose, partly in play form, Requiem for a Nun is a haunting exploration of the impact of the past on the present. -Amazon
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Vintage, 1990.
The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed by history and legacy, the character’s voices and actions mesh to create what is arguably Faulkner’s masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century -Amazon
Fitzgerald, F.Scott. Babylon Revisited and Other Stories. New York: Scriber, 1960.
From the lazy town of Tarleton, Georgia, to the glittering cosmopolitan centers of New York and Paris, Fitzgerald brings the society of the “Lost Generation” to life in these masterfully crafted gems, showcasing the many gifts of one of our most popular writers. -Amazon
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1925.
The story of the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, of lavish parties on Long Island at a time when The New York Times noted “gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession,” it is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s. -Amazon
Fitzhugh, Louise. Harriet the Spy. New York: Harper & Row, 1964.
Harriet M. Welsch is a spy. In her notebook, she writes down everything she knows about everyone, even her classmates and her best friends. Then Harriet loses track of her notebook, and it ends up in the wrong hands. Before she can stop them, her friends have read the always truthful, sometimes awful things she’s written about each of them. Will Harriet find a way to put her life and her friendships back together? -Amazon
Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun. New York: New American Library, 1966.
The tensions and prejudice they face form this seminal American drama. Sacrifice, trust and love among the Younger family and their heroic struggle to retain dignity in a harsh and changing world is a searing and timeless document of hope and inspiration. Winner of the NY Drama Critic’s Award as Best Play of the Year, it has been hailed as a “pivotal play in the history of the American Black theatre.” by Newsweek and “a milestone in the American Theatre.” by Ebony -Amazon
Keene, Carolyn. The Clue of the Black Keys. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1996.
Nancy and her friends follow a tangled trail of clues that lead to the Florida Keys and finally to Mexico in this suspense-filled story that will thrill readers. -Amazon
Kerouac, Jack. The Dharma Bums. New York: Penguin Books, 1976.
One of the best and most popular of Kerouac’s autobiographical novels, The Dharma Bums is based on experiences the writer had during the mid-1950s while living in California, after he’d become interested in Buddhism’s spiritual mode of understanding. One of the book’s main characters, Japhy Ryder, is based on the real poet Gary Snyder, who was a close friend and whose interest in Buddhism influenced Kerouac. -Amazon
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Penguin Books, 1980.
In its time Jack Kerouac’s masterpiece was the bible of the Beat Generation, the essential prose accompaniment to Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. While it stunned the public and literary establishment when it was published in 1957, it is now recognized as an American classic. With On the Road, Kerouac discovered his voice and his true subject—the search for a place as an outsider in America. -Amazon
Lawrence, D.H. Lady Chatterley’s Lover. New York: Faro, Inc., 1931.
Lyric and sensual, D.H. Lawrence’s last novel is one of the major works of fiction of the twentieth century. Filled with scenes of intimate beauty, explores the emotions of a lonely woman trapped in a sterile marriage and her growing love for the robust gamekeeper of her husband’s estate. -Amazon
Le Carre, John. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. New York: Coward McCann, 1964.
A veteran spy wants to “come in from the cold” to retirement. He undertakes one last assignment in which he pretends defection and provides the enemy with sufficient evidence to label their leader a double agent. -OPAC
Lloyd, Alexander. The Black Cauldron. New York: Rinehart and Winston, 1965.
The Black Cauldron, the Newbery Medal-winning second book in Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain. In the land of Prydain, evil is never far away. Arawn, Lord of the Land of Death, has been building an army of dark warriors to take over Prydain, and the only way to stop him is to destroy the Black Cauldron he uses to create his dreaded soldiers.
Mailer, Norman. The Naked and the Dead. New York: Rinehart, 1948.
Written in gritty, journalistic detail, the story follows an army platoon of foot soldiers who are fighting for the possession of the Japanese-held island of Anopopei. Composed in 1948, The Naked and the Dead is representative of the best in twentieth-century American writing. -Amazon
Malamud, Bernard. The Fixer. New York: Fararr, Straus, and Giroux, 1966.
Set in Kiev in 1911 during a period of heightened anti-Semitism, the novel tells the story of Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman blamed for the brutal murder of a young Russian boy. Bok leaves his village to try his luck in Kiev, and after denying his Jewish identity, finds himself working for a member of the anti-Semitic Black Hundreds Society. When the boy is found nearly drained of blood in a cave, the Black Hundreds accuse the Jews of ritual murder. Arrested and imprisoned, Bok refuses to confess to a crime that he did not commit. -Amazon
McCarthy, Mary. The Group. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1963.
