AP English Literature Exam Memphis TN

Preparing for the Advanced Placement* (AP) English Literature and Composition exam can be overwhelming. No matter how you look at it, you're going to be required to do a lot of reading. The good news is that you can take your cues from the authors who have shown up most often on previous exams to help you focus your study.

Based on the examinations of the last 20 years, the following is a list of the authors, plays, and novels that have been suggested for use on the open essay question for the AP English Literature and Composition exam. This list represents the authors and works that students have chosen to write about most often. A handful of other titles often appear on recommended reading lists (Melville's novel Redburn, for example) that hardly anyone wrote about, and these names have been omitted.

Over the years, the most frequently chosen novels have been Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The plays that students write about most often are Miller's Death of a Salesman, Williams' The Glass Menagerie, and Shakespeare's Hamlet. There have, of course, also been hundreds of other appropriate novels and plays that were not on the lists of suggested titles.

Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart

Aeschylus: the Oresteia

Aristophanes: Lysistrata

Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice

Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot

Bertolt Brecht: Mother Courage and Her Children

Charlotte Bronté: Jane Eyre

Emily Bronté: Wuthering Heights

Albert Camus: The Stranger

Anton Chekhov: The Cherry Orchard

Kate Chopin: The Awakening

Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Victory

Daniel Defoe: Moll Flanders

Charles Dickens: David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities

Feodor Dostoevski: Crime and Punishment

Theodore Dreiser: An American Tragedy, Sister Carrie

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

Euripides: Medea

William Faulkner: As I Lay Dying, Light in August, The Sound and the Fury

Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby

Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary

E. M. Forster: A Passage to India

William Golding: Lord of the Flies

Thomas Hardy: Jude the Obscure, Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter

Joseph Heller: Catch-22

Lillian Hellman: The Little Foxes

Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises

Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God

Aldous Huxley: Brave New World

Henrik Ibsen: A Doll's House, An Enemy of the People, Hedda Gabler, The Wild Duck

Henry James: The Turn of the Screw, Washington Square

James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Franz Kafka: Metamorphosis, The Trial

D. H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers

Sinclair Lewis: Main Street

Gabriel García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude

Herman Melville: Billy Budd, Moby Dick

Arthur Miller: All My Sons, The Crucible, Death of a Salesman

Toni Morrison: Beloved, Song of Soloman

Flannery O'Connor: Wise Blood

Eugene O'Neill: The Hairy Ape, Long Day's Journey into Night

George Orwell: Animal Farm, 1984

Alan Paton: Cry, the Beloved Country

Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean-Paul Sartre: No Exit

William Shakespeare: Hamlet, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night

George Bernard Shaw: Major Barbara, Man and Superman, Mrs. Warren's Profession, Pygmalion

Mary Shelley: Frankenstein

Sophocles: Antigone, Oedipus Rex

John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath

Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

August Strindberg: Miss Julie

Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels

Leo Tolstoi: Anna Karenina

Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Voltaire: Candide

Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse Five

Alice Walker: The Color Purple

Evelyn Waugh: The Loved One

Edith Wharton: Ethan Frome, The House of Mirth

Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest

Thornton Wilder: Our Town

Tennessee Williams: The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire

Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse

Richard Wright: Native Son

Once in a while, an open question allows for the choice of a poem rather than a novel or play. The following poems have been included in the list of works on the exam. (Do not write on one of these works if the question calls for a novel or play.)

Robert Browning: "My Last Duchess"

T. S. Eliot: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "The Waste Land"

Homer: The Iliad, The Odyssey

Milton: Paradise Lost

Pope: "The Rape of the Lock"

Cliffs Notes Online