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Bradbury, Ray
Brave New World (Huxley)
Brontë, Charlotte
Jane Eyre
Brooks, Walter R., Freddy the Pig series
Brown, Cupcake, A Piece of Cake
Camus, Albert, The Stranger
Catcher in the Rye, The (Salinger)
Cather, Willa
“Paul’s Case”
Song of a Lark
Chandler, Raymond
Chase, David
Chopin, Kate, The Awakening
Chua, Amy, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
Clockwork Orange, A (movie)
Coelho, Paulo
The Alchemist
Colbert, Stephen
Collins, Suzanne, Hunger Games
Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky)
Culture of Time and Space, The (Kern)
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, The (Haddon)
“Daddy” (Plath)
Darkness at Noon (Koestler)
David, Larry
David and Goliath (Gladwell)
Dawkins, Richard
Death of a Salesman (Miller)
De Beauvoir, Simone, “The Woman Destroyed”
Des Pres, Terrence
Destruction of the European Jews, The (Hilberg)
de Tocqueville, Alexis
Dewey, John
Diary of a Young Girl (Frank)
Dickens, Charles
Dickinson, Emily
Diderot, Denis, Rameau’s Nephew
Divergent (Roth)
Dixon, Franklin W., Hardy Boys series
Dostoevsky, Fyodor
Crime and Punishment
Notes from Underground
Douglass, Frederick
Doyle, A. Conan
Drowned and the Saved, The (Levi)
Duck Soup (movie)
East of Eden (Steinbeck)
Eat, Pray, Love (Gilbert)
Education and the Commercial Mindset (Abrams)
Eggers, Dave
Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt)
Elements of Style, The (Strunk & White)
Ellison, Ralph
Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Ephron, Nora
“Existentialism Is a Humanism” (Sartre)
Fast Food Nation (Schlosser)
Faulkner, William
As I Lay Dying
“A Rose for Emily”
The Sound and the Fury
Ferrante, Elena
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary
Forster, E. M.
Frank, Anne, Diary of a Young Girl
Frankl, Viktor E.
Man’s Search for Meaning
Franklin, Benjamin
Franklin, Ruth
Franny and Zooey (Salinger)
Frears, Steven
Freddy the Pig series (Brooks)
Freud, Sigmund
Gardner, Howard
Gates, Henry Louis
Gilbert, Elizabeth, Eat, Pray, Love
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins
Ginsberg, Allen
Girl, Interrupted (Kaysen)
Girl You Left Behind, The (Moyes)
Gladwell, Malcolm, David and Goliath
Glass Bead Game, The (Hesse)
Go Ask Alice (Anonymous)
Go Set a Watchman (Lee)
Great Books (Denby)
Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald)
Green, John
Grisham, John
Gulag Archipelago, The (Solzhenitsyn)
Haddon, Mark, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Hamlet (Shakespeare)
Handmaid’s Tale, The (Atwood)
Hardy Boys books
“Harrison Bergeron” (Vonnegut)
Harry Potter series (Rowling)
Hart, Betty
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
“The Minister’s Black Veil”
“My Kinsman, Major Molineux”
The Scarlet Letter
“Young Goodman Brown”
Hell, Richard
Heller, Joseph
Hemingway, Ernest
“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”
Herzog (Bellow)
Hesse, Hermann
The Glass Bead Game
Siddhartha
Hilberg, Raoul, The Destruction of the European Jews
Hillenbrand, Laura, Unbroken
Hirsch, E. D., Jr., The Knowledge Deficit
Hobbit, The (Tolkien)
Holidays on Ice (Sedaris)
Homer
The Odyssey
Hosseini, Khaled
The Kite Runner
A Thousand Splendid Suns
House of Mirth, The (Wharton)
Huckleberry Finn (Twain)
Hunger Games (Collins)
Huxley, Aldous
Brave New World
If This Is a Man (Levi)
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell (Max)
Inglorious Basterds (movie)
Invisible Man (Ellison)
James, Clive
James, Henry
Jane Eyre (Brontë)
Jefferson, Thomas
Jeter, Derek, The Life You Imagine
Joyce, James
Joy Luck Club, The (Tan)
Junger, Sebastian, Perfect Storm
Jungle, The (Sinclair)
Kafka, Franz
“Metamorphosis”
The Trial
Kaysen, Susanna, Girl, Interrupted
Keats, John
Kern, Stephen, The Culture of Time and Space
King, Martin Luther, Jr.
King, Stephen
King Lear (Shakespeare)
Kite Runner, The (Hosseini)
Kittle, Penny
Book Love
Knowledge Deficit, The (Hirsch)
Koestler, Arthur, Darkness at Noon
“Lady Lazarus” (Plath)
Lahane, Dennis, Mystic River
Lahiri, Jumpa, The Namesake
Lane, Anthony
Lanzmann, Claude
Lawrence, D. H.
Studies in Classic American Literature
LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole, Random Family
Le Carré, John
Lee, Harper
Go Set a Watchman
To Kill a Mockingbird
LeGuin, Ursula
“The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas”
Levi, Primo
The Drowned and the Saved
If This Is a Man
Lippmann, Walter
Lockhart, E., We Were Liars
Lolita (Nabokov)
Long Way Gone, A (Beah)
Lord of the Rings (Tolkien)
Macbeth (Shakespeare)
Madame Bovary (Flaubert)
Man’s Search for Meaning (Frankl)
Maus (Spiegel)
Max, Tucker, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
McCarthy, Cormac, The Road
McCullers, Carson
McEwan, Ian
Atonement
Meaning of Everything, The (Winchester)
Melville, Herman
Moby Dick
Menand, Louis
“Metamorphosis” (Kafka)
Meyer, Stephanie, Twilight series
Miller, Arthur, Death of a Salesman
“The Minister’s Black Veil” (Hawthorne)
Moby Dick (Melville)
Montaigne, Michel de
Morissette, Alanis, “Ironic,”
Morrison, Toni
Moyes, Jo Jo, The Girl You Left Behind
Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare)
Munro, Alice
“My Kinsman, Major Molineux” (Hawthorne)
Mystic River (Lahane)
Nabokov, Vladimir
Lolita
Nafisi, Azar
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Namesake, The (Lahiri)
Neruda, Pablo
New Jim Crow, The (Alexander)
Niebuhr, Reinhold
Nietzsche, Friedrich
Niffenegger, Audrey, The Time Traveler’s Wife
Night (Wiesel)
1984 (Orwell)
“The Noble Eightfold Path”
No Easy Day (Bissonnette and Mauer)
No Exit (Sartre)
Notes from Underground (Dostoevsky)
Obama, Barack
O’Connor, Flannery
Odyssey, The (Homer)
O’Hagan, Andrew
“The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas” (LeGuin)
“On the Teaching of Modern Literature” (Trilling)
On Writing Well (Zinsser)
Origins of Totalitarianism, The (Arendt)
Orr, Bobby, Orr: My Story
Orwell, George
Animal Farm
1984
“Politics and the English Language”
Paley, Grace
Patchett, Ann
“All Little Colored Children Should Play the Harmonica”
Patterson, James
“Paul’s Case” (Cather)
Perfect Storm (Junger)
Philomena (movie)
Piece of Cake, A (Brown)
Plath, Sylvia
The Bell Jar
“Daddy”
“Lady Lazarus”
Poe, Edgar Allan
“Politics and the English Language” (Orwell)
Porter, Katherine Anne
Portnoy’s Complaint (Roth)
Present Shock (Rushkoff)
Pretty Little Liars
Pride and Prejudice (Austen)
Proust, Marcel
Proust and the Squid (Wolf)
Pudd’nhead Wilson (Twain)
Rameau’s Nephew (Diderot)
Random Family (LeBlanc)
Ravitch, Diane
Reading Lolita in Tehran (Nafisi)
Reed, Lou
Risley, Todd R.
Road, The (McCarthy)
Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)
“A Rose for Emily” (Faulkner)
Roth, Philip, Portnoy’s Complaint
Roth, Veronica, Divergent
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques
Rowling, J. K.
Harry Potter series
Rudnick, Paul
Rushkoff, Douglas, Present Shock
Salinger, J. D.
The Catcher in the Rye
Franny and Zooey
Sartre, Jean-Paul
“Existentialism Is a Humanism”
No Exit
Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne)
Schindler’s List (movie)
Schlosser, Eric, Fast Food Nation
Scorsese, Martin
Sedaris, David
Holidays on Ice
Serenity Prayer
Shakespeare, William
Hamlet
King Lear
Macbeth
Much Ado About Nothing
Romeo and Juliet
Sonnets
The Tempest
Shakespeare in Love (movie)
Shoah (movie)
“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (Hemingway)
Siddhartha (Hesse)
Sinclair, Upton, The Jungle
Sirens of Titan, The (Vonnegut)
Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut)
Smith, Zadie
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, The Gulag Archipelago
Song of a Lark (Cather)
Sonnets (Shakespeare)
Sophocles, Antigone
Sound and the Fury, The (Faulkner)
Spiegel, Art, Maus
Spielberg, Steven
Star Wars (movie)
Steinbeck, John
East of Eden
Stevenson, Robert Louis, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Stewart, Jon
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson)
Stranger, The (Camus)
Strayed, Cheryl, Wild
Strunk & White, The Elements of Style
Studies in Classic American Literature (Lawrence)
Tan, Amy
The Joy Luck Club
Taxi Driver (movie)
Tempest, The (Shakespeare)
Thoreau, Henry
Thousand Splendid Suns, A (Hosseini)
Time Traveler’s Wife, The (Niffenegger)
To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee)
Tolkien, J. R. R.
The Hobbit
Lord of the Rings
Tolstoy, Leo
Trial, The (Kafka)
Trilling, Lionel
“Hawthorne in Our Time”
“On the Teaching of Modern Literature”
Turkle, Sherry, Alone Together
Twain, Mark
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Huckleberry Finn
Pudd’nhead Wilson
Twilight series (Meyer)
Tyler, Anne
Tyrell (Booth)
Unbroken (Hillenbrand)
Vargas Llosa, Mario
Vidal, Gore
Vonnegut, Kurt
“Harrison Bergeron”
The Sirens of Titan
Slaughterhouse-Five
Waiting for Godot (Beckett)
Wallace, David Foster
“Authority and American Usage”
Weiner, Matt
We Were Liars (Lockhart)
Wharton, Edith, The House of Mirth
Whitman, Walt
Wiesel, Elie
Night
Wild (Strayed)
Winchester, Simon, The Meaning of Everything
Wolcott, James
Wolf, Maryanne
Proust and the Squid
“The Woman Destroyed” (De Beauvoir)
Woolf, Virginia
Yeats, William Butler
“Young Goodman Brown” (Hawthorne)
Zeitlin, Benh
Zinsser, William K., On Writing Well
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DAVID DENBY is the author of Great Books, an acclaimed account of returning to college and reading the Western classics during the curriculum wars; American Sucker; Snark; and Do the Movies Have a Future? He is a staff writer and former film critic for The New Yorker, and his reviews and essays have appeared in The New Republic, The Atlantic, and New York magazine, among other places. He lives in New York City with his wife, writer Susan Rieger. You can sign up for email updates here.
ALSO BY DAVID DENBY
Great Books
American Sucker
Snark
Do the Movies Have a Future?
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE
BEACON, SEPTEMBER: THE FIRST DAYS OF ENGLISH 10G
CHAPTER TWO
BEACON, OCTOBER: FAULKNER AND HAWTHORNE
CHAPTER THREE
BEACON, OCTOBER: SYLVIA PLATH AND CONFESSIONS
CHAPTER FOUR
BEACON, NOVEMBER: NUTS MATTER, AND BOLTS, TOO
CHAPTER FIVE
BEACON, NOVEMBER: HUXLEY
CHAPTER SIX
BEACON, DECEMBER AND JANUARY: ORWELL
CHAPTER SEVEN
MAMARONECK, ALL YEAR: PERSONAL CHOICE
CHAPTER EIGHT
BEACON, JANUARY: SATIRE
CHAPTER NINE
BEACON, FEBRUARY: COELHO AND HESSE
CHAPTER TEN
BEACON, FEBRUARY: VONNEGUT
CHAPTER ELEV
EN
BEACON, MARCH: VIKTOR E. FRANKL
CHAPTER TWELVE
HILLHOUSE: THE YEAR
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
MAMARONECK, SPRING: TENTH-GRADE ENGLISH
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
BEACON, APRIL AND MAY: DOSTOEVSKY
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
BEACON, MAY AND JUNE: SARTRE AND BECKETT
NOTE
AFTERWORD
Appendix 1: Reading Lists
Appendix 2: Beacon Students’ College List
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index of Authors and Works
About the Author
Also by David Denby
Copyright
LIT UP. Copyright © 2016 by David Denby. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.henryholt.com
Cover design by Lucy Kim
Cover photograph by George Baier IV
Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at (800) 221-7945, extension 5442, or by e-mail at [email protected].
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Denby, David, 1943– author.
Title: Lit up: one reporter, three schools, twenty-four books that can change lives / David Denby.
Description: First edition. | New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015029973 | 1SBN 9780805095852 (hardback) | ISBN 9780805095869 (electronic book)
Subjects: LCSH: Literature—Study and teaching (Secondary)—United States. | Teenagers—Books and reading—United States. | High school students—Books and reading—United States. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / Books & Reading. | EDUCATION / Philosophy & Social Aspects.
Classification: LCC PN70 .D46 2016 | DDC 807.1/273—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015029973
e-ISBN 978-0-8050-95869
First Edition: February 2016