Reading List of Original Texts

Seventh Grade

• Lansing, Shackleton’s Valiant Voyage
• Twain, Tom Sawyer
• Adams, Watership Down
• Schaefer, Shane
• British and American poetry

Eighth Grade

• Tolkien, The Hobbit
• Gibson, The Miracle Worker
• Potok, The Chosen
• Green, King Arthur and His Knights
• Beowulf
• Dickens, A Christmas Carol
• British and American poetry

Ninth Grade

• Documents in American history
• The Federalist Papers (selections)
• Selections from the writings of Thomas Jefferson
• Selections from the Lincoln-Douglas debates
• Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
• Thoreau, Walden; Civil Disobedience
• Twain, Huckleberry Finn
• Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave
• Cather, My Antonia
• Sinclair, The Jungle
• Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
• Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
• Short stories of Crane, Cather, O'Connor
• Wilder, Our Town
• American poetry

Tenth Grade

• Documents in European history
• Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
• Bolt, A Man for All Seasons
• Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Inequality
• Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution (selections)
• Locke, Of Civil Government (selections)
• Austen, Pride and Prejudice
• Marx, The Communist Manifesto
• Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
• Orwell, Animal Farm
• British and European Poetry

Eleventh Grade

• Homer, Iliad; Odyssey
• Aeschylus, Oresteia
• Sophocles, Theban Plays
• Thucydides, Peloponnesian Wars
• Plato, Meno; Crito; Phaedo; Apology; Euthyphro; Gorgias; Republic
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
• Athanasius, On the Incarnation
• Augustine, The Confessions

Twelfth Grade

• Augustine, The Spirit and the Letter
• Thomas Aquinas, Treatise on Law
• Martin Luther, Commentary on Galatians
• Dante, Inferno
• Shakespeare, Macbeth; Hamlet
• Descartes, Meditations
• Montaigne, In Defense of Raymond Sebond
• Rousseau, The Social Contract
• Locke: On Civil Government (selections)
• Hegel, Reason in History
• Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts
• Mill, On Liberty
• Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
• O'Connor, Parker's Back
• Agee, A Death in the Family
• Carver, A Small, Good Thing
• Canin, The Palace Thief
• Stevens, The Idea of Order at Key West; Sunday Morning

"[Trinity's reading list] is most impressive. It's clear that Trinity's humanities programs have a depth and quality that a great many schools could learn from."

Lynne V. Cheney

Former Chairman
National Endowment for the Humanities