The Western Canon
by Harold Bloom

This page:
A. The Theocratic Age: 2000 BCE-1321 CE
B. The Aristocratic Age: 1321-1832
C. The Democratic Age: 1832-1900
D. The Chaotic Age: 20th Century

A. The Theocratic Age

"Since the literary canon is at issue here, I include only those religious, philosophical, historical, and scientific writings that are themselves of great aesthetic interest. I would think that, of all the books that are in this first list, once the reader is conversant with the Bible, Homer, Plato, the Athenian dramatists, and Virgil, the crucial work is the Koran...

"I have included some Sanskrit works, scriptures and fundamental literary texts, because of their influence on the Western canon. The immense wealth of ancient Chinese literature is mostly a sphere apart from Western literary tradition and is rarely conveyed adequately in the translations available to us."
(Bloom, p. 531)

The Ancient Near East

• Gilgamesh
• Egyptian Book of the Dead
• Holy Bible (King James Version)
• The Apocrypha
• Sayings of the Fathers (Pirke Aboth)

Ancient India (Sanskrit)

• Mahabharata
• Bhagavad-Gita
• Ramayana

The Ancient Greeks

• Homer
  Iliad
  Odyssey
• Hesiod
  Works and Days
  Theogony
• Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman
• Pindar
  Odes
• Aeschylus
  Oresteia
  Seven Against Thebes
  Prometheus Bound
  Persians
  Suppliant Women
• Sophocles
  Oedipus the King
  Oedipus at Colonus
  Antigone
  Electra
  Ajax
  Women of Trachis
  Philoctetes
• Euripides
  Cyclops
  Heracles
  Alcestis
  Hecuba
  Bacchae
  Orestes
  Andromache
  Medea
  Ion
  Hippolytus
  Helen
  Iphigenia at Aulis
• Aristophanes
  The Birds
  The Clouds
  The Frogs
  Lysistrata
  The Knights
  The Wasps
  The Assemblywomen
• Herodotus
  The Histories
• Thucydides
  The Peloponnesian Wars
• The Pre-Socratics (Heraclitus, Empedocles)
• Plato
  Dialogues
• Aristotle
  Poetics
  Ethics

  Hellenistic Greeks

• Menander
  The Girl from Samos
• "Longinus"
  On the Sublime
• Callimachus
  Hymns and Epigrams
• Theocritus
  Idylls
• Plutarch
  Lives
  Moralia
• "Aesop"
  Fables
• Lucian
  Satires

  The Romans

• Plautus
  Pseudolus
  The Braggart Soldier
  The Rope
  Amphitryon
• Terence
  The Girl from Andros
  The Eunuch
  The Mother-in-Law
• Lucretius
  The Way Things Are
• Cicero
  On the Gods
• Horace
  Odes
  Epistles
  Satires
• Persius
  Satires
• Catullus
  Attis and Other Poems
• Virgil
  Aeneid
  Eclogues
  Georgics
• Lucan
  Pharsalia
• Ovid
  Metamorphoses
  The Art of Love
  Heroides
• Juvenal
  Satires
• Martial
  Epigrams
• Seneca
  Tragedies, particularly Medea and Hercules Furens
• Petronius
  Satyricon
• Apuleius
  The Golden Ass

  The Middle Ages: Latin, Arabic, and the Vernacular Before Dante

• Saint Augustine
  City of God
  Confessions
• The Koran (Al-Qur'an)
• The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night
• The Poetic Edda
• Snorri Sturluson
  The Prose Edda
• The Nibelungen Lied
• Wolfram von Eschenbach
  Parzival
• Chrétien de Troyes
  Yvain: The Knight of the Lion
• Beowulf
• The Poem of the Cid
• Christine de Pisan
  The Book of the City of Ladies
• Diego de San Pedro
  Prison of Love

B. The Aristocratic Age

"It is a span of five hundred years from Dante's Divine Comedy through Goethe's Faust, Part Two [1321-1832], an era that gives us a huge body of reading in five major literatures: Italian, Spanish, English, French, and German. In this and in the remaining lists, I sometimes do not mention individual works by a canonical master, and in other instances I attempt to call attention to authors and books that I consider canonical but rather neglected. From this list onward, many good writers who are not quite central are omitted...."
(Bloom, p. 534)

Italy

• Dante
  The Divine Comedy
  The New Life
• Petrarch
  Lyric Poems
  Selections
• Giovanni Boccaccio
  The Decameron
• Matteo Maria Boiardo
  Orlando Innamorato
• Ludovico Ariosto
  Orlando Furioso
• Michelangelo Buonarroti
  Sonnets and Madrigals
• Niccolò Machiavelli
  The Prince
  The Mandrake, a Comedy
• Leonardo da Vinci
  Notebooks
• Baldassare Castiglione
  The Book of the Courtier
• Gaspara Stampa
  Sonnets and Madrigals
• Giorgio Vasari
  Lives of the Painters
• Benvenuto Cellini
  Autobiography
• Torquato Tasso
  Jerusalem Delivered
• Giordano Bruno
  The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast
• Tommaso Campanella
  Poems
  The City of the Sun
• Giambattista Vico
  Principles of a New Science
• Carlo Goldoni
  The Servant of Two Masters
• Vittorio Alfieri
  Saul

  Portugal

• Luis de Camoëns
  The Lusiads
• Antònio Ferreira
  Poetry

  Spain

• Jorge Manrique
  Coplas
• Fernando de Rojas
  La Celestina
• Lazarillo de Tormes
• Francisco de Quevedo
  Visions
  Satirical Letter of Censure
• Fray Luis de León
  Poems
• St. John of the Cross
  Poems
• Luis de Góngora
  Sonnets
  Soledades
• Miguel de Cervantes
  Don Quixote
  Exemplary Stories
• Lope de Vega
  La Dorotea
  Fuente Ovejuna
  Lost in a Mirror
  The Knight of Olmedo
• Tirso de Molina
  The Trickster of Seville
• Pedro Calderón de la Barca
  Life is a Dream
  The Mayor of Zalamea
  The Mighty Magician
  The Doctor of His Own Honor
• Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
  Poems

  England and Scotland

• Geoffrey Chaucer
  The Canterbury Tales
  Troilus and Criseyde
• Sir Thomas Malory
  Le Morte D'Arthur
• William Dunbar
  Poems
• John Skelton
  Poems
• Sir Thomas More
  Utopia
• Sir Thomas Wyatt
  Poems
• Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
  Poems
• Sir Philip Sidney
  The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia
  Astrophel and Stella
  An Apology for Poetry
• Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke
  Poems
• Edmund Spenser
  The Faerie Queene
  The Minor Poems
• Sir Walter Ralegh
  Poems
• Christopher Marlowe
  Poems and Plays
• Michael Drayton
  Poems
• Samuel Daniel
  Poems
  A Defence of Ryme
• Thomas Nashe
  The Unfortunate Traveller
• Thomas Kyd
  The Spanish Tragedy
• William Shakespeare
  Plays and Poems
• Thomas Campion
  Songs
• John Donne
  Poems
  Sermons
• Ben Jonson
  Poems, Plays, and Masques
• Francis Bacon
  Essays
• Robert Burton
  The Anatomy of Melancholy
• Sir Thomas Browne
  Religio Medici
  Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall
  The Garden of Cyrus
• Thomas Hobbes
  Leviathan
• Robert Herrick
  Poems
• Thomas Carew
  Poems
• Richard Lovelace
  Poems
• Andrew Marvell
  Poems
• George Herbert
  The Temple
• Thomas Traherne
  Centuries, Poems, and Thanksgivings
• Henry Vaughan
  Poetry
• John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
  Poems
• Richard Crashaw
  Poems
• Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
  Plays
• George Chapman
  Comedies, Tragedies, Poems
• John Ford
  'Tis Pity She's a Whore
• John Marston
  The Malcontent
• John Webster
  The White Devil
  The Duchess of Malfi
• Thomas Middleton and William Rowley
  The Changeling
• Cyril Tourneur
  The Revenger's Tragedy
• Philip Massinger
  A New Way to Pay Old Debts
• John Bunyan
  The Pilgrim's Progress
• Izaak Walton
  The Compleat Angler
• John Milton
  Paradise Lost
  Paradise Regained
  Lycidas, Comus, and the Minor Poems
  Samson Agonistes
  Areopagitica
• John Aubrey
  Brief Lives
• Jeremy Taylor
  Holy Dying
• Samuel Butler
  Hudibras
• John Dryden
  Poetry and Plays
  Critical Essays
• Thomas Otway
  Venice Preserv'd
• William Congreve
  The Way of the World
  Love for Love
• Jonathan Swift
  A Tale of a Tub
  Gulliver's Travels
  Shorter Prose Works
  Poems
• Sir George Etherege
  The Man of Mode
• Alexander Pope
  Poems
• John Gay
  The Beggar's Opera
• James Boswell
  Life of Johnson
  Journals
• Samuel Johnson
  Works
• Edward Gibbon
  The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
• Edmund Burke
  A Philosophical Enquiry into...the Sublime and Beautiful
  Reflections on the Revolution in France
• Maurice Morgann
  An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff
• William Collins
  Poems
• George Farquhar
  The Beaux' Strategem
  The Recruiting Officer
• William Wycherley
  The Country Wife
  The Plain Dealer
• Christopher Smart
  Jubilate Agno
  A Song to David
• Oliver Goldsmith
  The Vicar of Wakefield
  She Stoops to Conquer
  The Traveller
  The Deserted Village
• Richard Brinsley Sheridan
  The School of Scandal
  The Rivals
• William Cowper
  Poetical Works
• George Crabbe
  Poetical Works
• Daniel Defoe
  Moll Flanders
  Robinson Crusoe
  A Journal of the Plague Year
• Samuel Richardson
  Clarissa
  Pamela
  Sir Charles Grandison
• Henry Fielding
  Joseph Andrews
  The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
• Tobias Smollett
  The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
  The Adventures of Roderick Random
• Laurence Sterne
  The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
  A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
• Fanny Burney
  Evelina
• Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
  The Spectator

  France

• Jean Froissart
  Chronicles
• The Song of Roland
• François Villon
  Poems
• Michel de Montaigne
  Essays
• François Rabelais
  Gargantua and Pantagruel
• Marguerite de Navarre
  The Heptameron
• Joachim Du Bellay
  The Regrets
• Maurice Scève
  Délie
• Pierre Ronsard
  Odes, Elegies, Sonnets
• Philippe de Commynes
  Memoirs
• Agrippa d'Aubigné
  Les Tragiques
• Robert Garnier
  Mark Antony
  The Jewesses
• Pierre Corneille
  The Cid
  Polyeucte
  Nicomède
  Horace
  Cinna
  Rodogune
• François de La Rochefoucauld
  Maxims
• Jean de La Fontaine
  Fables
• Molière
  The Misanthrope
  Tartuffe
  The School for Wives
  The Learned Ladies
  Don Juan
  School for Husbands
  Ridiculous Precieuses
  The Would-Be Gentleman
  The Miser
  The Imaginary Invalid
• Blaise Pascal
  Pensées
• Jacques-Bénigne Bosuet
  Funerary Orations
• Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
  The Art of Poetry
  Lutrin
• Jean Racine
  Phaedra
  Andromache
  Britannicus
  Athaliah
• Pierre Carlet de Marivaux
  Seven Comedies
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  The Confessions
  Émile
  La Nouvelle Héloïse
• Voltaire
  Zadig
  Candide
  Letters on England
  The Lisbon Earthquake
• Abbé Prévost
  Manon Lescaut
• Madame de La Fayette
  The Princess of Cleves
• Sébastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
  Products of the Perfected Civilization
• Denis Diderot
  Rameau's Nephew
• Choderlos de Laclos
  Dangerous Liaisons

  Germany

• Erasmus
  In Praise of Folly
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  Faust, Parts One and Two
  Dichtung und Wahrheit
  Egmont
  Elective Affinities
  The Sorrows of Young Werther
  Poems
  Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
  Wilhelm Meister's Years of Wandering
  Italian Journey
  Verse Plays
  Hermann and Dorothea
  Roman Elegies
  Venetian Epigrams
  West-Eastern Divan
• Friedrich Schiller
  The Robbers
  Mary Stuart
  Wallenstein
  Don Carlos
  On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature
• Gotthold Lessing
  Laocoön
  Nathan the Wise
• Freidrich Hölderlin
  Hymns and Fragments
  Selected Poems
• Heinrich von Kleist
  Five Plays
  Stories

C. The Democratic Age

"I have located Vico's Democratic Age in the post-Goethean nineteenth century, when the literature of Italy and Spain ebbs, yielding eminence to England with its renaissance of the Renaissance in Romanticism, and to a lesser degree to France and Germany. This is also the era where the strength of both Russian and American literature begins."
(Bloom, p. 540)

Italy

• Ugo Foscolo
  On Sepulchres
  Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis
  Odes and The Graces
• Alessandro Manzoni
  The Betrothed
  On the Historical Novel
• Giacomo Leopardi
  Essays and Dialogues
  Poems
  The Moral Essays
• Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli
  Roman Sonnets
• Giosué Carducci
  Hymn to Satan
  Barbarian Odes
  Rhymes and Rhythms
• Giovanni Verga
  Little Novels of Sicily
  Mastro-Don Gesualdo
  The House by the Medlar Tree
  The She-Wolf and Other Stories

  Spain and Portugal

• Gustavo Adolpho Bécquer
  Poems
• Benito Pérez Galdós
  Fortunata and Jacinta
• Leopoldo Alas (Clarín)
  La Regenta
• José Maria de Eça de Queirós
  The Maias

  France

• Benjamin Constant
  Adolphe
  The Red Notebook
• François-Auguste-René de Chateaubriand
  Attala
  René
  The Genius of Christianity
• Alphonse de Lamartine
  Meditations
• Alfred de Vigny
  Chatterton
  Poems
• Victor Hugo
  The Distance, the Shadows: Selected Poems
  Les Misérables
  Notre-Dame of Paris
  William Shakespeare
  The Toilers of the Sea
  The End of Satan
  God
• Alfred de Musset
  Poems
  Lorenzaccio
• Gérard de Nerval
  The Chimeras
  Sylvie
  Aurelia
• Théophile Gautier
  Mademoiselle de Maupin
  Enamels and Cameos
• Honoré de Balzac
  The Girl with the Golden Eyes
  Louis Lambert
  The Wild Ass's Skin
  Old Goriot
  Cousin Bette
  A Harlot High and Low
  Eugénie Grandet
  Ursule Mirouet
• Stendhal
  On Love
  The Red and the Black
  The Charterhouse of Parma
• Gustave Flaubert
  Madame Bovary
  Sentimental Education
  Salammbô
  A Simple Soul
• George Sand
  The Haunted Pool
• Charles Baudelaire
  Flowers of Evil
  Paris Spleen
• Stéphane Mallarmé
  Selected Poetry and Prose
• Paul Verlaine
  Selected Poems
• Arthur Rimbaud
  Complete Works
• Tristan Corbière
  Les Armours Jaunes
• Jules Laforgue
  Selected Writings
• Guy de Maupassant
  Selected Short Stories
• Émile Zola
  Germinal
  L'Assommoir
  Nana

  Scandinavia

• Henrik Ibsen
  Brand
  Peer Gynt
  Emperor and Galilean
  Hedda Gabler
  The Master Builder
  The Lady from the Sea
  When We Dead Awaken
• August Strindberg
  To Damascus
  Miss Julie
  The Father
  The Dance of Death
  The Ghost Sonata
  A Dream Play

  Great Britain

• Robert Burns
  Poems
• William Blake
  Complete Poetry and Prose
• William Wordsworth
  Poems
  The Prelude
• Sir Walter Scott
  Waverley
  The Heart of Midlothian
  Redgauntlet
  Old Mortality
• Jane Austen
  Pride and Prejudice
  Emma
  Mansfield Park
  Persuasion
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  Poems and Prose
• Dorothy Wordsworth
  The Grasmere Journal
• William Hazlitt
  Essays and Criticism
• Lord Byron
  Don Juan
  Poems
• William Savage Landor
  Poems
  Imaginary Conversations
• Thomas De Quincey
  Confessions of an English Opium Eater
  Selected Prose
• Charles Lamb
  Essays
• Maria Edgeworth
  Castle Rackrent
• John Galt
  The Entail
• Elizabeth Gaskell
  Cranford
  Mary Barton
  North and South
• James Hogg
  The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
• Charles Maturin
  Melmoth the Wanderer
• Percy Bysshe Shelley
  Poems
  A Defence of Poetry
• Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
  Frankenstein
• John Clare
  Poems
• John Keats
  Poems and Letters
• Thomas Lovell Beddoes
  Death's Jest-Book
  Poems
• George Darley
  Nepenthe
  Poems
• Thomas Hood
  Poems
• Thomas Wade
  Poems
• Robert Browning
  Poems
  The Ring and the Book
• Charles Dickens
  The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club
  David Copperfield
  The Adventures of Oliver Twist
  A Tale of Two Cities
  Bleak House
  Hard Times
  Nicholas Nickleby
  Dombey and Son
  Great Expectations
  Martin Chuzzlewit
  Christmas Stories
  Little Dorrit
  Our Mutual Friend
  The Mystery of Edwin Drood
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson
  Poems
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti
  Poems and Translations
• Matthew Arnold
  Poems
  Essays
• Arthur Hugh Clough
  Poems
• Christina Rossetti
  Poems
• Thomas Love Peacock
  Nightmare Abbey
  Gryll Grange
• Gerald Manley Hopkins
  Poems and Prose
• Thomas Carlyle
  Selected Prose
  Sartor Resartus
• John Ruskin
  Modern Painters
  The Stones of Venice
  Unto This Last
  The Queen of the Air
• Walter Pater
  Studies in the History of the Renaissance
  Appreciations
  Imaginary Portraits
  Marius the Epicurean
• Edward FitzGerald
  The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
• John Stuart Mill
  On Liberty
  Autobiography
• John Henry Newman
  Apologia pro Vita Sua
  A Grammar of Assent
  The Idea of a University
• Anthony Trollope
  The Barsetshire Novels
  The Palliser Novels
  Orley Farm
  The Way We Live Now
• Lewis Carroll
  Complete Works
• Edward Lear
  Complete Nonsense
• George Gissing
  New Grub Street
• Algernon Charles Swinburne
  Poems and Letters
• Charlotte Brontë
  Jane Eyre
  Villette
• Emily Brontë
  Poems
  Wuthering Heights
• William Makepeace Thackeray
  Vanity Fair
  The History of Henry Esmond
• George Meredith
  Poems
  The Egoist
• Francis Thompson
  Poems
• Lionel Johnson
  Poems
• Robert Bridges
  Poems
• Gilbert Keith Chesterton
  Collected Poems
  The Man Who Was Thursday
• Samuel Butler
  Erewhon
  The Way of All Flesh
• W. S. Gilbert
  Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan
  Bab Ballads
• Wilkie Collins
  The Moonstone
  The Woman in White
  No Name
• Coventry Patmore
  Odes
• James Thomson (Bysshe Vanolis)
  The City of the Dreadful Night
• Oscar Wilde
  Plays
  The Picture of Dorian Gray
  The Artist as Critic
  Letters
• John Davidson
  Ballads and Songs
• Ernest Dowson
  Complete Poems
• George Eliot
  Adam Bede
  Silas Marner
  The Mill on the Floss
  Middlemarch
  Daniel Deronda
• Robert Louis Stevenson
  Essays
  Kidnapped
  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
  Treasure Island
  The New Arabian Nights
  The Master of Ballantrae
  Weir of Hermiston
• William Morris
  Early Romances
  Poems
  The Earthly Paradise
  The Well at the World's End
  News from Nowhere
• Bram Stoker
  Dracula
• George Macdonald
  Lilith
  At the Back of the North Wind

  Germany

• Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenburg)
  Hymns to the Night
  Aphorisms
• Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
  Fairy Tales
• Eduard Mörike
  Selected Poems
  Mozart on His Way to Prague
• Theodor Storm
  Immensee
  Poems
• Gottfried Keller
  Green Henry
  Tales
• E. T. A. Hoffmann
  The Devil's Elixir
  Tales
• Jeremias Gotthelf
  The Black Spider
• Adalbert Stifter
  Indian Summer
  Tales
• Friedrich Schlegel
  Criticism and Aphorisms
• Georg Büchner
  Danton's Death
  Woyzeck
• Heinrich Heine
  Complete Poems
• Richard Wagner
  The Ring of the Nibelung
• Friedrich Nietzsche
  The Birth of Tragedy
  Beyond Good and Evil
  On the Genealogy of Morals
  The Will to Power
• Theodor Fontane
  Effi Briest
• Stefan George
  Selected Poems

  Russia

• Aleksandr Pushkin
  Complete Prose Tales
  Complete Poetry
  Eugene Onegin
  Narrative Poems
  Boris Godunov
• Nikolay Gogol
  The Complete Tales
  Dead Souls
  The Government Inspector
• Mikhail Lermontov
  Narrative Poems
  A Hero of Our Time
• Segey Aksakov
  A Family Chronicle
• Aleksandr Herzen
  My Past and Thoughts
  From the Other Shore
• Ivan Goncharov
  The Frigate Pallada
  Oblomov
• Ivan Turgenev
  A Sportsman's Notebook
  A Month in the Country
  Fathers and Sons
  On the Eve
  First Love
• Fyodor Dostoevsky
  Notes from the Underground
  Crime and Punishment
  The Idiot
  The Possessed (The Devils)
  The Brothers Karamazov
  Short Novels
• Leo Tolstoy
  The Cossacks
  War and Peace
  Anna Karenina
  A Confession
  The Power of Darkness
  Short Novels
• Nikolay Leskov
  Tales
• Aleksandr Ostrovsky
  The Storm
• Nikolay Chernyshevsky
  What is to Be Done?
• Aleksandr Blok
  The Twelve and Other Poems
• Anton Chekhov
  The Tales
  The Major Plays

  The United States

• Washington Irving
  The Sketch Book
• William Cullen Bryant
  Collected Poems
• James Fenimore Cooper
  The Deerslayers
• John Greenleaf Whittier
  Collected Poems
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
  Nature
  Essays, first and second series
  Representative Men
  The Conduct of Life
  Journals
  Poems
• Emily Dickinson
  Complete Poems
• Walt Whitman
  Leaves of Grass, first edition
  Leaves of Grass, third edition
  The Complete Poems
  Specimen Days
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
  The Scarlet Letter
  Tales and Sketches
  The Marble Faun
  Notebooks
• Herman Melville
  Moby-Dick
  The Piazza Tales
  Billy Budd
  Collected Poems
  Clarel
• Edgar Allan Poe
  Poetry and Tales
  Essays and Reviews
  The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
  Eureka
• Jones Very
  Essays and Poems
• Frederick Goddard Tuckerman
  The Cricket and Other Poems
• Henry David Thoreau
  Walden
  Poems
  Essays
• Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
  Two Years Before the Mast
• Frederick Douglass
  Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
  Selected Poems
• Sidney Lanier
  Poems
• Francis Parkman
  France and England in North America
  The California and Oregon Trail
• Henry Adams
  The Education of Henry Adams
  Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres
• Ambrose Bierce
  Collected Writings
• Louisa May Alcott
  Little Women
• Charles W. Chesnutt
  The Short Fiction
• Kate Chopin
  The Awakening
• William Dean Howells
  The Rise of Silas Lapham
  A Modern Instance
• Stephen Crane
  The Red Badge of Courage
  Stories and Poems
• Henry James
  The Portrait of a Lady
  The Bostonians
  The Princess Casamassima
  The Awkward Age
  Short Novels and Tales
  The Ambassadors
  The Wings of the Dove
  The Golden Bowl
• Harold Frederic
  The Damnation of Theron Ware
• Mark Twain
  Complete Short Stories
  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
  The Devil's Racetrack
  Number Forty-Four: The Mysterious Stranger
  Pudd'nhead Wilson
  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
• William James
  The Varieties of Religious Experience
  Pragmatism
• Frank Norris
  The Octopus
• Sarah Orne Jewett
  The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories
• Trumbull Stickney
  Poems

D. The Chaotic Age: A Canonical Prophecy

"I am not as confident about this list as the first three. Cultural prophecy is always a mug's game. Not all of the works here can prove to be canonical; literary overpopulation is a hazard to many among them. But I have neither excluded nor included on the basis of cultural politics of any kind."
(Bloom, p. 548)

Italy

• Luigi Pirandello
  Naked Masks: Five Plays
• Gabriele D'Annunzio
  Maia: In Praise of Life
• Dino Campana
  Orphic Songs
• Umberto Saba
  Stories and Recollections
  Poems
• Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
  The Leopard
• Giuseppe Ungaretti
  Selected Poems
  The Buried Harbour: Selected Poems
• Eugenio Montale
  The Storm and Other Things: Poems
  The Occasions: Poems
  Cuttlefish Bones: Poems
  Otherwise: Last and First Poems
  The Second Life of Art: Selected Essays
• Salvatore Quasimodo
  Selected Writings: Poems and Discourse on Poetry
• Tommaso Landolfi
  Gogol's Wife and Other Stories
• Leonardo Sciascia
  Day of the Owl
  Equal Danger
  The Wine-Dark Sea: Thirteen Stories
• Pier Paolo Pasolini
  Poems
• Cesare Pavese
  Hard Labor: Poems
  Dialogues with Leucò
• Primo Levi
  If Not Now, When?
  Collected Poems
  The Periodic Table
• Italo Svevo
  The Confession of Zeno
  As a Man Grows Older
• Giorgio Bassani
  The Heron
• Natalia Ginzburg
  Family
• Elio Vittorini
  Women of Messina
• Alberto Moravia
  1934
• Andrea Zanzotto
  Selected Poetry
• Italo Calvino
  Invisible Cities
  The Baron in the Trees
  If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
  t zero
• Antonio Porta
  Kisses from Another Dream: Poems

  Spain

• Miguel de Unamuno
  Three Exemplary Novels
  Our Lord Don Quixote
• Antonio Machado
  Selected Poems
• Juan Ramón Jiménez
  Invisible Reality: Poems
• Pedro Salinas
  My Voice Because of You: Poems
• Jorge Guillén
  Guillén on Guillén: The Poetry and the Poet
• Vicente Aleixandre
  A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems
• Federico Garcia Lorca
  Selected Poems
  Three Tragedies: Blood Wedding, Yerma, The House of Bernardo Alba
• Rafael Alberti
  The Owl's Insomnia: Poems
• Luis Cernuda
  Selected Poems
• Miguel Hernández
  Selected Poems
• Blas de Otero
  Selected Poems
• Camilo José Cela
  The Hive
• Juan Goytisolo
  Space in Motion

  Catalonia

• Carles Ribá
  Selected Poems
• J. V. Foix
  Selected Poems
• Joan Perucho
  Natural History
• Merce Rodoreda
  The Time of the Doves
• Pere Gimferrer
  Selected Poems
• Salvador Espríu
  La Pell de Brau: Poems

  Portugal

• Fernando Pessoa
  The Keeper of Sheep
  Poems
  Selected Poems
  Always Astonished: Selected Poems
  The Book of Disquiet
• Jorge de Sena
  Selected Poems
• José Saramago
  Baltasar and Blimunda
• José Cardoso Pires
  Ballad of Dogs' Beach
• Sophia de Mello Breyner
  Selected Poems
• Eugénio de Andrade
  Selected Poems

  France

• Anatole France
  Penguin Island
  Thaïs
• Alain-Fournier
  Le Grand Meaulnes
• Marcel Proust
  Remembrance of Things Past (In Search of Lost Time)
• Andre Gide
  The Immoralist
  Corydon
  Lafcadio's Adventure (The Caves of the Vatican)
  The Journals
• Colette
  Collected Stories
  Retreat from Love
• Georges Bataille
  Blue of Noon
• Louis-Ferdinand Céline
  Journey to the End of Night
• René Daumal
  Mount Analogue
• Jean Genet
  Our Lady of the Flowers
  The Thief's Journal
  The Balcony
• Jean Giraudoux
  Four Plays
• Alfred Jarry
  Selected Works
• Jean Cocteau
  The Infernal Machine and Other Works
• Guillaume Apollinaire
  Selected Writings
• André Breton
  Poems
  Manifestoes of Surrealism
• Paul Valéry
  The Art of Poetry
  Selected Writings
• René Char
  Poems
• Paul Éluard
  Selected Poems
• Louis Aragon
  Selected Poems
• Jean Giono
  The Horseman on the Roof
• Michel Leiris
  Manhood
• Raymond Radiguet
  Count d'Orgel's Ball
• Jean-Paul Sartre
  No Exit
  Nausea
  Saint Genet
  The Words
  The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert
• Simone de Beauvoir
  The Second Sex
• Albert Camus
  The Stranger
  The Plague
  The Fall
  The Rebel
• Henri Michaux
  Selected Writings
• Edmond Jabès
  The Book of Questions
  Selected Poems
• Saint-John Perse
  Anabasis
  Birds
  Exile and Other Poems
• Pierre Reverdy
  Selected Poems
• Tristan Tzara
  Seven Dada Manifestoes
• Max Jacob
  Selected Poems
• Pierre-Jean Jouve
  Selected Poems
• Francis Ponge
  Things: Selected Writings
• Jacques Prévert
  Paroles
• Philippe Jacottet
  Selected Poems
• Charles Péguy
  The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc
• Bejamin Péret
  Selected Poems
• Andé Malraux
  The Conquerors
  The Royal Way
  Man's Fate
  Man's Hope
  The Voices of Silence
• François Mauriac
  Therese
  The Desert of Love
  The Woman of the Pharisees
• Jean Anouilh
  Becket
  Antigone
  Eurydice
  The Rehearsal
• Eugène Ionesco
  The Bald Soprano
  The Chairs
  The Lesson
  Amédée
  Victims of Duty
  Rhinoceros
• Maurice Blanchot
  Thomas the Obscure
• Pierre Klossowski
  The Laws of Hospitality
  The Baphomet
• Raymond Roussel
  Locus Solus
• Antonin Artaud
  Selected Writings
• Claude Lévi-Strauss
  Tristes Tropiques
• Alain Robbe-Grillet
  The Voyeur
  Jealousy
  In the Labyrinth
  The Erasers
  Project for a Revolution in New York
  For a New Novel
• Nathalie Sarraute
  The Use of Speech
  The Planetarium
• Claude Simon
  The Grass
  The Wind
  The Flanders Road
• Marguerite Duras
  The Lover
  Four Novels
• Robert Pinget
  Fable
  The Libera Me Domine
  That Voice
• Michel Tournier
  The Ogre
  Friday
• Marguerite Yourcenar
  Coup de Grace
  Memoirs of Hadrian
• Jean Follain
  Transparence of the World: Poems
• Yves Bonnefoy
  Words in Stone

  Great Britain and Ireland

• William Butler Yeats
  The Collected Poems
  Collected Plays
  A Vision
  Mythologies
• George Bernard Shaw
  Major Critical Essays
  Heartbreak House
  Pygmalion
  Saint Joan
  Major Barbara
  Back to Methuselah
• John Millington Synge
  Collected Plays
• Sean O'Casey
  Juno and the Paycock
  The Plough and the Stars
  The Shadow of a Gunman
• George Douglas Brown
  House with the Green Shutters
• Thomas Hardy
  The Well-Beloved
  The Woodlanders
  The Return of the Native
  The Mayor of Casterbridge
  Far From the Madding Crowd
  Tess of the D'Urbervilles
  Jude the Obscure
  Collected Poems
• Rudyard Kipling
  Kim
  Collected Stories
  Puck of Pook's Hill
  Complete Verse
• A. E. Housman
  Collected Poems
• Max Beerbohm
  Zuleika Dobson
  Seven Men and Two Others
• Joseph Conrad
  Lord Jim
  The Secret Agent
  Nostromo
  Under Western Eyes
  Victory
• Ronald Firbank
  Five Novels
• Ford Madox Ford
  Parade's End
  The Good Soldier
• W. Somerset Maugham
  Collected Short Stories
  The Moon and Sixpence
• John Cowper Powys
  Wolf Solent
  A Glastonbury Romance
• Saki (H. H. Munro)
  The Short Stories
• H. G. Wells
  The Science Fiction Novels
• David Lindsay
  A Voyage to Arcturus
• Arnold Bennett
  The Old Wives' Tale
• Walter De la Mare
  Collected Poems
  Memoirs of a Midget
• Wilfred Owen
  Collected Poems
• Isaac Rosenberg
  Collected Poems
• Edward Thomas
  Collected Poems
• Robert Graves
  Collected Poems
  King Jesus
• Edwin Muir
  Collected Poems
• David Jones
  In Parenthesis
  The Anathemata
• John Galsworthy
  The Forsyte Saga
• E. M. Forster
  Howards End
  A Passage to India
• Frank O'Connor
  Collected Stories
• D. H. Lawrence
  Complete Poems
  Studies in Classic American Literature
  Complete Short Stories
  Sons and Lovers
  The Rainbow
  Women in Love
• Virginia Woolf
  Mrs. Dalloway
  To the Lighthouse
  Orlando: A Biography
  The Waves
  Between the Acts
• James Joyce
  Dubliners
  Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
  Ulysses
  Finnegans Wake
• Samuel Beckett
  Murphy
  Watt
  Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable
  Waiting for Godot
  Endgame
  Krapp's Last Game
  How It Is
• Elizabeth Bowen
  Collected Stories
• J. G. Farrell
  The Siege of Krishnapur
• Henry Green
  Nothing
  Loving
  Party Going
• Evelyn Waugh
  A Handful of Dust
  Scoop
  Vile Bodies
  Put Out More Flags
• Anthony Burgess
  Nothing Like the Sun
• G. B. Edwards
  The Book of Ebenezer Le Page
• Iris Murdoch
  The Good Apprentice
  Bruno's Dream
• Graham Greene
  Brighton Rock
  The Heart of the Matter
  The Power and the Glory
• Christopher Isherwood
  The Berlin Stories
• Norman Douglas
  South Wind
• Aldous Huxley
  Collected Essays
  Antic Hay
  Point Counter Point
  Brave New World
• Lawrence Durrell
  Alexandria Quartet
• William Golding
  Pincher Martin
• Doris Lessing
  The Golden Notebook
• Mervyn Peake
  The Gormenghast Trilogy
• Jeanette Winterson
  The Passion
• W. H. Auden
  Collected Poems
  The Dyer's Hand
• Roy Fuller
  Collected Poems
• Gavin Ewart
  Selected Poems
• Basil Bunting
Collected Poems
• William Empson
Collected Poems
Milton's God
Some Versions of Pastoral
• George Wilson Knight
The Wheel of Fire
The Burning Oracle
• R. S. Thomas
Poems
• Frank Kermode
The Sense of an Ending
• Stevie Smith
Collected Poems
• F. T. Prince
Collected Poems
• Philip Larkin
Collected Poems
• Donald Davie
Selected Poems
• Geoffrey Hill
Collected Poems
• Jonathan Spence
The Death of Woman Wang
The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci
• Elizabeth Jennings
Selected Poems
• Keith Douglas
The Complete Poems
• Hugh MacDiarmid
Complete Poems
• Louis MacNeice
Collected Poems
• Dylan Thomas
The Poems
• Nigel Dennis
Cards of Identity
• Seamus Heaney
Selected Poems: 1969-1987
Field Work
Station Island
• Thomas Kinsella
Peppercanister Poems
• Paul Muldoon
Selected Poems
• John Montague
Selected Poems
• John Arden
Plays
• Joe Orton
The Complete Plays
• Flann O'Brien
The Dalkey Archive
The Third Policeman
• Tom Stoppard
Travesties
• Harold Pinter
The Caretaker
The Homecoming
• Edward Bond
The Fool
Saved
• George Orwell
Collected Essays
1984
• Edna O'Brien
A Fanatic Heart

Germany

• Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Poems and Verse Plays
Selected Prose
Selected Plays and Libretti
• Rainer Maria Rilke
Selected Poetry (including the Duino Elegies)
The Sonnets to Orpheus
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
New Poems: First Part and Other Part
• Hermann Broch
The Sleepwalkers
The Death of Virgil
Hugo von Hofmannsthal and His Time
• Georg Trakl
Selected Poems
• Gottfried Benn
Selected Poems
• Franz Kafka
Amerika
The Complete Stories
The Blue Octavo Notebook
The Trial
The Diaries
The Castle
Parables, Fragments, Aphorisms
• Bertolt Brecht
Poems, 1913-1956
The Threepenny Opera
The Good Woman of Setzuan
Mother Courage and Her Children
Galileo
The Caucasian Chalk Circle
• Arthur Schnitzler
Plays and Stories
• Frank Wedekind
Lulu Plays
Spring Awakening
• Karl Krauss
The Last Days of Mankind
• Günter Eich
Moles
• Thomas Mann
The Magic Mountain
Stories of Three Decades
Joseph and His Brothers
Doctor Faustus
Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man
• Alfred Döblin
Berlin Alexanderplatz
• Hermann Hesse
The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi)
Narcissus and Goldmund
• Robert Musil
Young Törless
The Man Without Qualities
• Joseph Roth
The Radetzky March
• Paul Celan
Poems
• Thomas Bernhard
Woodcutters
• Heinrich Böll
Billiards at Half-Past Nine
• Ingeborg Bachmann
In the Storm of Roses
• Hans Magnus Enzensberger
Poems for People Who Don't Read Poems
• Walter Benjamin
Illuminations
• Robert Walser
Selected Stories
• Christa Wolf
Cassandra
• Peter Handke
Slow Homecoming
• Max Frisch
I'm Not Stiller
Man in the Holocene
• Günter Grass
The Tin Drum
The Flounder
• Friedrich Dürrenmatt
The Visit
• Johannes Bobrowski
Shadow Lands

Russia

• Anna Akhmatova
Poems
• Leonid Andreyev
Selected Tales
• Andrey Bely
Petersburg
• Osip Mandelshtam
Selected Poems
• Velimir Khlebnikov
The King of Time
• Vladimir Mayakovsky
The Bedbug and Selected Poetry
• Mikhail Bulgakov
The Master and the Margarita
• Mikhail Kuzmin
Alexandrian Songs
• Maksim Gorky
Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Andreev
Autobiography
• Ivan Bunin
Selected Stories
• Isaac Babel
Collected Stories
• Boris Pasternak
Doctor Zhivago
Selected Poems
• Yury Olesha
Envy
• Marina Tsvetayeva
Selected Poems
• Mikhail Zoshchenko
Nervous People and Other Satires
• Andrei Platonov
The Foundation Pit
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
The Cancer Ward
The Gulag Archipelago
August 1914
• Joesph Brodsky
A Part of Speech: Poems

Scandinavia

• Isak Dinesen
Winter's Tales
Seven Gothic Tales
• Martin Andersen Nexø
Pelle the Conqueror
• Knut Hamsun
Hunger
Pan
• Sigrid Undset
Kristin Lavransdatter
• Gunnar Ekelöf
Guide to the Underworld
• Tomas Tranströmer
Selected Poems
• Pär Lagerkvist
Barabbas
• Lars Gustafsson
Selected Poems

Serbo-Croat

• Ivo Andric
The Bridge on the Drina
• Vasko Popa
Selected Poems
• Danilo Kis
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich

Czech

• Karel Capek
War with the Newts
R.U.R
• Vaclav Havel
Largo Desolato
• Milan Kundera
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• Jaroslav Seifert
Selected Poetry
• Miroslav Holub
The Fly

Polish

• Bruno Schulz
The Street of Crocodiles
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass
• Czeslaw Milosz
Selected Poems
• Witold Gombrowicz
Three Novels
• Stanislaw Lem
The Investigation
Solaris
• Zbigniew Herbert
Selected Poems
• Adam Zagajewski
Tremor

Hungarian

• Attila József
Perched on Nothing's Branch
• Ferenc Juhasz
Selected Poems
• Laszlo Németh
Guilt

Modern Greek

• C. P. Cavafy
Collected Poems
• George Seferis
Collected Poems
• Nikos Kazantzakis
The Greek Passion
The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel
• Yannis Ritsos
Exile and Return
• Odysseas Elytis
What I Love: Selected Poems
• Angelos Sikelianos
Selected Poems

Yiddish

• Sholem Aleichem
Tevye the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories
The Nightingale
• Mendele Mokher Seforim
The Travels and Adventures of Benjamin the Third
• I. L. Peretz
Selected Stories
• Jacob Glatstein
Selected Poems
• Moshe-Leib Halpern
Selected Poems
• H. Leivick (Leivick Halpern)
Selected Poems
• Israel Joshua Singer
The Brothers Ashkenazi
Yoshe Kalb
• Chaim Grade
The Yeshiva
• S. Ansky
The Dybbuk
• Mani Leib
Selected Poems
• Sholem Asch
East River
• Isaac Bashevis Singer
Collected Stories
In My Father's Court
The Manor, the Estate, the Family Moskat
Satan in Goray

Hebrew

• Hayyim Nahman Bialik
Shirot Bialik: The Epic Poems
• S. Y. Agnon
In the Heart of the Seas
Twenty-One Stories
• Aharon Appelfeld
The Immortal Bartfuss
Badenheim 1939
• Yaakov Shabtai
Past Continuous
• Yehuda Amichai
Selected Poetry
Travels
• A. B. Yehoshua
A Late Divorce
• Amos Oz
A Perfect Peace
• T. Carmi
At the Stone of Losses
• Nathan Zach
Selected Poems
• Dalia Ravikovitch
A Dress of Fire
• Dan Pagis
Selected Poems
• David Shahar
The Palace of Shattered Vessels
• David Grossman
See Under: Love
• Yoram Kaniuk
His Daughter

Arabic

• Najib Mahfuz
Midaq Alley
Fountain and Tomb
Miramar
• Adunis
Selected Poems
• Mahmud Darwish
The Music of Human Flesh
• Taha Husayn
An Egyptian Childhood

Latin America

• Rubén Dário
Selected Poetry
• Jorge Luis Borges
The Aleph and Other Stories
Dreamtigers (The Maker)
Ficciones
Labyrinths
A Personal Anthology
• Alejo Carpentier
Explosion in a Cathedral
The Lost Steps
Reasons of State
The Kingdom of This World
• Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Three Trapped Tigers
View of Dawn in the Tropics
• Severo Sarduy
Maitreya
• Reinaldo Arenas
The Ill-Fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando
• Pablo Neruda
Canto General
Residence on Earth
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
Fully Empowered
Selected Poems
• Nicolás Guillén
Selected Poems
• Octavio Paz
The Collected Poems
The Labyrinth of Solitude
• César Vallejo
Selected Poems
Spain, Take This Cup from Me
• Miguel Angel Asturias
Men of Maize
• José Lezama Lima
Paradiso
• José Donoso
The Obscene Bird of Night
• Julio Cortázar
Hopscotch
All Fires the Fire
Blow-up and Other Stories
• Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Love in the Time of Cholera
• Mario Vargas Llosa
The War of the End of the World
• Carlos Fuentes
A Change of Skin
Terra Nostra
• Carlos Drummond de Andrade
Travelling in the Family

The West Indies

• C. L. R. James
The Black Jacobins
The Future in the Present
• V. S. Naipaul
A Bend in the River
A House for Mr. Biswas
• Derek Walcott
Collected Poems
• Wilson Harris
The Guyana Quartet
• Michael Thelwell
The Harder They Come
• Aimé Césaire
Collected Poetry

Africa

• Chinua Achebe
Things Fall Apart
Arrow of God
No Longer at Ease
• Wole Soyinka
A Dance of the Forest
• Amos Tutuola
The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Dead's Town
• Christopher Okigbo
Labyrinths, with Path of Thunder
• John Pepper Clark (-Bekederemo)
Casualties: Poems
• Ayi K. Armah
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
• Wa Thiong'o Ngugi
A Grain of Wheat
• Gabriel Okara
The Fisherman's Invocation
• Nadine Gordimer
Collected Stories
• J. M. Coetzee
Foe
• Athol Fugard
A Lesson from Aloes
• Léopold S. Senghor
Selected Poems

India (in English)

• R. K. Narayan
The Guide
• Salman Rushdie
Midnight's Children
• Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Heat and Dust

Canada

• Malcolm Lowry
Under the Volcano
• Robertson Davies
The Deptford Trilogy
The Rebel Angels
• Alice Munro
Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You
• Northrop Frye
Fables of Identity
• Anne Hébert
Selected Poems
• Jay Macpherson
Poems Twice Told
• Margaret Atwood
Surfacing
• Daryl Hine
Selected Poems

Australia and New Zealand

• Miles (Stella) Franklin
My Brilliant Career
• Katherine Mansfield
The Short Stories
• A. D. Hope
Collected Poems
• Patrick White
Riders in the Chariot
A Fringe of Leaves
Voss
• Christina Stead
The Man Who Loved Children
• Judith Wright
Selected Poems
• Les A. Murray
The Rabbiter's Bounty: Collected Poems
• Thomas Keneally
The Playmaker
Schindler's List
• David Malouf
An Imaginary Life
• Kevin Hart
Peniel and Other Poems
• Peter Carey
Oscar and Lucinda
Illywhacker

The United States

• Edwin Arlington Robinson
Selected Poems
• Robert Frost
The Poetry
• Edith Wharton
Collected Short Stories
The Age of Innocence
Ethan Frome
The House of Mirth
The Custom of the Country
• Willa Cather
My Ántonia
The Professor's House
A Lost Lady
• Gertrude Stein
Three Lives
The Geographical History of America
The Making of Americans
Tender Buttons
• Wallace Stevens
Collected Poems
The Necessary Angel
Opus Posthumous
The Palm at the End of the Mind
• Vachel Lindsay
Collected Poems
• Edgar Lee Masters
Spoon River Anthology
• Theodore Dreiser
Sister Carrie
An American Tragedy
• Sherwood Anderson
Winesburg, Ohio
Death in the Woods and Other Stories
• Sinclair Lewis
Babbitt
It Can't Happen Here
• Elinor Wylie
Last Poems
• William Carlos Williams
Spring and All
Paterson
Collected Poems
• Ezra Pound
Personae: Collected Poems
The Cantos
Literary Essays
• Robinson Jeffers
Selected Poems
• Marianne Moore
Complete Poems
• Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)
Selected Poems
• John Crowe Ransom
Selected Poems
• T. S. Eliot
The Complete Poems and Plays
Selected Essays
• Katherine Anne Porter
Collected Stories
• Jean Toomer
Cane
• John Dos Passos
U.S.A
• Conrad Aiken
Collected Poems
• Eugene O'Neill
Lazarus Laughed
The Iceman Cometh
Long Day's Journey Into Night
• e. e. cummings
Complete Poems
• John B. Wheelwright
Collected Poems
• Robert Fitzgerald
Spring Shade: Poems
• Louise Bogan
The Blue Estuaries: Selected Poems
• Léonie Adams
Poems: A Selection
• Hart Crane
Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose
• Allen Tate
Collected Poems
• F. Scott Fitzgerald
Babylon Revisited and Other Stories
The Great Gatsby
Tender is the Night
• William Faulkner
As I Lay Dying
Sanctuary
Light in August
Absalom, Absalom!
The Sound and the Fury
The Wild Palms
The Collected Stories
The Hamlet
• Ernest Hemingway
Complete Short Stories
A Farewell to Arms
The Sun Also Rises
The Garden of Eden
• John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath
• Zora Neale Hurston
Their Eyes Were Watching God
• Nathanael West
Miss Lonelyhearts
A Cool Million
The Day of the Locust
• Richard Wright
Native Son
Black Boy
• Eudora Welty
Collected Stories
Delta Wedding
The Robber Bridegroom
The Ponder Heart
• Langston Hughes
Selected Poems
The Big Sea
I Wonder as I Wander
• Edmund Wilson
The Shores of Light
Patriotic Gore
• Kenneth Burke
Counter-statement
A Rhetoric of Motives
• Joseph Mitchell
Up in the Old Hotel
• Abraham Cahan
The Rise of David Levinsky
• Kay Boyle
Three Short Novels
• Ellen Glasgow
Barren Ground
Vein of Iron
• John P. Marquand
H. M. Pulham, Esquire
• John O'Hara
Collected Stories
Appointment in Samarra
• Henry Roth
Call It Sleep
• Thornton Wilder
Three Plays
• Robert Penn Warren
All the King's Men
World Enough and Time
Selected Poems
• Delmore Schwartz
Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge
• Weldon Kees
Collected Poems
• Elizabeth Bishop
The Complete Poems
• John Berryman
Collected Poems
• Paul Bowles
The Sheltering Sky
• Randall Jarrell
Complete Poems
• Charles Olson
The Maximus Poems
Collected Poems
• Robert Hayden
Collected Poems
• Robert Lowell
Collected Poems
• Theodore Roethke
Collected Poems
Straw for the Fire
• James Agee
Permit Me Voyage
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
• Jean Garrigue
Selected Poems
• May Swenson
New & Selected Things Taking Place
In Other Words
• Robert Duncan
Bending the Bow
• Richard Wilbur
New and Collected Poems
• Richard Eberhart
Collected Poems
• M. B. Tolson
Harlem Gallery
• Kenneth Koch
Seasons on Earth
• Frank O' Hara
Selected Poems
• James Schuyler
Collected Poems
• James Baldwin
The Price of a Ticket
• Saul Bellow
Seize the Day
The Adventures of Augie March
Herzog
• John Cheever
The Stories
Bullet Park
• Ralph Ellison
Invisible Man
• Truman Capote
In Cold Blood
• Carson McCullers
The Ballad of the Sad Cafe
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
• Flannery O'Connor
Complete Stories
The Violent Bear It Away
Wise Blood
• Vladimir Nabokov
Lolita
Pale Fire
• Gore Vidal
Myra Breckenridge
Lincoln
• William Styron
The Long March
• J. D. Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye
Nine Stories
• Wright Morris
Ceremony in Lone Tree
• Bernard Malamud
The Stories
The Fixer
• Norman Mailer
Advertisements for Myself
The Executioner's Song
Ancient Evenings
• John Hawkes
The Cannibal
Second Skin
• William Gaddis
The Recognitions
• Tennessee Williams
The Glass Menagerie
A Streetcar Named Desire
Summer and Smoke
• Arthur Miller
Death of a Salesman
• Edwin Justus Mayer
Children of Darkness
• Harold Brodkey
Stories in an Almost Classical Mode
• Ursula K. LeGuin
The Left Hand of Darkness
• Raymond Carver
Where I'm Calling From
• Robert Coover
Spanking the Maid
• Don DeLillo
White Noise
Libra
Running Dog
Mao II
• John Crowley
Little, Big
Aegypt
Love and Sleep
• Guy Davenport
Tatlin!
• James Dickey
The Early Motion
The Central Motion
• E. L. Doctorow
The Book of Daniel
World's Fair
• Stanley Elkin
The Living End
• William H. Gass
In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
Omensetter's Luck
• Russell Hoban
Riddley Walker
• Denis Johnson
Angels
Fiskadoro
Jesus' Son
• Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian
Suttree
Child of God
• William Kennedy
Ironweed
The Albany Cycle
• Toni Morrison
Song of Solomon
• Gloria Naylor
The Women of Brewster Place
• Joyce Carol Oates
Them
• Walker Percy
The Moviegoer
• Grace Paley
The Little Disturbances of Man
• Thomas Pynchon
V
The Crying of Lot 49
Gravity's Rainbow
• Cynthia Ozick
Envy, or Yiddish in America
The Messiah of Stockholm
• Ishmael Reed
Mumbo Jumbo
• Philip Roth
Portnoy's Complaint
My Life as a Man
Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue
The Counterlife
Patrimony
Operation Shylock
• James Salter
Solo Faces
Light Years
• Robert Stone
Dog Soldiers
A Flag for Sunrise
• John Barth
The Floating Opera
The End of the Road
The Sot-Weed Factor
• Walter Abish
Alphabetical Africa
How German Is It
Eclipse Fever
I Am the Dust Under Your Feet
• Donald Barthelme
Forty Stories
The Dead Father
• Thomas M. Disch
On Wings of Song
• Paul Theroux
The Mosquito Coast
• John Updike
The Witches of Eastwick
• Kurt Vonnegut, Jr
Cat's Cradle
• Edmund White
Forgetting Elena
Nocturnes for the King of Naples
• James McCourt
Time Remaining
• James Wilcox
Modern Baptists
• A. R. Ammons
Collected Poems
Selected Longer Poems
Sphere: The Form of a Motion
• John Ashbery
The Double Dream of Spring
Houseboat Days
Selected Poems
Flow Chart
Hotel Lautréamont
And the Stars Were Shining
• David Mamet
American Buffalo
Speed-the-Plow
• David Rabe
Streamers
• Sam Shepard
Seven Plays
• August Wilson
Fences
Joe Turner's Come and Gone
• Anthony Hecht
Collected Earlier Poems
• Edgar Bowers
Living Together: New and Selected Poems
• Donald Justice
Selected Poems
• James Merrill
From the First Nine
The Changing Light at Sandover
• W. S. Merwin
Selected Poems
• James Wright
Above the River: The Complete Poems
• Galway Kinnell
Selected Poems
• Philip Levine
Selected Poems
• Irving Feldman
New and Selected Poems
• Donald Hall
The One Day
Old and New Poems
• Alvin Feinman
Poems
• Richard Howard
Untitled Subjects
Findings
• John Hollander
Reflections on Espionage
Selected Poetry
Tesserae
• Gary Snyder
No Nature: New and Selected Poems
• Charles Simic
Selected Poems
• Mark Strand
Selected Poems
The Continuous Life
Dark Harbor
• Charles Wright
The World of the Ten Thousand Things
• Jay Wright
Dimensions of History
The Double Invention of Komo
Selected Poems
Elaine's Book
Boleros
• Amy Clampitt
Westward
• Allen Grossman
The Ether Dome and Other Poems: New and Selected
• Howard Moss
New Selected Poems
• James Applewhite
River Writing: An Eno Journal
• J. D. McClatchy
The Rest of the Way
• Alfred Corn
A Call in the Midst of the Crowd
• Douglas Crase
The Revisionist
• Rita Dove
Selected Poems
• Thylias Moss
Small Congregations: New and Selected Poems
• Edward Hirsch
Earthly Measures
• Tony Kushner
Angels in America

Source: Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. Appendixes. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994. © 1994 by Harold Bloom

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