McCarthy’s most celebrated novel follows the lives of eight Vassar graduates, known simply to their classmates as the group. An eclectic mix of personalities and upbringings, they meet a week after graduation to watch Kay Strong get married. After the ceremony, the women begin their adult lives traveling to Europe, tackling the worlds of nursing and publishing, and finding love and heartbreak in the streets of New York City. -Amazon
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. New York: Groiler, 1978.
… the story of Captain Ahab’s quest to avenge the whale that ‘reaped’ his leg. The quest is an obsession and the novel is a diabolical study of how a man becomes a fanatic. But it is also a hymn to democracy. Bent as the crew is on Ahab s appalling crusade, it is equally the image of a co-operative community at work: all hands dependent on all hands, each individual responsible for the security of each. -Amazon
Plath, Sylvia. “Ariel.” Collected Poems. HarperCollins, 1960.
Matthew Weiner told January Jones to read this poem to better understand the character, Betty. (Jones, 146)
Porter, Katherine. Ship of Fools. Boston: Little Brown, 1962.
Rich in incident, passion, and treachery, the novel explores themes of nationalism, cultural and ethnic pride, and basic human frailty that are as relevant today as they were when the book was first published in 1962. –Amazon
Puzo, Mario. The Godfather. New York: Putnam, 1969.
When Mario Puzo’s blockbuster saga, The Godfather, was first published in 1969, critics hailed it as one of the greatest novels of our time, and “big, turbulent, highly entertaining.” …is an epic story of family, loyalty, and how “men of honor” live in their own world, and die by their own laws. -Amazon
Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York : Plume, 1999.
…it contains Rand’s most extensive statement of Objectivism in any of her works of fiction. The book depicts a dystopian United States, wherein many of society’s most prominent and successful industrialists abandon their fortunes and the nation itself, in response to aggressive new regulations, whereupon most vital industries collapse. -Amazon
Roth, Philip. Portnoy’s Complaint.New York: Random House, 1969.
Along with Saul Bellow’s Herzog, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint defined Jewish American literature in the 1960s. Roth’s masterpiece takes place on the couch of a psychoanalyst, an appropriate jumping-off place for an insanely comical novel about the Jewish American experience. -Worldcat
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. New York: American Book Company, 1898.
Shakespeare may have written Julius Caesar as the first of his plays to be performed at the Globe, in 1599. For it, he turned to a key event in Roman history: Caesar’s death at the hands of friends and fellow politicians. Renaissance writers disagreed over the assassination, seeing Brutus, a leading conspirator, as either hero or villain. Shakespeare’s play keeps this debate alive. -Amazon
Trollope, Anthony. The Prime Minister. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1913.
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1903.
On one level, this is the prototypical tale of one boy’s innocence and how he lost it, but it’s also a profound evocation of the national character that Twain, an odd combination of independent thinker and moralist, clearly thought needed some analyzing. -Amazon
Wilson, Sloane. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1955.
Tom Rath doesn’t want anything extraordinary out of life: just a decent home, enough money to support his family, and a career that won’t crush his spirit. After returning from World War II, he takes a PR job at a television network. It is inane, dehumanizing work. But when a series of personal crises force him to reexamine his priorities — and take responsibility for his past — he is finally moved to carve out an identity for himself. This is Sloan Wilson’s searing indictment of a society that had just begun to lose touch with its citizens. –Amazon
Yates, Richard. Revolutionary Road. 3rd Vintage Contemporaries Ed. New York: Vintage Books, 2008.
From the moment of its publication in 1961, Revolutionary Road was hailed as a masterpiece of realistic fiction and as the most evocative portrayal of the opulent desolation of the American suburbs. It’s the story of Frank and April Wheeler, a bright, beautiful, and talented couple who have lived on the assumption that greatness is only just around the corner. With heartbreaking compassion and remorseless clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their spiritual birthright, betraying not only each other, but their best selves. -Amazon
Articles
Lilley, Kate. “Mediations on Emergent Occasions: Mad Men, Donald Draper and Frank O’Hara.” Cultural Studies Review 18.2 (2012): 301-15. ProQuest. Web. 8 Aug. 2016.
Websites
Parrott, Billy. The “Mad Men” Reading List. New York Public Library. February, 27, 2012.
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