Overview of Comprehensive Examination

Period Reading Lists

Part II Primary Text(s)

American Literature: 1914-present

1. Cather, My Antonia

2. Frost, Selected Poems

3. Eliot, Selected Poems and “Tradition and the Individual Talent, “Hamlet,” and the “The Metaphysical Poets” from Selected Prose

4. Pound, Stevens, Williams, Moore (selections from the Norton’s Anthology, volume D)

5. O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night and Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

6. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

7. Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

8. Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

9. Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath

10. Wright, Native Son

11. Ellison, Invisible Man

12. Lowell, Plath, and Rich (selections from the Norton’s Anthology, volume E)

13. O’Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories

14. Nabokov, “Terror,” “Terra Incognita,” “Spring in Fialta,” “Mademoiselle O,” “That in Aleppo Once,” “Cloud, Castle, Lake,” and “Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster” in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov.

15. Bellow, Herzog

16. Morrison, Beloved and Playing in the Dark (essay)

17. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

18. DeLillo, White Noise

19. Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies