College Prep Book Titles

The List of Most Commonly Cited Texts on the AP Exams (thanks to Ms. Effie who has been maintaining this list for decades) 

The list below has titles counted and organized by how often they have been in the list of possible titles given to students for exams. The numbers correspond to how often they have shown up on AP Literature tests.

• 36 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison 
• 34 Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte 
• 32 Great Expectations by Charles Dickens 
• 30 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte 
• 24 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne 
• 23 Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky; King Lear by William Shakespeare 
• 22 Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston 
• 21 Beloved by Toni Morrison 
• 20 The Awakening by Kate Chopin 
• 19 Moby Dick by Herman Melville; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce 
• 18 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain; Catch-22 by Joseph Heller 
• 17 Native Son by Richard Wright; A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry 
• 16 Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison 
• 15 Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko; The Color Purple by Alice Walker; Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller 
• 14 Antigone by Sophocles; The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald 
• 13 Light in August by William Faulkner; Othello by William Shakespeare 
• 12 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner; Billy Budd by Herman Melville; The Color Purple by Alice Walker; The Crucible by Arthur Miller; Frankenstein by Mary Shelley; The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams; Portrait of a Lady by Henry James 
• 11 Candide by Voltaire; Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen; A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams; Sula by Toni Morrison; The Tempest by William Shakespeare; Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett 
• 10 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy; Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert; Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy; A Passage to India by E. M. Forster 
• 9 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley; A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen; Fences by August Wilson; Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy; The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard; The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner; Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy; Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe; The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor 
• 8 All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy; Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya; The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck; The Jungle by Upton Sinclair; Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe; Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf; Oedipus Rex by Sophocles; The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway; Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee 
• 7 Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton; All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren; Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton; Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes; Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton; Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad; Medea by Euripides; The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare; The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri; Obasan by Joy Kogawa; One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey; The Piano Lesson by August Wilson; A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens; To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf; Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare 
• 6 Atonement by Ian McEwan; The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison; An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen; Equus by Peter Shaffer; Hamlet by William Shakespeare; Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen; The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton; The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan; Kindred by Octavia Butler; Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw; Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot; The Odyssey by Homer; The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver; Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser; The Stranger by Albert Camus; To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee; The Turn of the Screw by Henry James 
• 5 Bleak House by Charles Dickens; The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger; The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov; Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe; Emma by Jane Austen; Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin; Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde; Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee; Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka; Middlemarch by George Eliot; The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot; Mrs. Warren’s Profession by George Bernard Shaw; My Ántonia by Willa Cather; 1984 by George Orwell; Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro; Passing by Nella Larsen; The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro; Tom Jones by Henry Fielding; Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys; Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor.